The Audacity of Cope: An Interview with Stefanie Preissner

I’m a broad-minded fellow who allows people their idiosyncrasies, but Stefanie Preissner has just told me something that goes beyond the realms of common decent behaviour.

“I’m a big Celine Dion fan and had gold card membership to Copperface Jack’s,” she says as if this is a perfectly acceptable way to carry on. It’s a shame because up till now we’d been getting on rather well. Munich-born and Mallow-raised – the latter is obvious, the former isn’t – the Gaiety School of Acting graduate came onto the Hot Press radar in 2012 when her solo Solpadeine Is My Boyfriend show stormed the Dublin Fringe Festival. Subsequently turned into a radio play, which is top of RTÉ’s ‘most downloaded’ chart, its scalpel-like dissection of the female Irish condition led to sell-out runs not just here, but also in Scotland, Australia and Romania where she had subtitles above her head. “You’d have the people who understood English laughing with me, and then this little trickle effect as everyone else got the joke,” Stefanie recalls with a smile.

It turns out that acting and writing’s gain is Irish law enforcement’s loss.

“When I was a kid my dream wasn’t to be a writer or actress, it was to be the Garda Commissioner,” she reveals. “I managed to get myself a fortnight of work experience at Templemore whilst it was still in operation. I learned the Garda alphabet and watched them train. I’m big into rules. I love knowing the parameters of whatever institution I’m in.”

While she still considers herself a jobbing actress, Stefanie has penned Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, an RTÉ2 six-parter starring Amy Huberman, Nika McGuigan and Seána Kerslake who’s been receiving rave reviews all round for her lead role in A Date For Mad Mary.

“I wrote Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope as a response to seeing these characters on English and American television that aren’t like Irish girls,” Preissner reflects. “We’re just not the same. I don’t have sex with a guy and then hang out a window whilst smoking a cigarette. That’s not who I am; that’s not who my friends are. You see these girls on US shows standing around with their tops off talking, but if my friend’s changing I’ll avert my eyes or start inspecting her make-up bag until her bra’s back on. It’s those sorts of nuances that separate us from those English and American girls. It’s important that young Irish people have young Irish fictionalised people that they can relate and aspire to and not feel like they’re different in subtle ways. The characters in the show are likeable but just make bad choices sometimes.”

Unlike Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, to whom she’s inevitably been compared, Stefanie is far from a voracious maneater.

“Ask my friends and they’ll tell you, ‘Stefanie’s the conservative one.’ There’s a sex scene in it and I said to the producer, ‘Here’s the script. Unless there’s something wrong with the scene, I don’t want to discuss it.”

Although keen to bring her work to the big-screen – the makers of Albert Nobbs and Breakfast On Pluto, Parallel Films UK, last year signed her to a ‘first look’ deal, which is close to bearing fruit – Stefanie knew from the off that Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope is better suited to TV than cinema. “It always had that sort of episodic nature,” she resumes. “All my work up till now has addressed that thing of, ‘How does our generation cope with the hand we’ve been dealt?’ What is different this time is that it isn’t autobiographical; neither of the characters are me. Well, except for the fact that they go to Coppers. I wanted to work Celine Dion in there as well, but we couldn’t get clearance for her music. Next time!” Preissner admits that she found it tough at first ceding control of the show to Cathy Brady whose directorial CV includes Channel 4’s Glue and Coming Up.

“I was able to say, ‘We should get this person in for an audition’, but I didn’t have a final say in the casting process which involved almost four hundred girls. Nika was a friend of the director’s, but Seána was just one of the hundreds who sent in their tape and hoped for the best. I saw her audition and went, ‘Yeah, that’s Aisling!’ but I could easily have been overruled. I went on set first day to hold the slate and do a little cameo – it was my birthday, so I indulged myself by playing a Guard! – but after that I more or less left them to it.”

Hot Press has heard its fair share of RTÉ horror stories down through the years, but Stefanie can’t speak too highly of Cathy Brady, producer Ailish McElmeel and the station’s then commissioning editor, Bill Malone. “I’d heard some of those horror stories too but, no, Bill got it from the start. Ailish is like a Jack Russell. She just goes for it, which left me to focus on the creative stuff, which having spent half my adult life applying for Arts Council funding and having meetings about meetings was so liberating.”

With so little time spent on set, Stefanie had no idea what Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope would look like until she watched the finished episodes. “I was absolutely terrified because this has been sitting in my head forever,” she admits. “It’s the closest thing I have to a child, so I would have been devastated if they’d got it wrong. But they didn’t. From the casting and the shooting to the soundtrack and the animated opening sequences, it’s something that I can 100% stand-over.”