It’s April, and the cherry blossoms around the suburban homes of Terenure, in Dublin, are in full bloom. Marian Keyes is sitting in a cosy chair, with her feet up on a stool, in a garden shed. This is not just any garden shed. The sign on the door reads The Department of Calm and Efficiency. Inside it are a TV and shelves heaving with golf trophies. A framed T-shirt on a wall reads Minister of Cop On.
This shed belongs to Daddy Walsh, husband of Mammy Walsh, father of the five Walsh sisters, all characters loved by millions of readers of Keyes’ bestselling novels. The cast and crew are coming to the end of an 11-week shoot for The Walsh Sisters, RTÉ’s highly anticipated TV adaptation of two of her novels about the family.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Keyes says as she looks around the cluttered space, thinking of her late father. “My dad would have loved a man shed. Somewhere to watch the golf in peace, that’s all he asked for. He would have locked the door and eaten crisps and chocolate and been in here for hours.”
Visiting the set has been a surreal and satisfying experience for Keyes. This adaptation has been a long time coming. She has sold more than 35 million copies of her more than 20 books, in 33 languages, yet Watermelon, her first novel and the first of several to feature the Walsh family, is the only one to have made it to television screens, back in 2003.
Keyes’ second novel, Rachel’s Holiday, a darkly subversive romantic comedy about Rachel Walsh and her descent into, and recovery from, drug and alcohol addiction, was first optioned in 1998. Keyes and her husband, Tony Baines, were flown first class to Los Angeles “and put up in a swanky hotel”. Nothing came of that trip, but lately there has been a clamour to present her work to existing fans and, it’s safe to imagine, a new generation of readers.
“You wait years for an adaptation and then two come along at once,” Keyes says about the fact that a Netflix version of her novel Grown Ups is also in the works. That one is being filmed around Dublin as well, helmed by Samantha Strauss, the woman behind the streamer’s hit show Apple Cider Vinegar. Its impressively starry cast includes Aisling Bea, Robert Sheehan, Sinéad Cusack and Adrian Dunbar.
“It’s great that it’s happening now, but I never minded,” Keyes says. “I always said the books were enough by themselves – they don’t need to be legitimised by another medium. But I do have to say this: The Walsh Sisters has been worth waiting for … The writing is brilliant, the women playing the sisters are all fabulous. I couldn’t be happier.”
Keyes had no interest in writing the series herself. In fact, she was the one who recommended that producers consider Stefanie Preissner, the writer behind RTÉ’s hit show Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope and the play Solpadeine Is My Boyfriend.
Keyes speaks admiringly of Preissner, who has taken her novels Rachel’s Holiday and Anybody Out There, written in the 1990s and partly set in New York, and transplanted them firmly to contemporary Dublin to create The Walsh Sisters.
The RTÉ series, made in association with the BBC, follows the messy lives of the five Walsh sisters as they navigate the chaos, self-destruction and sisterly dynamics of their late 20s and early 30s.
The sisters have a lot going on: there’s Claire, the overwhelmed single mother (who’s played by Danielle Galligan); the dependable Maggie (Preissner herself), who is desperate for a baby of her own; Rachel (Caroline Menton), who’s in denial about her addiction issues; the loved-up Anna (Louisa Harland), who’s facing a profound personal crisis; and Helen (Máiréad Tyers), the youngest, who is stuck living at home and dealing with her own secret struggles.
[ Marian Keyes on casting The Walsh Sisters: ‘The big worry was who is playing Luke Costello?’Opens in new window ]
Rachel’s Holiday was heavily inspired by Keyes’ own experience of alcoholism. Before she became a writer she attended the Rutland Centre in Dublin to be treated for her condition. As loyal readers will know, Rachel’s “holiday” turns out to be a spell in a treatment centre called the Cloisters, where various members of the Walsh family attend sessions to tell Rachel exactly how her addiction has affected them.
In the shed, Keyes, who has been sober for more than 30 years, is thinking about her first visit to the set with Baines, watching on a screen as Mammy, who is played by Carrie Crowley, and Daddy Walsh – “lovely Aidan Quinn, in his slip-on shoes and anorak” – walked up the path to the Cloisters.
“It was emotional for both of us,” Keyes says. “It’s hard to describe. It’s not like the characters are our children or anything, but they came from my head with Tony’s help, and we’ve both felt a lot of ownership of them.”
The author remembers, early in the process, being on a video call with the producer Dixie Linder, the director Ian Fitzgibbon and the five actors cast as the sisters.
“The five of them were all talking over each other, exactly the way I am in my family,” says Keyes, who also grew up with four siblings. “The chemistry between them was real. I believed they were a family. Then seeing them on set for the first time was just a thrill.
“It’s an incredible thing, watching these characters you made up in your head talking and walking around on a television set wearing sunglasses and bomber jackets. And the wonderful thing is they are each different, each exactly as I imagined them.”
It’s seven years since Preissner flew to London to pitch her vision of The Walsh Sisters to producers. A lot has happened in her life since then, including a new relationship, a wedding, the birth of her two children and the death of her grandmother, “a massive Marian Keyes fan”.
Talking during a brief break in filming, Preissner is recalling that meeting in London where, having done a deep dive into the Keyes books she’d been reading for years, she laid out her vision for how she’d go about adapting Walshworld for television if she were given the chance. Other writers were being considered, but Preissner got the job.
Although each of the Walsh family novels, from Watermelon to Again, Rachel, focuses on a different sister, Preissner wanted to create a world where all the sisters and their storylines could exist together. It was a tricky puzzle, because they were all at different ages and stages in each of the novels. Keyes says Preissner has a brain “like a Rubik’s cube”, which came in handy when she was writing the show.
“I needed to pick storylines that would bring them all together,” Preissner says. “Ian [Fitzgibbon] and I have a saying: ‘Where two or more of the Walsh sisters are gathered, Jesus is present.’ It’s just so good when the sisters are together, so I wanted them to all be in the same world.”
Transposing the action from the 1990s setting of the novels was an interesting challenge, Preissner says. The Mammy Walsh we see in the TV version, for example, is different in some ways from the Mammy in the books – “she has an iPad and probably doesn’t go to Mass” – although her frustration and disappointment with some of the life choices of her more dysfunctional daughters remain unchanged.
There were other challenges in adapting the novels for a contemporary audience. Preissner says she talked a lot to Keyes about the novels, which she says in parts were “fatphobic, white and heteronormative”, a product of the times in which they were written. (“My thinking has changed profoundly since then,” Keyes says, “and it’s a special kind of shame to have opinions that hurt people enshrined in books that were written 20 or 30 years ago. All I can do is do better now that I know better.”)
“I asked Marian if we could change that up, and she was totally open to it,” Preissner says. This is reminiscent of Element Pictures’ TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which contained more diversity than the novel.
For the Dubliner Caroline Menton, a relative newcomer seen most recently in the Irish horror movie Oddity, playing the part of Rachel was a huge opportunity. “It’s a dream role,” she says. Did she feel the pressure and expectations of readers on her shoulders in portraying a legend of popular Irish fiction?
“Well, yeah, it was a big responsibility,” she says. Menton hopes that she has done the character justice and that fans of the novels will approve. It was important, she says, given Rachel’s backstory, to delve into her issues. Keyes says that Menton “did her research, she knows her Gabor Maté, she knows that the question is not why the addiction but why the pain?”
[ Gabor Maté: I began to notice that the people who got chronically ill had trouble saying ‘no’Opens in new window ]
Before filming began, Menton visited a drug-rehabilitation centre. “I went there and got to speak to someone who was really vulnerable and open and kind enough to share their story with me. It was an eye-opener.”
It’s a nuanced story. Rachel, with her stable family background and no obvious trauma, shows that addiction does not discriminate. “And this is the power of Marian Keyes,” Preissner says. “If that novel had been called Girl With a Needle in Her Arm, nobody would have brought it to read on the beach. Marian hides the vegetables in the chocolate.”
With the global success of Sharon Horgan’s award-winning Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters, there’s no denying that Irish sisters have been enjoying a moment. Does Preissner have any thoughts on the inevitable comparisons between the two shows, which are both set in Dublin and feature gobby, funny, middle-class Irish sisters?
She says it did lead to some discussion about whether to keep “sisters” in the title of the show, which was in development well before Bad Sisters came along. “It definitely helps that our show is based on Marian’s books – like, I haven’t just created a show based on five sisters,” she says. “I also think Bad Sisters is very plot driven, where ours is more character driven.”
As with Horgan, who played a sister in her show, Preissner has taken a lot on, starring in the show as Maggie Walsh while also writing most of the episodes.
When it comes to the other sisters, it seems reasonable to assume that the show will make stars out of the young ensemble cast. Apart from Louisa Harland, who played Orla in Derry Girls and does a stunning turn as Anna Walsh, most of them are relatively unknown.
[ Derry Girls’ Saoirse-Monica Jackson: ‘Dyslexia shaped me. I’m always thinking two steps ahead’Opens in new window ]
Máiréad Tyers is outstanding as the youngest Walsh. Menton is being spoken of as a potential breakout star. “Whatever happens beyond this point, I did my dream job, and I got to work with these amazing people,” the young actor says.
Preissner has other concerns. “Our big fear is that we’re going to get commissioned for The Walsh Sisters season two and she’s going to be booked on something else,” she says in mock indignation. “I will be here for it, I will,” Menton promises. “You’d f**king better,” Preissner says, laughing.
The cameras are rolling, and I’m standing in the front garden of the Walsh family home, having a whispered conversation with Aidan Quinn. Metres from us, Luke Costello, played by Jay Duffy, is knocking at the Walshes’ door after a harrowing visit to Rachel, his girlfriend, in rehab.
Quinn is carrying a prop, a copy of Ticket, The Irish Times’ culture supplement. “It’s a great newspaper,” he whispers. That’s not the only reason we’re blushing. For some of us of a certain age Quinn will always be the handsome star of the Madonna film Desperately Seeking Susan, from 1985.
The actor, who lives with his family in New York, also whispers that there was a 10-year period when he couldn’t get to work in Ireland because of commitments in the United States. “So it’s really very nice to come back here,” he says.
He is full of praise for Crowley, who plays the overbearing, perennially put-upon Mammy Walsh. “She has all the best lines,” he says. I mention a scene in a hotel where he is trying to get romantic with her. “I don’t get very far on that occasion.”
Quinn is called inside by the director, but later I get a quick moment upstairs in the house with Crowley, who mentions the same hotel scene and adopts her Mammy Walsh persona: “I mean, where in my head do you think I have room to think about sex today with all that is going on?”
The star of An Cailín Ciúin has a good feeling about the show. “You never know until you see the finished product, but sometimes you have a positive feeling. I’ve got that feeling about this.”
She asks what scenes I’ve watched so far. I tell her about the one with Luke. “Ridey Luke!” she exclaims, using a word that is an essential part of the Keyes canon. We agree that Duffy does indeed tick all the boxes required of the romantic hero of Rachel’s Holiday.
“And do you know who his father is?” Crowley asks, beaming. Duffy’s father is the Coronation Street actor and former Boyzone star Keith Duffy. “Also ridey,” Crowley declares before heading off for her next scene.
Every so often on the set of The Walsh Sisters someone will say, “Let’s consult the source of the Nile.” That’s how Fitzgibbon and Preissner refer to Keyes. Back in the shed, the writer told me that she was flattered by the fact that the cast and crew – she had many of them over to her home for a party before shooting began – would text her about everything from costume choices to character motivation.
Duffy, whose casting is arguably the most intensely scrutinised of the show, took full advantage of “the source”. Keyes has been extremely vocal about “the thing with Luke. There was a lot of pressure coming over the wires from the fans, saying, ‘Just don’t f**k this up.’ Everyone has their own idea of what Luke looks like. For me he’s like a young Keanu Reeves, but other people have completely different pictures. It needed to be right.”
Taking a break from the set with Galligan, Duffy reflects on the expectations of fans. “When you step into something which is loved that much you’re kind of, like, ‘Oh my God’. There’s a lot of pressure, but it’s the same as with any role: whether it’s loved by fans of a book series or not, you have a responsibility to do your best and trust that you are enough … But then to have Marian a phone call away was brilliant.”
What did he ask her? “I wanted to know who Luke was outside of his relationship with Rachel. What makes him tick? What’s his flaw? Because a lot of the book is about how amazing he is and how much charisma he has. But nobody is perfect. And she told me that he sees the world in black and white. He’s very set in his beliefs. That was helpful.”
Galligan, who also has a role in House of Guinness, the new Netflix drama, was one of the final sisters to be cast. She says she auditioned for two other sisters “but I fluffed it”. It was both a relief and a thrill when, after a long Christmas on tenterhooks, she was told she had landed the part of Claire, the glam single mother.
Filming is nearly over when we meet. She says the cast have become like a real family. “We’ll miss each other when it’s all over.” As with everyone else involved in The Walsh Sisters, Galligan can’t wait to see how audiences react.
“Stefanie has written a really compelling, grounded drama about a family with everyday, real life issues, about addiction, about grief, about sisterhood. But she’s done it in such a way that’s so Irish in the sense that it’s light and funny at times, but also really heavy and emotional.
“And that’s why I was so excited to be a part of it. I think she’s done an amazing job capturing Marian’s beloved characters and adapting them brilliantly to the world we’re in now.”
The Walsh Sisters begins on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player at 9.30pm on Sunday, September 28th; The Walsh Sisters: The Official Podcast, presented by Marian Keyes and Stefanie Preissner, will be available straight after each episode
