Sharon Horgan

By Angie Palmer, Photography by David Yeo

Hidden behind that down-to-earth, you-must-bef*cking-kidding-me persona she brings to many of her roles is, you’ve guessed it, a down-to-earth, you-mustbe-f*cking-kidding-me, real-life, flesh-and-blood, sexy-as-hell funny lady who just happens to be the super-talented, smart-as-a-whip, witty and sardonic writer, producer and director of some of the best tv around. Oh and she also makes great movies!

Most of us know Sharon Horgan from the hit sit-com Catastrophe, which she cowrote and starred in alongside Rob Delaney. Although calling this series a hit “sit-com” simply doesn’t do it justice.

Behind the show’s lighthearted humor and at times heavy themes, viewers can always spot the brilliant and genuinely honest voice of Sharon Horgan. “It’s a bit of a relief. You get to do stuff on the page that you might not have dealt with in real life, you get to just like exhale it all out onto the page and it becomes something that you really treasure.” But before there was Sharon Horgan the celebrated actress, writer, and chic business woman, there was Sharon Horgan the Irish turkey farmer. That’s right, believe it or not, her original 13 minute short film, The Week Before Christmas, jam-packed full of dark humor and amusing commentary on adolescence, was based on her own offbeat childhood of plucking feathers on a turkey farm in Bellewstown County Meath, Ireland. It wasn’t until her early twenties when she moved back to London to attend a variety of drama courses that her career in entertainment really took off, although not right away by any means. She describes these formative years as anything but straightforward. “I wasn’t really part of any sort of group...I wasn’t part of any scene, so I was very sort of out on a limb, not really part of anything. So that was a bit of a problem.”

“... So I guess it was driven by my own sort of need to stand on my own two feet in the end and also to really sort of extenuate the female voice that is already there but is, wasn’t really being driven fast enough or far enough...”

But regardless, she pressed on, “sort of (out of) pride, I suppose. I think at a certain stage, I decided I wasn’t gonna go back to Ireland until I had something to go back with. So that was a tricky couple of years, not going back to Ireland because I felt sort of, mortified by my own situation...you want your family to be proud and wanting to feel like you sort of did something with your life.” Although it wasn’t just pride that helped her persevere but also her ability to retain her dreams. While attending classes she had a string of odd jobs including waitressing, working at a call center, and even managing a head shop in London’s Camden Town. Perhaps these jobs, as well as her days as a young turkey farmer, are what gave her the unapologetic tone she consistently demonstrates throughout all of her work. When it comes to creating relatable comedy, it’s important for a writer to actually have real life experiences under their belt where absurd things happen to them naturally. Horgan didn’t have her career just handed to her, but ultimately her fearless decision to quit these odd jobs gave her the final push she needed. “It wasn’t until I decided to cut that loose and sort of throw myself into the abyss that I kind of had to make it work because I didn’t have any sort of financial safety net.” In the season 1 finale of Catastrophe, nine months pregnant Sharon lays in a romantic hotel bed next to her husband Rob on their wedding night. Rob clips the toenails on her swollen feet and jokingly comments about how unsexy the moment is, to which Sharon grows furious, calling him a “fucking duty bound boyscout” before storming, or rather waddling out of the room. Seconds later, Sharon is back, with her look of fury replaced with one of fear as she delivers the news to Rob that her water just broke. This may just be a fictional character Sharon Horgan created for the show, but it paints a particular picture of a fearless woman who is full of humour, grit and unabashed intensity. And this is exactly how one may describe the Emmy award nominated actress: a woman who is unapologetic when it comes to speaking her mind.

The synopsis goes something like this: 41-year-old Londoner Sharon has a one week fling with American Rob while on a business trip. When Sharon finds out she’s pregnant with his child in the pilot episode, the two shock viewers with their decision to not only keep the baby, but get married and raise the child in London together; Rob moving across the world after a quick, and quite frankly, chaotic phone call. But the show is so much more than another dose of comedic relief for viewers. In fact, Horgan herself even accredits the show’s success to its more innovative approach in the realm of comedy. She explains the early script-writing days with Rob as a string of questions raised at their writing table: “What are the parameters of comedy, how far can you push a certain subject and still make laughter around it? Is this going to make people feel uncomfortable or are they actually going to be relieved that you’re addressing something in that way, if it could be really really brutally honest, would people like that? Or would people think we’re monsters?”

Catastrophe explores a plethora of unspoken grievances that accompany pregnancy and marriage. From the cigarettes she can no longer smoke to the fact that this spontaneous one week stand may be her last shot at motherhood before time runs out on her biological clock, Horgan still manages to weave moments of pure humor into it all. But even with an already highly successful career in comedy, Horgan and Delaney held off on the jokes almost entirely in the early stages of the show’s creation, “we felt we really wanted to say something, something that we could get stuck into that wasn’t sort of just fluff. And so right from the very first version of it, let’s just not pull any punches, let’s just make it as real as we possibly can. Let’s make some absolutely real problems. So let’s have terrible things happen to them and see how they deal with it.” And that’s exactly what the two have accomplished. Five seasons later, Catastrophe can be streamed in over 133 countries, and has gone on to win six Irish Film and Television Awards for Horgan’s acting and writing, even winning the 2016 BAFTA TV Award for Best Comedy Writer...

(on social media)...I find it incredibly damaging, it’s hard enough anyway being a teenager without a constant sort of onslaught of images of what you should look like or what you should be trying to achieve ...

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