Because Horgan kept rewriting scripts even as they were shooting, Friend had to commit to the part and then roll with it. “There was a fair bit of ad-libbing and a fair bit of corpsing,” he says with a grin, using the British theater term for an uncontrollable fit of giggles that breaks the flow of performance (the kind of blooper nowadays often saved as bonus material). “Once she’d seen us all inhabit the characters she’d imagined, I think Sharon then went back and fed some of that into later episodes, as the tension is cranked up and the stakes are raised.”
That was especially true in the case of Ruari, Alex’s rebellious teenage son, who is absorbing warped ideas about what it means to be a man from online influencers. Horgan wanted some authentic examples of the kind of videos young men watch, so she put 19-year-old actor Aran Murphy in a group chat with the show’s director and crew so that he could share reels from his friends’ feeds.
“I was like, Oh God, I don’t know if I can send this stuff to professionals!” says Murphy, who’s making a splash this year with roles in Klara and the Sun and another HBO series, War. (He also happens to be the son of Irish actor Cillian Murphy.) Horgan ended up incorporating some of those videos—AI slop of dogs blowing up houses with laser beam eyes, for instance—which amused Murphy. Still, he says that Horgan did not need much help from him to craft an authentically sullen teen in crisis. “She kind of nailed it, because there were a lot of times when I was like, That feels annoyingly familiar.”
One of the most unexpectedly fun elements of the show is its London literary world backdrop, including a jaunt to the Frankfurt Book Fair. “I wanted to show how much a lot of women like me care about their jobs, and bring that work home, and think about it when they wake up,” Horgan says. “I loved the idea of doing that through books, and it felt like a nice juxtaposition with the content you see [Ruari] imbibing all the time.”
Alex works at her friend Sam’s literary agency, where there’s a constant struggle over artistic quality versus commerciality. “Alex wants to represent the more high-end artists, and Sam wants to go for the money,” Whyte says. As the boss, “Sam’s always got to be ahead of the curve. This is her livelihood, and it’s also a generational-wealth thing.” So when Alex rejects the author of a romantasy novel entitled The Goblin Seed that turns out to be a bestseller, all hell breaks loose. The publishing backdrop also allows for a fantastic turn from Harriet Walter, as the daughter of an elderly blockbuster author who wants them to find a home for the racist novel the mother has written.
