When Sharon Horgan was offered a starring role in a film, her first reaction was to try and talk the director out of it. ‘I do this with loads of jobs,’ she says. ‘I tell people why they shouldn’t give me it.’
She’s half-joking, although with Horgan, 49, it’s always difficult to tell. She has made a career out of treading the thin line between comedic opportunity and painful truth in hit shows such as Catastrophe and Motherland.
Luckily, the film director wasn’t persuaded by Horgan’s insistence on her lack of qualification for the part and the result is Military Wives, a comedy drama based on the real-life story of a group of Army spouses who formed a choir while their other halves were serving in Afghanistan. Horgan plays Lisa, who is placed in charge of a social committee to keep wives occupied.
Sharon Horgan has made a career out of treading the thin line between comedic opportunity and painful truth in hit shows such as Catastrophe and Motherland
Horgan’s reticence to take on the role was twofold. For one thing, she was terrified about acting opposite Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays a grief-stricken colonel’s wife. ‘I’m such a huge fan and she’s top-level brilliant,’ Horgan says. ‘I was sort of scared that all my limitations would show up on screen.’ But the main reason was the singing. There is a lot of it in the film. And the director, Peter Cattaneo, ‘was desperate for it not to be polished or professional,’ she recalls. ‘If he caught anyone over-practising the harmonies, he’d freak out.’
He wanted the women – an ensemble of a dozen or so – to embody the same spirit as the real-life choir they were based on, and that meant improving in real time over the course of the five-week shoot. For Horgan, this was a fairly nightmarish prospect. She doesn’t even particularly like karaoke. But, in the end, she says, ‘You kind of lost your fear because it was never about singing on your own. We just had this mad delight that it ever sounded good at all because as soon as you start singing together the pressure is off you… it’s hard for it to sound terrible when everyone is in together doing it.’
And what was it like when she finally met Scott Thomas?
‘Amazing. She’s so brilliantly nuts and funny. The “formidable” thing goes pretty quickly and you just end up really enjoying working with her.’
The resulting film is a sweet, warm-hearted ode to a certain kind of getting-on-with-it. Perhaps the most striking thing about the movie is that almost every scene has a woman in it, talking about things other than romantic love. It makes you realise how rare it is to see groups of women on the big screen, particularly middle-aged women who have so often been sidelined to supporting roles. Horgan agrees. ‘It was a really smart bit of casting.’
Does having a nearly all-female cast change the atmosphere on set?
‘It does,’ she says. ‘I don’t know whether it was that particular group of women but it was very relaxed. It was the opposite of tense. There was no watching ourselves. It was just a generally very chilled-out kind of vibe.’
Horgan herself is the essence of a woman’s woman. From the moment she walks into the room at her production company, Merman, where we are doing the interview, her manner is warm and shrewd. She is beautiful, but gives the impression of someone who doesn’t believe this about herself. Today she’s wearing high-heeled boots, a blouse with an oversized bow around the neck that she keeps fiddling with, and an aggressively cool pair of checked, high-waisted trousers that I immediately wish I owned.
Horgan’s new film is Military Wives, a comedy drama based on the real-life story of a group of Army spouses who formed a choir while their other halves were serving in Afghanistan
Her brain seems to be constantly whirring and I can sense her observing and listening to the things that aren’t being said as well as the things that are. She hugs me hello, but seems slightly nervous and unsure of herself: her conversation is littered with ellipses and ‘sort ofs’, as if she is second-guessing what she’s saying at the precise moment that she’s saying it. This last year has been a time of transition for Horgan.
‘It was a big year of changes,’ she says. ‘Personal and professional. And sometimes those overlapping. I split with my husband Jeremy last year. But we’re still partners together at Merman. We still co-parent our kids. We’re lucky.’
Their eldest daughter, Sadhbh (Irish for ‘sweet, goodness’ and pronounced ‘Saive’), is 16, and their youngest, Amer, is 11. The failure of a marriage is always difficult. But perhaps especially so for Horgan who is, by her own admission, ‘an approval seeker’. Whose approval? ‘Oh, definitely parents. Definitely peers, I suppose. And my kids, I would say. That would be a big one.’
But does she approve of herself?
‘I’m a bit up and down about that. It depends on what I’m doing. When you’re in the middle of the creative process is when I like myself the most. I like that feeling of, “I’m good at this.” But then at the same time, if I’m acting, I’m very quick to not approve of myself. I’m very quick to see what my failings are or notice that anxiety interferes with performance.
Sharon Horgan and her Catastrophe co-star Rob Delaney. The show followed the story of a woman who found herself pregnant after a one-night stand
‘It’s like anything. Even in your personal life there are times when I think, “I’m f***ing nailing this mother thing! I really gave a good piece of advice there to my 16-year-old!” Or “I got the work-life balance thing right this week or month!” And then it sort of flips and you’re completely at sea and your arms are flailing and you’re kind of drowning. It just massively depends on the day or the week or the month, I think.’
Horgan first came on the scene with Pulling, a show about three single women living in south London, which she co-wrote and which became an unexpected cult hit. Various critically acclaimed sitcoms followed, but it wasn’t until she and the American comic Rob Delaney co-wrote Catastrophe that Horgan really hit her stride. The Channel 4 show followed the story of a woman who found herself pregnant after a one-night stand. It was loosely based on Horgan’s own experience – she conceived her first child with Jeremy Rainbird after they’d been dating for six months.
I’m not in touch with Rob at all. I do get these pangs when I really miss him
Catastrophe first aired in 2015 and ran for four seasons. It was notable for its portrayal of all the messy, frequently hilarious, realities of a chaotic and unanticipated family life and won a Bafta. Later, Horgan produced the American show Divorce for Sarah Jessica Parker and co-wrote Motherland, a BBC comedy following the trials and tribulations of a group of middle-class parents.
She is now something of a creative powerhouse: her production company has signed a huge deal with Apple and she’s got several works in the pipeline, including Herself, a film about a woman escaping an abusive relationship that earned a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival.
If there is one common theme to her work, it is that she takes the reality of a woman’s experience – a reality that has so often been marginalised as domestic and trivial – and makes it not only universal, but darkly funny too.
‘I love writing about stuff that is a bit forensic and specific,’ she says, ‘but then you realise that it’s just a version of something that everyone can relate to.
‘When it comes down to it, Motherland is about friendship and it is about finding your tribe… I think there’s universal questions and truths in there that if you take the kids out of the picture, it would be just as interesting.
‘And I think with Catastrophe it was always about relationships. And it wasn’t about being parents. It was about being in a relationship and how you survive that with kids.’
Her writing doesn’t fetishise motherhood, either for good or bad, which means those of us without children do not feel excluded.
Horgan with co-star Kristin Scott Thomas in Military Wives. ‘I’m such a huge fan and she’s top-level brilliant,’ Horgan says of Scott Thomas
‘Oh that’s so great to hear,’ she says when I tell her this. ‘It could be because motherhood just sort of happened to me and if it hadn’t happened, would I have ever done it? I don’t know.’
Being a parent, Horgan explains, is one part of her life, but it doesn’t monopolise everything. Her children are now of an age where they can watch her work – she sometimes shows early edits to Sadhbh and her reactions are ‘brutal. But when I can make her laugh it’s the most amazing thing because she’s tough. Teenagers are so porous, aren’t they?’
Her youngest daugher, Amer, is more into watching re-runs of Friends on Netflix. Recently, Horgan went to dinner at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles with Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe on the show, and was appropriately star-struck: ‘The amount of times she caught me staring at her, with pure love and admiration…’
Back at home, Horgan is fully aware of the fact that her work can sometimes be cringe-worthy for her children. ‘The embarrassment of having a mother who writes about sex, or the breakdown of sex in a marriage… Sadhbh has definitely had situations where boys in her group have said, “Why did your mother write herself a part where all she does is have sex in the first ten minutes of the show?”’
Why can’t I allow myself to know that everything’s fine? In another way, it’s handy because anxiety is what motors me
She emits a full-throttled laugh.
Her parenting style is, she says, a bit like her karaoke style: an attempt to exercise control over inherently chaotic circumstances.
‘I expect a lot from them, which is not great. I wouldn’t call it criticism, but I think it can be read as that. I think they’re both amazing and so therefore I have decided [to] dig into their choices, whether it’s school or friendship or boys or whatever. I’m a bit too watchful.’
It’s partly because she remembers what she was like as an adolescent. Horgan was born in Hackney, east London, but moved to Ireland when she was four when her parents, John and Ursula, bought a turkey farm in Meath. She still remembers plucking turkeys before the Christmas rush. The secret, she says, is to ‘pluck down, never up’.
She is the second of five children – two sisters and two brothers, one of whom, Shane, is a former international rugby player. As a teenager, she went to a strict convent school and ‘I was a brat, for sure. I definitely gave my parents the runaround. I think that’s why I’m so on high alert with my daughters because I just have this sort of spidey sense that I know everything they’re going to do before they’ve done it. Every lie or ruse…’
Horgan moved to London in her 20s, and while she was struggling to make it as an actress, she worked for two years in a shop in Camden selling T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Take Me To Your Dealer’ to the clientele.
Looking back now, she sees her 20s as a period of being ‘utterly unfulfilled and lost and scrambling around looking for something and hoping that I had the ability to find it but really unsure it was ever going to happen, professionally or personally.’
Her 30s were ‘a big turnaround of all that, because that’s when I was having babies and making Pulling. And then your 40s are a weird time because you’re suddenly aware of an end… I don’t mean necessarily mortality-wise, but this mad sort of thing of “this is what I have to get done… because it’s against the clock.”
‘I get very frustrated and angry at myself because there’s a built-in panic mode – “how will I pay my mortgage next year?”’ She knows the panic is ‘ridiculous’ but at the same time can’t seem to find it in her to relax. ‘Why can’t I just allow myself to know that everything’s fine?’ she asks, rhetorically. ‘In another way it’s handy because it [anxiety] motors me.’
She turns 50 in July and is refreshingly honest about the ‘huge fear’ attached to it. ‘The kind of person I want to be in my 50s, I’m not entirely sure I’ve got the tools to be that.’
What kind of person would she want to be? ‘Well,’ she smiles, ‘I suppose a more relaxed person. I want to take my foot off the pedal and just enjoy it a little. I don’t want to slow down but I do want to relax. I don’t want to lose my energy because one of the things I like about myself is the energy I have. I hate feeling tired. I hate anything that even suggests that I have to slow down at all. But then I don’t want to protest too much. I don’t want to be like, “I’m 50!”’ She assumes the gravelly American accent of a showy Hollywood grande dame and high-kicks her leg from the sofa to demonstrate. ‘I just want it to go away a little bit.’
Horgan on working with Scott Thomas: ‘Amazing. She’s so brilliantly nuts and funny. The “formidable” thing goes pretty quickly and you just end up really enjoying working with her’
She glances away, momentarily lost in reflection. She is, in many ways, at a crossroads in her life. She is newly divorced, and however amicable that separation has been, it must be difficult to navigate a different way of life after 14 years together. Professionally, too, Horgan is looking for something that will fulfil her in the same way that Catastrophe did. The show ended last year, but she has hinted it could be brought back again at some point, with grown-up kids at its centre.
She had a very close working relationship with her co-creator, Rob Delaney, and when I ask whether they’re still in touch all the time, she surprises me by saying, ‘No, not at all… I think we spent five really intense years together. And I think it’s healthy to have a break from that. ‘I mean, I get these pangs every so often where I really miss him and miss what we wrote, I miss that feeling of sitting in a room together and realising that we had this thing that we wanted to say… I’m in the process of trying to replace that, which is weird and not easy. I’m quite ruined by it because if something isn’t as fun as that… then I’ll feel short-changed.’
Instead, Sharon Horgan has spent the past year on other projects and ‘just letting myself read and watch stuff that is going to inspire me. It’s the first time in years where I’m just allowing myself to soak things up a bit.’
She deserves it. There’s a lot to soak up.
‘Military Wives’ is in cinemas now. The official soundtrack is out now on Decca Records