‘She Was Just Trying to Fly’

Spoilers follow for the second season of Bad Sisters through finale “Cliff Hanger,” which premiered on Apple TV+ on December 23. 

Grace Garvey may not get a happy ending in Bad Sisters, but she did get an “epic” one, as Anne-Marie Duff puts it. Grace seemed like a new woman in the season premiere, set two years after she killed her abusive, revolting husband JP (Claes Bang) in the series’s first season. She’s more confident in her sexuality, laughs louder, and takes up space when her sisters spend time together, all of which allowed Duff to grow the character into someone more sure of herself. But the effects of JP’s abuse still linger, in the nightmares she has about his death, in the reveal that her new husband, Ian (Owen McDonnell), is a scammer, and in her hesitation to tell her sisters that she needs their help. When Grace dies an episode later in “Penance,” the circumstances of her car crash are a season-spanning mystery: Where was she going to or coming from in the middle of the night; why didn’t she say good-bye to her daughter, Blánaid (Saise Quinn); why did she hide bags of cash in her home? And most important, who are the Garvey girls without Grace?

“I really enjoyed seeing them without one of their limbs, and seeing what happened to them as a result of that, because it does bring out different characteristics in the sisters,” says Duff, who stopped reading scripts after her character’s death and finished watching the season with no advance knowledge of what happened after her exit. “Them all being inside this bubble of grief — the show isn’t as much of a caper this time around.”

In finale “Cliff Hanger,” a flashback sequence clarifies how willing Grace was to embrace her own independence. She refuses to pay off Ian for his silence after her confession to him that she killed JP, and she vows to protect Blánaid from him. She sneers and parries his insults; she pulls her arm out of his grasp and drives away into the night. That additional context for what Grace was up to before she died doesn’t make her accident any less heartbreaking. What it allows Duff, though, is the opportunity to showcase the character’s self-respect, and to dig into Grace’s hidden angles as she chooses, once again, to defend herself — a theme that Bad Sisters, underneath all its murder-mystery tropes, has always prioritized for its women.

“It was a bit like seeing what happens when you leave a room. You never get to do that in life, but I got to do it; I wanted to watch and see,” Duff says of what happened to the Garveys after her exit. “Watching the funeral scene was extraordinary for me. It was seeing the world without you, and I’d never experienced that before.”

You knew before receiving the scripts that Grace would die this season. How did that affect your approach to her this time around? 
It was something that gradually evolved. Anything that will excite and thrill an audience and give them something unexpected, I’m always keen to do. It wasn’t like there was an awful soap-opera moment where I was turning the page and was devastated. I knew that at the end, there would be the big resolution and the reveal of what really happened. I still had loads of acting to do, if that makes sense. That little gremlin inside me was being fed. Sharon, I trust her implicitly, because she’s such an extraordinary writer.

It’s really hard to articulate, but I felt there was this inevitability with Grace. There’s something of a classical heroine about her, in as much as her only escape is the big one. You get to the point where you feel like she might just be about to save herself in that final episode. She’s just about to reach out for help properly. And then she’s gone. I enjoyed the epic nature of it.

You’ve said that in the first season, you were somewhat isolated from the rest of the cast because JP was forcing Grace to stay away from her sisters. Because you knew the ending that was coming for Grace, was there anything that you requested from Sharon scene-wise, in terms of spending more time with the other Garveys? 
I didn’t need to, because we’ve gotten rid of the Prick. [Laughs] I then had a lot more time with the girls. The irony is that this time she isolates herself. But I got to have some gorgeous, giggly days with the girls, especially for the first episode where we had the hen party and then we had the wedding. The wedding was the most glorious couple of days of filming. We had the best time. The last time, I just watched them all heading off to film their scenes while I’m stuck playing the miserable scenes with JP. But this time, I got to have a lot more fun.

Early in the season, Grace has a confrontation with Ian that very quickly turns physical, and in the finale we see a more contextualized version of that scene. Can you take me back to filming that? We see Grace flourishing, and then we realize this guy is not who we thought. 
I lucked out because we filmed the events around that almost chronologically; we filmed the scene where I confess to him before we filmed all of the argument. I really felt the momentum of that devastation. It made me think of that scene in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where she admits that she was raped and has had a baby. It was very profound. But it was heartbreaking because he does seem like the perfect man, and she trusted him so much. Sharon could have left it there. She could have had it that he is a great guy who just goes, “Whoa, this is very unhealthy, and I need to walk away.” But of course, she adds more pepper to the pot.

Grace’s desperation, it was great to see that. She’s so cornered and she lashes out, like a frightened little creature. I also didn’t know, because one often doesn’t, what the edit would be, in terms of where they would place all of the information. I think at certain points on the journey they weren’t sure whether they would scatter it throughout the season in flashback, but they decided to just bookend the season. I was just having to play it all as if it was one movie. This was interesting because it was different to the dynamic with her first husband. That was almost cartoonesque in its abuse, but this time around, it’s much more cunning and complex. For an actor, it’s great. And I had Dearbhla Walsh, who directed on the first season and then came back to work on the second, and she’s a producer. She and I knew this woman so well. We were able to go, “This is a whole new scenario, but we know her and we know her history, and the parachute of her history that she’s dragging behind her,” so I could bring that into the room.

What was Owen like as a scene partner? I read that Claes Bang would call you “Mammy” between takes in the first season, and I thought you deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for that.
[Gasps in horror hearing “Mammy” and then laughs.] Owen is literally the nicest man in the film industry. [Laughs] But he had to be, in a way, right? The audience have to believe he’s this amazing guy, because he’s so beautiful and looks like a beautiful soul. You want him to be with Grace, and then you think, Oh, with Eva! This could be Eva’s savior! It’s very clever. We had a lovely time. It was a lot of giggles. It’s inevitable when you play very tragic characters that you end up laughing a super-amount, because it’s such an elastic band of relief.

I also just wanted to make sure that no one was still calling you “Mammy,” because that would have been unacceptable.
No. I don’t think anybody used the word “Mammy” the whole of the second season. How great is that?

I’m so relieved. You’ve said of Grace’s physicality this season, “She’s just this hummingbird, she has nowhere to land. It was much more taut, whereas in season one, she’s becoming as invisible as she can be.” How did you work to convey that tautness?
If I’ve ever had something that I’ve needed to say, I’ve always felt like I have a huge weight on my chest, and there’s a kind of [flutters her hand over her chest]. I always imagine there’s a little bird trying to take flight. That’s what I felt for season two: She was just trying to fly, but she was trapped behind glass and could never quite break through. She thinks that by unburdening herself and confessing to him, that way freedom lies. It can be a physical sensation that you think you need to feel in your body, as well as in your thought process and emotional life. If you just imagine this physical energy, it can really inform everything. Even now, as we’re talking about it, I can see it. She has these wings, but they were completely clipped in season one. She didn’t even think about taking off. But now she thinks about taking off, and she can’t quite soar. Mayhaps if she’d survived the car crash, she would have — if she’d come through that like a phoenix, coming out of the fire. But she doesn’t. She’s burnt to a crisp. There’s very much a birdlike energy around Grace.

In the finale, Grace calls the mysterious phone number on Ian’s old phone and realizes he has another wife and then meets him at a bar without the money he demanded. She’s refusing to play his game and she’s able to be angry and she’s able to defend herself. Did you find catharsis in those moments for her?
Yeah, it was great filming the bar scene because Owen and I got to have a very different dynamic. It’s a showdown in a saloon, and I loved that. I had to remove from my head the idea that I wouldn’t then go on and live my life. I had this idea that I was on this crusade, and that from here on in, I will have some more ownership and I will be a better mother. She has a sense of objective around those scenes. This feeling of vibration really feeds into that. There’s an inkling of what she really deserves and what everybody deserves, which is respect, just starting to grow and germinate, and then, not again. Not again. It’s so overwhelming, and she’s alone with it. If only she had asked Eva to come with her to the bar.

That scene leads into the car crash, which was the last scene you filmed. There are stunt performers, there were technical things you had to do. Tell me about that.
There’s these amazing stunt vehicles they use now quite a lot in filming, where you’re sitting in the car and you’re on the road, and then there’s somebody attached to the roof of the vehicle who’s actually steering it. However, the wheel moves in the car, so you feel like you’re driving it. The first time you’re driving it, you’re like [pantomimes driving wildly], “Whoa, oh my God!” Then you realize that the guy doing it is really an expert, and he’s making sure you survived.

This can sometimes happen when you’re an actor: You’re having to play a huge amount of emotional process, but at the same time, there’s all this technical stuff. You’ve got to make sure you look there for this moment, and then [big gasp], and then fake crashing [throws herself diagonally to the side]; it’s like Star Trek, you know? Knowing I was saying good-bye to Grace, and having to do the voice message to Eva-slash-Sharon, it was very powerful. You feel very responsible, and you feel like, Don’t let me screw this up, because there’s a lot of people here. Please let me remember the order in which I have to do these things. But Dearbhla was brilliant, and she kept whispering in my ear, “All the rest of it doesn’t matter. If we don’t feel and care about you, the stunt doesn’t matter.” She’s very good at giving you a sense of an actor’s perspective, which you can lose easily because it is a very technical sphere of filming. There’s a lot of people with bulbs and lenses and microphones, so you have to hold fast to your process.

In another interview you said she told you, “Don’t forget the character’s truth.” What did you see as Grace’s truth during that scene? 
I think it was just this idea of this Herculean task. It cost me so much to confront him and to say no, because she doesn’t say no easily. For all of us, having to say no to somebody we love, it’s costly. But for Grace, who has spent years shape-shifting and people-pleasing and acquiescing? This idea of saying no, you don’t get to do that. For her, trying to build a boundary is so hard. It was about feeling completely spent, and then thinking, So what happens next? I don’t know what happens next. She’s sort of clueless around that. That’s the point at which she reaches out for Eva to ask for help, because this is, for her, uncharted territory. Standing up for herself feels like, Oh my God, what do you do after you’ve done it? Because I just feel like falling down.

You’ve worked with Women’s Aid, an organization that works to prevent domestic abuse. Have women reached out to you about what your performance as Grace means to them?
I’ve had so many conversations, and not just with women, with men, too, funnily enough. The amount of men who’ve approached me to talk about their friends has been really extraordinary, because coercion is still, for some people, difficult for them to wrap their heads around. I have to say, I have also had comments where people go, “You were so annoying. I just thought, Why don’t you grow a spine?” And we know that abuse is like water; it slowly wears away the stone with each drip. I don’t know about in the U.S., but certainly here, a lot of the time iconography around abuse in storytelling tends to be a very specific socioeconomic background. It tends to be fueled by addiction. But we’re intelligent women. We know that you can find abuse in every type of residence. I think a lot of people were surprised by that. It’s still very recent, actually, that legislation and laws were changed around coercion in the U.K., and it was properly identified as a form of serious domestic abuse.

I remember getting an email from this girl, an artist, who I bought something from a couple years ago. She sent me an email saying, “I just watched Bad Sisters,” and she told me her mother’s story. You reach out these invisible strings to audience members, and you never know. It’s incredibly powerful and makes you really grateful to get to do the job. Like I said that night when I won the award and said how political TV is, it is. It is a place where you can say to somebody, “You know what’s happening to you? It’s completely wrong,” and you can do that obliquely by telling a story. It can be quite powerful in that way, of all the mediums, especially so for somebody who’s trapped. You can’t underestimate television in many ways.

We’ve talked about patterns of behavior during this conversation. I’m wondering if you had any worry about portraying Grace as a woman who suffered domestic abuse, and then fell into the same scenario again. Were you concerned about the story suggesting that a woman who lived through this couldn’t have a happy ending? 
To be honest, yeah. Of course. I wanted season two to be Grace lying on a beach, having Javier Bardem put sunscreen on my back, but that was the decision that was made. It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? But of course, the end of season one wasn’t a healthy resolution. She murdered somebody, although you could call it an act of self-defense in many ways. I think perhaps that’s why Sharon made the decision she made. And I also think that was useful, in a way, that Grace leaves the show, because her vulnerability then is unleashed, and other characters can have ownership of their vulnerability, instead of it all being Grace’s. But yeah, it’s complicated. As an actor, you don’t really have that authority. There’s another universe in which Grace could have had a different season two, absolutely. There’s also a truth around repetition. But, I hear you, sister, is what I’m saying.