The Garvey Sisters truly know how to get themselves into trouble, don’t they? After crashing the Emmy party a few years ago with a batch of nominations, the drama series returns with a vengeance with an even more fraught second season. There is no such thing as a tidy end after a murder occurs, and Emmy winning director Dearbhla Walsh returns to expand on the Garveys next chapter.
Some might assume that season one of Apple’s Bad Sisters ended on a closed note, but I would argue that you cannot just end the story of these women with the murder of one of their husbands. After we discover how John Paul Williams met his end, do you think his wife, family, and extended brood of sisters would go back to a happy existence? There is more to bite into, more familiar intrigue, and definitely more accidents to happen along the way. Whalsh was eager to be reunited with the Garveys.
“We hadn’t planned on a second season, because it was an adaptation,” Walsh admits. “We all knew, though, that these sisters were fascinating, and one executive told us that these sisters could be reading the telephone directory, and it would be thrilling. But what did pull us in was the idea of what you do with such a secret. How do you continue? Can lightning strike twice. When Grace finally gets what she wants the happiness she deserves, could she walk through the same door again? Then, of course, is the fact that they don’t know that Roger helped their sister, so they are finding out things that they didn’t know. At one point, Bibi asks, ‘Do we even know our sister?’ That was so interesting to me.”
Claes Bang’s John Paul (aka The Prick) was one of the cruelest, evil characters I have ever seen. Truly. How do you begin a new season without repeating yourself? Surely, not every Garvey gal is paired with a hateful beau, so Walsh and Horgan bend the story in a different direction with a character whose loneliness and leads her to become an adversary that we cannot anticipate.
“We didn’t want to repeat The Prick, but what is extraordinary is how much everyone loved to hate him,” she says. “We had such a reprehensible character with him, but it seemed almost cathartic for the TV audience to have another kind of prick to vent their hatred on. We didn’t want to just create a female prick, so coming up with The Wagon and getting Fiona Shaw to play her was so incredible for us. And that character evolved so much. At one point, she was going to die within the series, and working with Fiona and talking about what the season could be with Sharon was thrilling, honestly. I can’t tell you how many times Ian was going to die. He was dead, then he wasn’t, then there were going to be three deaths, and then none. Would it be Roger? The Wagon? It felt like an organic process to see where the story was going to take this since this was new territory–it wasn’t an adaptation this time around.”
Before we lose Anne-Marie Duff’s Grace at the end of episode two, we see her basking in the glow of wedded bliss. I joked with the director that it was refreshing to see Duff having a good time.
“I went up to her and told her how nice it was to not have her crying in that first episode,” Walsh says, with a smile. “Anne-Marie is such a fantastic acteress, and she got to enjoy the joy of that sisterhood. Filming the day at the races was so incredible, but when there is that much happiness, something bad has to happen, doesn’t it?”
In this new season’s premiere, we meet two very different women. The afforementioned Anjelica is brought to life by the incomprable Shaw, but a young female cop, Thaddea Graham’s Una, comes sniffing around the Garveys convinced that she’s on the right track. Graham is fantastic, and she brings some winningly awkward comedy as the freshest detective on the scene. In a way, we become more defensive of the Garvey sisters when Una creeps closer and closer.
“It starts with bringing in these characters and wondering what their moral compass is going to be,” she admits. “Writing cop characters is actually harder than you think, because you have to tick boxes. With Thaddea Graham’s Una, we wanted to show how talented she is as she moves through a male-dominated, very misogynistic world as she finds her voice. Thaddea, who is Northern Irish and Chinese, could bring her own experience of growing up as that in Ireland. The other extreme is with Fiona since she is very experienced and, you know, she’s a great dame. There’s so many places that that character could’ve gone, and when Sharon and I walked away from our meeting with her, we didn’t know how Fiona felt about it. When she said yes, it was incredibly exciting.
Anjelica is a busy body, and, sometimes, these characters want to be the center of everything, and, at the heart of that, is tremendous vulnerability and loneliness. Roger was such a small character in season one, but Michael [Smiley] did something so beautiful with that character. These characters are inspired by people Sharon knew growing up, and Roger was inspirted by a fisherman who used to come to their home every Christmas with a box of seafood for her father.”
Anjelica’s arc throughout this season is so complicated. You sympathize with her first, because she seems lonely. Then she body checks Horgan’s Eva at Grace’s wedding. When Anjelica is knocked off the boat in season five, we assume that she will not return, especially when they cannot find her body in the choppy water. Walsh lovingly recounts Shaw’s last day on set.
“At one point, she was going to die when she fell off that boat,” Walsh says. “We were all kind of heartbroken in their final season in episode eight when she finally leaves the house and the sisters tell her that she need to go home. We all thought that it might be the last we would see of Anjelica. We all thought that she almost wanted to move in with the girls and become a Garvey. The last scene we shot with Fiona was when she falls overboard into the Irish Sea. She did a take where she went over, the men came out to lift her out of the freezing cold water in the wind and the rain, and she screamed, from the water, ‘I’m a bad sister!’ It was so extraordinary to have her be a part of our show.”
After two years, I feel protective of these women. They are fictional, of course, but they feel so alive, because this ensemble gnaws at such juicy, weighted, emotionally-driven material. If Walsh and Horgan come back after a few seasons with a new story, I know audiences will welcome them with open arms.
“Who knows?” she ponders, wistfully. “Hopefully, they just might return.”
Bad Sisters is streaming now on Apple TV+.
