Actress and comedian Aisling Bea joined the Second Captains to talk about success, failure and to throw a bit of sport into the mix for good measure.
Actually, it’s no stretch for Aisling to talk sport as she comes from a long line of horse riders and her mother was a trailblazer in the world of professional flat racing.
"In many ways, she was quite a pioneer for female jockeys. I’m extremely proud of her. It is interesting how… there aren’t as many women in my industry in comedy as there should and could and hopefully will be, but it is interesting growing up watching a woman in a male-dominated industry and kind of like plowing ahead… There are lots of parallels in terms of her career with mine. I remember she always said that if she won a race, it was because the horse was fast but if she lost the race, oh, it was a female jockey, so that’s what it was… You never just got to be there on your own merit, but it didn’t stop her."
In her own life and career, Aisling says it never occurred to her to be intimidated by men until she was in university and it was suggested to her for the first time that she was "weird" or "odd" being a female and being a comic.
"Up to that point, I’d managed to get away with being a person and then all of a sudden I started being kind of segregated… Those little moments, those little niggles, push away at your mindset and your confidence sometimes, that inner, intrinsic thing which has been helped by my mother’s determination."
Amidst her many other projects, Aisling and writing partner Sharon Horgan have been working together for 8 years now and one of their pilots has recently been picked up as a series. While Aisling is very proud of their achievement, she believes it’s as important to highlight the fact that it hasn’t always been plain sailing.
"While we talk about successes, I think it’s also important to talk about all the failures. Like for every Netflix special, there’s things that don’t work… One year I did 10 or 11 pilots of TV shows that never went anywhere. They are the things that make you, but also they’re so sad and disappointing and most of it is grit and pulling yourself back up again... No-one posts photos of themselves on Instagram when you’re eating spaghetti hoops out of a tin going "Why?!?"
It would be so embarrassing for @realDonaldTrump if Iranian President Rouhani doesn't check Twitter & just goes about his next few days without realising anything is up.
— Aisling Bea (@WeeMissBea) July 23, 2018
Aisling spoke about another topic close to her heart, the tragic death of her father by suicide when she was three years old. She opened up about her loss in a remarkable article for The Guardian newspaper last year and explained why it was important to her to do so.
"The reason I sort of wrote the article was to put something in my own words because once you’re sort of in the public eye, people ask questions and stuff and you know you’re going to get flummoxed in an interview or something like that. But also when I was growing up, there were just no stories anywhere which sort of makes sense because like suicide was decriminalised in Ireland in only 1989, so two years after my dad died, and people still say ‘committed suicide’ and you can only commit a crime so like the language around it is still pretty bogged down in a weird way. The reaction from it has been very overwhelming at times… I can’t even count the thousands of messages I’ve read."
