Róisín Gallagher: "You've actors and crew who left Belfast coming back and sharing their experiences"

One minute 53 seconds. No spoilers (yet!), but that’s how long it takes to realise that Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee has come up comedy trumps again with her very eagerly awaited new series, How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, which gets its Netflix premiere on February 12.

It tells the story of four thirtysomething friends – Dara, Robyn, Saoirse and Greta – who share a terrible teenage secret. It soon becomes three thirtysomething friends after Greta dies in a freak household accident. Or does she?

The plot continues to thicken over eight action-packed episodes, which in addition to some serious belly laughs will also scare the bejaysus out of you.

Saoirse, the creator of smash hit TV show Murder Code, is played with much glee by Róisín Gallagher, who’s previously tickled funnybones in The Lovers and The Dry, more of which anon.

Like Erin in Derry Girls, the character appears to be at least partially based on McGee herself.

“Is there a bit of Lisa in Saoirse? I think so,” Gallagher agrees as we meet up in her native Belfast. “They’re both chaotic, funny, clever and lovable. Saoirse’s a bit more – well, a lot more – unfiltered but there are a lot of similarities.”

Gallagher has wanted to work with Lisa McGee for a long time.

“One of the things I did when I came home after training and doing a little bit of professional acting in the UK was go back to my high school, St. Genevieve’s in West Belfast, and work as a facilitator in their drama department ,” she explains. “One of the plays we did every year was Lisa’s Girls And Dolls which these young women had such a connection to. Way before Derry Girls came out and she became a household name, I knew how powerful her work is.”

A jig was therefore danced when Róisín got a call from her agent saying, “I’ve just received a script with Lisa McGee’s name on it.”

“I was really, really excited… and that’s before I’d read a word,” she resumes. “And then when I did, wow! Whatever your expectations are, How To Get To Heaven… will live up to them. As an audience member, I love surprises and this is full of them. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before.

“People are going to have a hard time sticking it into a genre. The horror/mystery element sits so well with the comedy. Every line’s there for a reason and, two years after shooting it, I’m still discovering extra layers to the show.”

It’s also Róisín’s first time working with Michael Lennox, the Derry Girls director who more recently presided over four episodes of the sublime Say Nothing.

“Michael Lennox is a genius, full-stop,” she asserts. “He’s also a very unassuming, friendly person who’s so approachable and open. There’s this preconception that people working at his level are going to be intimidating, but that just wasn’t the case with Michael. After the chemistry read in London, I shared a flight back to Belfast with him – my husband, Craig, was with us – and we just talked nonstop. He’s a very, very kind man.”

They also shared a shandy or three at the 2024 BAFTAs where, courtesy of her portrayal of Janet in The Lovers, Róisín was up for Best Female Performance in a Comedy.

She didn’t win – damn you Gbemisola Ikumelo from Black Ops! – but a good time was had by all.

“I loved it!” she beams. “Being very new to that glitz ‘n’ glam environment, Craig and I spent the whole night nudging each other and whispering, ‘Look who it is!’ We were sitting behind Martin Freeman and in front of Claudia Winkleman which was very exciting!”

Róisín also gets to walk the BAFTA red carpet in How To… Do the real awards have the same level of mwah mwah luvviness and clipboard Nazism as the Lisa McGee version?

GREAT SET-PIECES

“Oh, I enjoyed that so much!” she laughs. “It was kind of similar, yeah. Lisa does this brilliant thing where she takes very real situations and very real people and just makes them funny. The fact that it’s so nuanced – you have to say this and wear that – makes me think she’s encountered all of her characters, or versions of them, before.”

One of How To Get To Heaven From Belfast’s great set-pieces is when Dara, Robyn and Saoirse strut their not inconsiderable stuff to Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Pump It’. Did Róisín go “Yay!” when she got to that part in the script or was it, “They’ll have to get a body double in because I can’t dance!”

“A body double? How dare you!” she deadpans. “I dug one or two moves out from my underage disco days bopping around to Sean Paul, Scooter, Alice DJ and the Spice Girls– the cheesier the better! Interestingly, a lot of the songs I love from back then are in the show.”

The series’ original music is supplied by Gary Lightbody and Iain Archer, who previously wrote Snow Patrol’s ‘Run’ together, among many other ace tunes.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when we heard the song of theirs that was used for the scene where you see the girls as teenagers,” Róisín says. “They did a brilliant job.”

How To Get To Heaven… is full of bravura performances from the likes of Darragh Hand, who smoulders as Saoirse’s Garda lust interest; Ardal O’Hanlon, whose cute hoor hotel owner steals many a scene; Emmett J. Scanlan, who’s equal parts Gomez Addams and Rylan Clark as Greta’s handsome-but-spooky husband; and Bronagh Gallagher, who plays a pistol-packing Derry hard nut with something unusual in her car boot.

“I love the frisson between Saoirse and Darragh’s character, Liam,” his co-star enthuses. “Emmett is brilliant because you don’t know whether he’s a goodie or a baddie. You think you’ve got it worked out and then he flips things on their head. It adds another level of ‘What is this?’

“Ardal – watch out for his bowtie! – was absolutely magic and Bronagh is such a bad ass in the show. We didn’t do a scene together but ten years ago I was in the same independent film as her, Made In Belfast, and she made it look so effortless – which of course it isn’t. Those are the actors who you know have done an incredible amount of work and have a special talent.”

Ardal O'Hanlon as Séamus

Along with the main characters, there are some great cameos from people who don’t make it onto How To Get To Heaven From Belfast’s IMDB page.

“One of the funniest days I had on set was with Marie Jones and Pat Shortt who play Saoirse’s parents,” Róisín recalls. “I’d worked with Marie before but not Pat, who’s very good at keeping a straight face himself but making other people – eg. me – laugh. Darragh Hand and Josh Finnan are also a bit giggly, which is fine, until you’re going into the second hour of overtime and the giggling’s costing a lot of money!

“Again, they were all such nice people. Lisa and Mike have worked together so much now that they have a real understanding of who they want in the room.”

Róisín going back to St. Genevieve’s as a facilitator means that she didn’t leave in disgrace, but were her school days happy – and did they have a Sister Michael?

“It was – and still is – a brilliant school and very nurturing for me,” she reflects. “There was a lot of tartan and that real Catholic ethos. Religious studies were a big part of it and we had Sister Michaels plural.

“There’s a scene in the show when the girls are in church for Greta’s funeral and one of them goes, ‘God, this is great, we’re missing double maths!’ I partook in the liturgical elements of school because I got to miss maths and science. That was the pay off!”

When Róisín finished her St. Genevieve’s studies in the noughties and headed off to the Royal Conservatoire Scotland because there was nothing happening locally, did she envisage that Belfast would become the TV and film boomtown it is now?

“No, never,” she shoots back. “Leaving school I was categorically told that, ‘You won’t have a career here. You’ll have to move.’ A bit of that was to do with the lack of professional training, which is still something we have to improve on. Belfast needs its own version of the Bow Street Academy in Dublin, which is respected throughout the industry.

“It’s a changed place, though, from when I was growing up. Most of my work is here, which is an absolute privilege, and you’ve actors and crew who left Belfast coming back and sharing their experiences.”

There’s a great self-deprecating moment in How To Get To Heaven…when one of McGee’s characters opines that, “Derry people are always such weirdoes.”

Is that a commonly held opinion in the rest of the North?

“I’ve always felt an affinity with people from Derry, the same as I did when I went to Glasgow and Liverpool,” Róisin counters. “They’ve the best accent in the world – the thicker and faster the better – and I’ve loved watching its development, like when they got the City of European Culture. And everybody has to go there at least once for Halloween!”

How To Get To Heaven… wrapped, Róisín joined Sam Claffin and Bill Nighy in Lazarus, a supernaturally-inclined who and whydunit from the pen of Harlan Coben.

“That was so much fun and very different to anything I’ve done before,” she notes. “Rather than being a comedy role, it was this woman really struggling with her own demons in the job she does. She’s quite separate from the rest of the storyline, which has all those brilliant twists and turns that Harlan is renowned for. I met him at the read-throughs and he was massively encouraging.”

In addition to How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, Róisín will also be reprising her breakthrough role as Shiv Sheridan in the third and – sob! – final season of The Dry.

“If season one or two didn’t break your heart, number three will finish you off,” she concludes with a smile. “Nancy Harris, the writer, has outdone herself. We knew the story was concluding which brought something special to the shoot. It was really important for Nancy and Paddy Breathnach, and Emma Norton from Element Pictures, that the show maintained the integrity it’s had throughout, and we’ve gone out with a bang rather than a whimper.”

• How To Get To Heaven From Belfast gets its Netflix premiere on February 12.