Siobhán Cullen currently features in three dark comedies, Obituary (RTÉ One and Netflix), The Dry (RTÉ One and ITVX) and Bodkin (Netflix). She finds the notion of herself as a star of comedies inherently unlikely and, ironically, somewhat funny. “Previously, comedy would have terrified me,” the Dubliner says. “I would always have been naturally drawn to drama. Comedy was certainly not something that I thought was going to be in my future.” She laughs. “And now it seems that it’s all I do.”
She did see an acting career in her future. She took acting classes from a very young age. Her mother was a nurse and her father was the managing director of an electrical wholesale company, but they were involved in amateur theatre. “I would be going down to rehearsals with them some evenings, just tagging along, and I’d be prompting in the wings and stuff,” she says.
“Seeing my parents go through these imaginary situations – dying or getting their hearts broken – it hit me so hard. It broke my heart. I thought it was magic. It blew my mind that it could have such a profound effect on people, that you could watch magic being created in front of you and everyone is on board. Everyone is buying into this deceit and totally committing to it. I loved it. And I loved the tactile making of the thing as well. They were rehearsing in a school hall down the road – a chair becomes a couch, and walls are flying in and being painted. I loved the mechanics of it.”
Cullen got her first professional acting job at the age of eight, in an Abbey production of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats. That’s when she realised, “This is a job … And that’s when I went, ‘I’ll just do this [when I grow up], because this is the best.’”
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‘I think I have always seen it as a game. What are the rules? How much can I bend the rules?’
Was she nervous? “No, it was just more people to perform in front of,” she says. “I never got stage fright. Maybe because I started so young. So the connotations around going to an audition or putting on a play or doing a performance were always a positive. There was no pressure. I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’ve got to make a living.’ For me an audition meant getting an afternoon off school and maybe getting an ice cream afterwards in Dún Laoghaire. I never felt spooked by it or scared by it. At that age it was a game.”
Does she still see it as a game? “I think I have always seen it as a game,” she says. “What are the rules? How much can I bend the rules? And can I get it right? As an older actor I’ve tried to get rid of the ‘Can I get it right?’ part, because that’s almost impossible.”
Cullen continued acting and attending acting classes right through her teens, then did a degree in drama and theatre at Trinity College Dublin. When she graduated she and many of her class ended up working as actors or directors. What sort of career did she want? “I wanted to just work in Irish theatre and be able to make a living from it. It was all I knew. I’d had a couple of TV gigs as a teenager and a young adult. But for me, yeah, it was theatre. That’s what I wanted to do.”
She started to get small roles at the Gate and loved it. “A month in the rehearsal room watching amazing Irish theatre actors,” she says. “That was like a masterclass for me. I didn’t train in the traditional sense, because I did a degree course, which is quite academic ... So that was my training, being in those rehearsal rooms and running lines with them backstage, taking any opportunity I could just to help out and get involved. I just kind of worked my way up.” She reflects for a moment. “That sounds like it was really linear and easy. It wasn’t. There were loads of years where I wasn’t really doing anything and panicking and freaking out.”
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Cullen has since done a lot of work with Druid Theatre company, on shows such as Richard III and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. What’s that experience like? “It really feels like you’re working with a family and that there’s a shorthand there. And because they’ve all worked together for so long … you don’t really get those first-day-at-school nerves. It’s a return to something ... It’s really lovely. Because they all know each other so well, and they’re so open and free. It just invites you to do the same. It’s a beautiful company. And what they make, it’s pretty magic, I think.”
With theatre there’s a sense that there’s no “definitive” version, she says, because each performance is different. “That’s what’s so gorgeous and infuriating about it, as well, and keeps you going back for more … Something could have happened one night, and then you’re chasing that [feeling] for the rest of the week … You have to realise that it’s sort of an exercise in meditation. It’s about being present and being in the moment. Let it go … We’ll find something else. We’ll find another spark.”
In her late 20s Cullen started to get more television roles. She appeared in Conor McPherson’s RTÉ-BBC series Paula (“I loved that”) and on the big-budget YouTube sci-fi series Origin, which, though not a big hit, was hugely important to her. “I had six months in front of the camera every day, and that was where I learned so much,” she says. “I went from having very limited camera experience to it being my working day and having countless hours with the whole machinery and mechanics of a film set. It was invaluable to me.”
For Cullen, like so many other performers, Covid was a huge career disruption. “I live in London, but I chose to stay at home with my mam and dad during Covid, and I remember going into them one evening [and saying], ‘I’m going to have to pick a new career now. It’s over. People will never gather in a dark room together to watch a play again. It’s gone.’” She laughs. “It was frightening, but actors are so resilient, and you just find a way. ‘Okay, we’ll do a one-person show and we’ll broadcast it into people’s homes,’ or, ‘Let’s record voiceovers in our wardrobes.’”
‘...if there was ever a line that didn’t sit right in my accent, or didn’t sit right for some of the characters from west Cork, we were given free rein’
At one point in the midst of it all she starred in a one-woman play about Eavan Boland that was written by Colm Tóibín and directed by Druid’s artistic director, Garry Hynes. “It was in a format that we were all kind of trying to figure out, this broadcast-theatre thing. But it was amazing.”
Cullen did not, back then, foresee this very productive comedy-drama period in her career. It’s a clutch of very juicy roles for an actor. In Obituary, written by Ray Lawlor, she plays a small-town obituarist who goes on a killing spree to rustle up business. In The Dry she is a deceptively competent sibling in an Irish family rife with dysfunction. In Bodkin she is a cynical journalist working with a wide-eyed American podcaster to document a mystery in a town in west Co Cork.
She’s great in all three roles. What made her choose them? With Obituary, she says, it was because she never expected to be offered a role as a serial killer. “It just didn’t feel like that was going to be an obvious casting for me. I was delighted to get to play that kind of villain.”
What about The Dry? “Nancy Harris’s writing is just so clear and concise,” she says. “You knew exactly who those people were … What’s so gorgeous, coming back to do a second season of something, is that you know each other very well … You could do a take of something and you could just tell by the look on [director] Paddy [Breathnach]’s face if you’re hitting the comedy too much or you’re hitting the drama too much. It’s a very delicate balance, but I think he nails it. Paddy is just such a brilliant conductor.”
Bodkin, on the other hand, is a much bigger-budget production, produced for Netflix by the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground. (The Obamas were not on set, sadly.) It was created by the British writer Jez Scharf, yet it still has a very Irish sensibility. “Fifty per cent of our writers’ room was Irish, and it was majority-Irish casting and crew,” says Cullen. “It’s so important to me and to the showrunners that it’s authentic … So if there was ever a line that didn’t sit right in my accent, or didn’t sit right for some of the characters from west Cork, we were given free rein.”
She also suspects her American costar, the Saturday Night Live alumnus Will Forte, might know more about Ireland than she does. “We would wrap for the day at 6pm in Ardmore Studios, and he’d say, ‘I’m just going for a drive for the day to Mayo.’ He was flat-out exploring. He was telling me that he’s now been around the whole coast of Ireland.”
Whether there will be a second series of Bodkin is “in the lap of the Netflix gods”, she says, but it looks as if she won’t have any gaps on her CV for a while. She’s about to start rehearsing for another Abbey play, The Sugar Wife, by Elizabeth Kuti, and the second season of Obituary starts filming in the autumn. She says she’d love to do a film next. “I haven’t done a whole lot of film in my career, and it’s something that I’d love to learn more about.”
Has she learned a lot about comedy from doing these three roles? “I’m still terrified any time a comedy script comes to my desk,” she says. “I’m sure I have learned something.” She laughs. “I hope I have.”
Bodkin is on Netflix now. The second season of The Dry begins on RTÉ One on Wednesday, May 15th, at 9.35pm
