The Dry: Roisin Gallagher is back with the dark comedy drama about struggling with sobriety

What happens when you can give up the drink but you can’t give up your family?

If you haven’t watched The Dry starring Irish actor Roisin Gallagher you’ve missed a treat and it’s time to catch up because there’s a highly anticipated new season of the hit comedy drama about to launch.

Set in and around Dublin, the BritBox and RTÉ 2022 comedy-drama written by BAFTA-nominated screenwriter Nancy Harris returns to follow the continued fortunes of recovering alcoholic Shiv Sheridan and her family over another darkly comic eight episodes.

Dubbed ‘an Irish Fleabag’, season one saw Shiv returning to the family home on the outskirts of Dublin to attempt to live a life of sobriety, hampered by a family that includes Ciarán Hinds and Pom Boyd as her parents, all with issues of their own.

Roisin Gallagher stars in The Dry, a second series of whic is now available on ITVX. Pic: David Reiss. Hair and Makeup Jade Bird

Second time around and seven months on an increased cast sees the dysfunctional Sheridan home bursting at the seams with three adult children all in residence, a new job and relationship for Shiv, and it turns out that you can give up the drink but you can’t give up your family.

Gallagher is delighted to return to the role of Shiv, after making the acclaimed Sky Atlantic Belfast set romcom series The Lovers, with Johnny Flynn in the interlude between series, and it was one she couldn’t turn down.

“Nancy has created a very complex, substantial, multi-faceted character that I don’t often see in scripts and I think to deal with subject matter like alcoholism and addiction in a humorous way is really special,” she says.

“It’s the dark humour that we do so well. Feeling ‘oh I shouldn’t be laughing at that’ gives very, very serious subject matters relief and accessibility for a wider audience. They can find identification with the family regardless of whether they have any experience personally or otherwise with addiction. For me it’s the relationships within the family that are the thing that makes us connect so much with the show. It’s the Sheridan family dysfunction.”

Roisin Gallagher as Shiv Sheridan in ITVX's The Dry. Pic: Mark Sheen/ITV

How would she describe the character of Shiv?

“Messy. She tries really hard to be good. She’s a little self-absorbed, really stuck when we met her in the first series and I think her journey is so beautifully developed that it’s been a real pleasure to grow with her into a place of coming home, in more ways than one, in the second series. She grows up.”

After the engagement party to end all engagement parties at the end of series one, Shiv has opened a Pandora’s box of family secrets.

“She was on the precipice of really understanding what living a sober life could mean for her. Now we are looking at somebody who is living in sobriety physically, and starting to understand emotional sobriety, learning how to live in the world as a sober person in recovery.”

The Sheridan family are at the heart of ITVX's dark comedy drama The Dry. L-R Siobhán Cullen as Caroline, Pom Boyd as Bernie, Roisin Gallagher as Shiv, Ciarán Hinds as Tom and John Richardson as Ant. Pic: ITV

No longer turning to alcohol to help her cope, Shiv still seeks out adrenalin highs but when the repercussions of her spontaneous behaviour are too hard to handle, she is forced to sit with some difficult feelings and is exposed and vulnerable.

“She’s putting down the drink but she’s still a person who craves and is addicted to height, dopamine, adrenaline, fun, chaos. Life’s hard for Shiv, she’s an artist and emotionally she feels things in a big way. She’s trying very hard to fit in with her family and the world. I feel like she is a woman who has been sitting outside everyone else in the world living life and doesn’t understand how they’re doing it. In the second series we see her understand that a bit better and feel emotions and pain and sit in the uncomfortability.

“It’s important to see that the sober life isn’t the instagrammable, happy, fresh-faced, clear-headed image some people may have. Sobriety is real life and hard and normal, and trying to keep from the big highs and the low lows, trying for a level playing field.

“And of course, there’s her family,” says Gallagher, touching on one of the key themes of the series, for The Dry is as much about family as it is about addiction.

Roisin Gallagher in The Dry, which has returned for a second season, following the journey of Shiv as she tries to live a life of sobriety. Pic: Mark Sheen/ITV For further information please contact:[email protected] 07909906963

“Every single Sheridan is carrying their own big bag of difficult days and challenges and their home becomes very small at points because of our brilliant cast newcomers, who bring more characters and humour to the series.

“I feel if Shiv was on her own in Dublin and she didn’t have to speak to her family or have a relationship or hold down her job, she’d be great at it. But I don’t think she would have done any of the things she does - looking inside and seeing there’s other people in the world and thinking maybe I could have a romantic connection and friends and a job in the area I want - had she not moved back and maybe been challenged in the way she was with her family.

“The Sheridans have this incredible way of connecting and then rejecting and sometimes it almost happens simultaneously. There’s something so powerful in the last scene of series one when she’s joined by a family member in an AA meeting the morning after exposing all of her moral inventory in front of everybody. The journey that she and her mum then go on is fascinating and quite heartbreaking, and also there are lots of laughs to be found in these two people who are at times in competition over who’s the best sober person. Shiv’s actually now the calm in the storm in many moments which is great to play.”

One of the things Gallagher enjoys most about acting is researching for roles, so how did she go about it for The Dry?

“Addiction and alcoholism are subjects that are very readily available to research. There were lots of books and podcasts and I’ve a few friends in recovery I was able to speak to about their own personal experience and they were very generous in sharing their insights.

“And you draw on your personality, whatever it is that you identify with in the character. You know I came back home to Belfast from London having not quite made it, in quotation marks, not having quite felt like I was where I should have been at the time, so you draw on all of those things across the board to make something that is as honest as you can make it.”

Johnny Flynn as Seamus and Roisin Gallagher as Janet in Sky Atlantic's dark romcom, The Lovers. Pic: Sky UK Ltd

It’s a surprise to hear that Gallagher felt she hadn’t made it when she returned home to Belfast after honing her craft, mainly on stage, in the UK as she has numerous credits on stage and TV to her name. In addition to being an actor, she is also a playwright, penning 2017’s Natural Disaster to process her grief over losing her father, an oil truck driver, who along with her nurse mother, raised Gallagher and her four siblings in a working class area of West Belfast. A school performance of My Fair Lady, in which she played Eliza, saw her get the acting bug and go on to study acting at Glasgow’s Conservatoire.

What was it that drew her to acting?

“There’s a part of it which is about escapism and switching off in my world and getting the opportunity to be in someone else’s shoes, and that’s incredible. You get a little break and then I can go back to my world and that’s great.

“But there’s also something about stories and the telling of stories that helps me understand myself and the world around me in a way nothing else does. Reading and learning in an educational setting doesn’t happen for me. There’s something about accessing someone else’s feelings about a thing, as opposed to their understanding of a thing intellectually, that helps me understand the world.”

After the Conservatoire, among other theatre jobs Gallagher did Bard in the Botanics in Glasgow and it was while returning to Shakespeare again in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in 2012 that she met electrician husband Craig, and the couple are now settled in Belfast with their two children.

About to turn 37 this month, Gallagher is conscious of the labels and expectations put on women, something that’s expressed in The Dry.

“Her mother Bernie lets everyone know that by the time she was Shiv’s age she was a mother and had her mortgage and a job and all of those conventional things, which Shiv doesn’t. I think we need to keep the narrative going of where women should be and what the expectations are of women between 35 and 45. This idea of if you don’t have a baby, why not, and if you do have a baby are you going to have more? Shiv’s just getting on in her world and doesn’t feel her age much until comments at her birthday party that Marilyn Monroe and Lady Di died when they were 36.

“I think it’s great that the story is about a female protagonist in her thirties and it’s not about her being a mother, it’s going against the grain of the convention of where society has previously placed women and where they should be at that stage in life and it’s commented on in a very comical and insightful way.”

Gallagher was able to use her gift for comedy and ability to infuse both light and shade into another character when she played Janet in The Lovers last year, a romcom with so much more.

“Both parts are quite dark, heavy things, for two very different characters. I feel incredibly blessed to have got to play a role like Shiv and then a role like Janet in relatively quick succession. Janet is complex, dark, very funny, really enjoyable to play, but quite a forceful character and the nature of the TV show despite it being a romcom, when you play the character who is in the mental headspace that Janet was in, or even Shiv, it’s not that funny for them. The other characters and the writing is what makes it hilarious, but I don’t get the benefit of the comedy until I have time away and watch it and go, ‘oh god this is hilarious’. At the time my head was probably in a much different place, but I guess that’s the job and I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to take on those huge roles.”

“Janet is a working class girl from Belfast and it was a very different type of research in that I wasn’t reading books, listening to podcasts and talking to friends. It was a much more internal process and Janet’s complexities came from a place of being stuck and wanting to break out and not knowing how. Her journey was one of looking outside, with the help of somebody else, who helped her see she was worth much more than she thought.”

Playing a young woman from a loyalist background was a step into another side of her home city for Gallagher, but she found a familiarity in the working class origins of the character and the echoes of The Troubles for a generation that has grown up in peace.

“Yeah, I’m familiar with the political unrest and the unease and the underlying tensions and also, thankfully, familiar with the peace and the unity of the city, and I feel the message that was underlying David Ireland’s writing is a really important one for the city and for its progress and I was very proud to be part of that.

“There’s a trap door you go through to get underneath the reality of life and I think writers need to be really quite courageous to push through that door and find what’s underneath and then hand it over and trust that somebody else will be brave and authentic.”

“I got a good crack in my twenties of not staying in the one place and that was essential for my journey but I love working at home and telling the stories that have come from the place that I’m from. But I like going away too so I’m hoping there might be more opportunity for a bit of travel in my career next.

Speaking of next, does Gallagher know what that entails?

“No!” She laughs. “You don’t know what’s going to land in your inbox and you don’t know what the next phone call’s going to give you, so we’ll see. I don’t think I could do it, knowing exactly how it was going to pan out. That’s not how I’m built. And for me that’s the beauty of the job.”

Roisin Gallagher stars in the second series of The Dry, which will stream exclusively on ITVX from Thursday 14 March and RTÉ One and RTÉ Player later in the spring. The first series is available to watch on ITVX and RTÉ Player now.

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