Sharon Horgan Knows the Power of ‘Group-Hating on a Monstrous, Cartoon Bigot of a Man’

It’s the morning after the presidential election, and Sharon Horgan is here to talk about men who hurt women. “How are you?” she asks before catching herself. “Oh my god, I don’t even know why I’m asking that.”

Sitting in bed in a hotel in Rome, where she’s busy filming Hulu’s upcoming miniseries about Amanda Knox (she plays the accused killer’s mother), the Irish actor-writer-producer is getting ready to launch the second season of Bad Sisters, a midnight-black dramedy co-written and produced by Horgan about five siblings working to cover up the “accidental death” of their sister Grace’s (Anne Marie-Duff) abusive husband. Occupied as Horgan might be, she has still found time to feel unmoored by the outcome of the U.S. election. 

“When I was on set yesterday, a couple of my American colleagues almost felt like they had to [apologize]; there was a sense of embarrassment there or something,” says Horgan, 54. “Not that we knew the results at that stage. But it was that thing of [the rest of us] going, ‘It’s OK. We’re fucked, too.’” 

Perhaps that’s why the first season of Bad Sisters was such a hit outside of its home in Ireland, winning the British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Series in 2023, plus four stateside Emmy nominations: At the root of Horgan’s trademark wry wit is a real, widely felt anxiety around the effects of patriarchal structures, which at best pretend to listen to women while simultaneously dismissing them, and at worst enable the men who cheat, lie, belittle, and rape them.

From the beginning, Bad Sisters (based on the Belgian series Clan) grappled with these existential threats. Season One, which premiered on Apple TV+ in 2022, introduced us to the Garvey sisters: Eva (Horgan), Grace (Duff), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene), and Becka (Eve Hewson), each of whom have unique motivations for wishing Grace’s detestable husband John Paul, a.k.a. “the Prick” (Claes Bang), would disappear. 

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“I think 80 percent of the reason it was a success was because everyone needed their catharsis of group-hating on a monstrous, religious, cartoon bigot of a man who was hurting a woman,” Horgan says. “We all got to focus on the same villain.” But the second season, she says, is “weirdly pushing it further,” even though the Prick is long gone.

“There is a bigger villain, really, in this institutional sexism and bigotry that we all experience,” Horgan explains. “If you can’t rely on the people who are there to protect you, if they’re the ones who are offending, then what do you do? Where do you turn? If you’re too consumed with shame about what happened to you in the first place, how do you talk about it?”

In addition to his habitual verbal and physical abuse toward the loyal yet shrinking Grace, John Paul has raped Eva, caused Bibi to lose her eye in a car accident, blackmailed Ursula, and swindled Becka. As if that weren’t enough, the Garveys, who are orphaned following their parents’ early death, also worry about the long-term effects the abuse will have on his and Grace’s teenage daughter, Blánaid.    

The new season, debuting Nov. 14, opens two years after John Paul’s death, and, for a blissful moment, everything appears right in the Garvey-verse. Grace is getting remarried to a kind and gentle man named Ian (Owen McDonnell). Eva has quit drinking and is focused on self-care with a Goop-y “menopause coach.” Bibi and her wife are trying, with some tension, to get pregnant via sperm donor. Ursula is successfully co-parenting with her ex-husband. And Becka is relatively happy in a new relationship. But when the police make a grisly discovery, the sisters’ past comes racing back as they’re forced to grapple with unearthed secrets, unlikely consequences, suspicious neighbors, and questionable confidants.

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Unlike Bad Sisters’ initial season, which Horgan developed from an existing limited series, the story within the new eight-episode follow-up is all new. After getting the green light for a second season from Apple, Horgan, despite having “a germ of an idea,” wasn’t even sure she could justify a continuation. That nervousness came from having a sense of responsibility toward real victims and what happens when they successfully leave abusive relationships. “You can’t suddenly be like, ‘Well, then they go to Disneyland,’” Horgan jokes. “You want to be very true to the intention of the original… This terrible thing happens not just to Grace, but to all of them. What would be the reality of all those situations?”

That sense of lived realism, combined with bits of slapstick sibling hijinks and a crackling script, is the engine driving Bad Sisters Season Two, which introduces a few new characters into the fold. There’s the elderly church lady Angelica (Fiona Shaw), an intentionally obtuse buttinsky and the sister of Grace’s neighbor, Roger (Michael Smiley), who knows what really happened to the Prick. There’s also rookie detective Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham), a brainy Asian-Irish Gen Z-er determined to solve the case with the sort of zeal you might see in a true-crime TikTok creator. Constantly dismissing her is a near-retirement supervisor, Fergal Loftus (Barry Ward), who may have started his career with Una’s brand of resolve but has perhaps been worn down over time by a rocky justice system that is quicker to blame the victim than the perpetrator.  

“[Una] took a long time to get right,” Horgan says. “That kind of a sidekick character learning from a cantankerous old guard has been done, you know? It’s a borderline trope, but I needed her to be that. I needed her to be the new blood. The job isn’t what she thought it was going to be.. It’s a stark but important message, gender-wise, across the board. You have to fight that hard all the time or nothing will change.”

Likewise, casting Shaw turned out to be an easy decision for Horgan. “With Angelica, from the start, we were like, ‘This woman could be iconic.’ I loved [Shaw] in Fleabag and Killing Eve, but the thing that I really loved her in was Harry Potter,” Horgan says, in reference to Shaw’s priggish Petunia Dursley. “I know it was so small, but I found her ridiculously funny. She was like Molly Shannon in her physical funniness. She’s one of our greatest living actors, without a doubt. Apart from Harry Potter, I’d never seen her lean into the funny before.”

Excavating satire out of everyday relationships, life stages (see: “menopause coach”), and family dynamics is a longstanding specialty of Horgan’s, who at this point in her decades-long career is an outright comedic auteur. From 2006 to 2009, Horgan wrote and starred in the BBC Three sitcom Pulling, about three single women in London messily navigating the modern-dating maze. Americans became more familiar with Horgan in Catastrophe (2015-2019), a rom-com she co-created and starred in with Rob Delaney, about an American man who gets an Irish woman unexpectedly pregnant after a one-week fling. The subject matter might shift, but Horgan’s ear for authenticity is the common thread across projects. 

It helps that Horgan frequently pulls from her own life to illustrate a universality of the human condition. Pulling offered a fictionalized glance at Horgan’s dating escapades right before she attended grad school; Catastrophe was partially inspired by the comedian becoming pregnant shortly after beginning to date her (now-ex) husband Jeremy Rainbird; the parenting sitcom Motherland (2016-2022) starring Anna Maxwell Martin and Diane Morgan, was about the chaotic realities of juggling kids, work, friends, and family. 

Pieces of Horgan’s real life do make it into Bad Sisters as well, but they’re mixed with global cultural conversations, such as public reckonings about violence against women. Around the time she was working on the first season, the murder of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman killed by an off-duty London police officer, had kicked off a national outcry in Britain. “I wanted to shine a light on that, not in a way that’s very soapbox-y, but just for it to be there and for it to be recognized,” Horgan says. 

On a more personal note, Horgan also channeled some of the fallout of her 2019 divorce and midlife bodily changes into the sisters. “I was going through perimenopause,” she says. “I was quitting drink. I started training, just trying to take control of my fifties, and I’d come through a nesting situation where I’d split up with my husband… and so I put that into Ursula. There was stuff I gave to all of them that was inspired by things going on [with] myself and my friends at the time.

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“With all the sisters, I wanted to give them a journey,” Horgan continues. “I didn’t want the journey just to be the caper. I wanted it to be stuff that’s going on in their lives, everyday stuff that women go through, and for that to be the thing that exacerbates what ends up happening. I just wanted it all to marry together and feel organic.”

With the rave reviews Bad Sisters Season One saw in America, surely once audiences watch Season Two, they’ll be clamoring for yet another chapter. Is Horgan prepared for that? “I do get asked about it a lot, and I’m very boring,” she says. “We’re giving the same answer, which is, [with] the first season, something came into my head for the second. The thing that I think made it work is that it was so connected to what happened in the first season. There was a reason for it to exist. If there was a Season Three, I’d have to feel that same thing. It’s not like White Lotus where you can just start again with a whole new set of people. You’ve got to believe that these sisters are going to go through something extraordinary again. If I can find something where it feels believable and truthful and riveting, then I would absolutely [make a third season]. Because I love those girls.”