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View image in fullscreen Top marks: Saoirse-Monica Jackson wears suit by shirt by clogs by earrings and ring by. But the sentiment of Derry Girls and the fundamental change it’s made… Well, what can ever be as big as that personally for me? There will never be anything like that.” “There will be other jobs where you move to a different country or they financially make you feel more secure or they will probably stretch me more emotionally as an actor. “I don’t think anything will ever compare to that experience,” she says. So it was not a surprise that the series resonated deeply with her what was less expected was that the city has now become a tourist hotspot. She grew up in and around Derry and went to an all-girls Catholic secondary school there, not a million miles from the one in the show. When a dog, belonging to one of the shoot team, becomes a little over-familiar with my trouser leg, Jackson scrunches her face and deadpans, “I feel cheated on now, because he was humping me and I thought I was special.”ĭerry Girls, the final season of which dropped in spring 2022, remains a touchstone for Jackson and probably always will.
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She’s much more poised than Erin Quinn, but shares her comedic timing. Off-duty, she wears skinny jeans, Adidas shell-toes and a vibrant, brushed-wool Fendi sweater she bought in Rome while filming The Decameron. It’s been a long day, but Jackson loves fashion and is down with all the dressing-up. We are meeting at the end of the Observer’s photoshoot, at a studio in north London. That was a lesson for me to learn creatively: if you half-arse a big decision, it’s never going to work and really land.” The show was a big success and people loved it. “I was so absorbed in the anxiety of it that I forgot it was working,” she says. Still, Jackson finds that it gives her courage to remember the insecurity she felt in the early days on Derry Girls. From left: Orla (Louise Harland), Clare (Nicola Coughlan), Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), James (Dylan Llewellyn) and Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell). View image in fullscreen School daze: with some of the cast of Derry Girls. There’s also a Netflix series, The Decameron, based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century collection of comic short stories. Upcoming, she is in the Paramount+ period thriller The Doll Factory, adapted from Elizabeth Macneal’s 2019 novel about scandal and murder in the Victorian art establishment in the buildup to the 1851 Great Exhibition. And Jackson has, in fact, worked again, appearing this summer in the $190m DC superhero flick The Flash, alongside Ezra Miller and Ben Affleck. When it transferred to Netflix, the show became a global hit. Over three seasons, Derry Girls became the most popular Channel 4 comedy since Father Ted, and broke viewing records in Northern Ireland. It turns out that Jackson needn’t have worried. And I was terrified that I was just… bad.” “And felt scared that I would never get cast in anything else again. “When it first came out and it was commented on a lot, I felt extremely vulnerable and really anxious,” she goes on. Jackson, who was playing a teenager, but was actually 24, began to catastrophise. I’d basically auditioned and I just thought that Erin was very physical and that the madness of the world and all the characters around her would lend itself to a physical comedy performance.” “It’s crazy: I didn’t think of it as a risk when I was doing it because Lisa, the writer, instilled such faith in me. “I felt in a perpetual state of fear,” recalls the 30-year-old Jackson now. But now she feared that she had blown her big break.
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Jackson had been inspired by the punk irascibility of her teenage cousin and the animated comic tics of Jim Carrey and Rowan Atkinson. Her performance as Erin Quinn, one of four Catholic schoolgirls (and an English fella) living in Derry on the Northern Ireland border in the final throes of the Troubles, was – she now realised – quite out there: full of adolescent facial contortions that dripped with awkwardness, disdain and indignation. When the first season of the Channel 4 sitcom Derry Girls debuted in 2018, the show’s lead actor Saoirse-Monica Jackson had something of a flip out.