The Walsh Sisters, a compelling adaptation of Marian Keyes' bestselling novels, plunges us into the hearth and soul of the Walsh family. Donal O’Donoghue visits the set and speaks with cast members Caroline Menton (Rachel), Louisa Harland (Anna) and Carrie Crowley (Mammy Walsh).
Caroline Menton, Rachel
"Did you know that Posh and Becks got married here?" says Caroline Menton. "We found their names in the guest book." 'Here’ is Luttrellstown Castle, a fancy pile on the north-west frontier of Dublin, where cast and crew of The Walsh Sisters are close to wrapping up the six-part RTÉ/BBC co-production.
Based on two Marian Keyes’ novels (Rachel’s Holiday and Anybody Out There), the drama is adapted for screen by Stefanie Preissner (who also plays Walsh sister, Maggie) and features relative unknown, Caroline Menton, in the key role of Rachel Walsh.
She is one of five sisters in a drama that vividly captures a family muddling through the mess, magic and mystery of life; where blood is thicker than water, where people struggle with addiction and relationships, but where there is also the promise of a happy ever after.
Some six months after the set visit, we meet again by Zoom. "I’m one of five girls and I really connected with the material," says Menton, who grew up in Dublin, the youngest of six siblings (one brother in the mix).
"Marian’s books were always in the house; my mum is a huge fan, as is one of my older sisters. I love that big family thing that The Walsh Sisters captures: no one is seemingly listening to anyone else, there are multiple conversations happening simultaneously and it just looks and sounds like complete chaos. I’m the ‘baby’ in our family, so whenever I did try to contribute or engage, I’d maybe just get one sentence into the mix. That’s how it was and how it will aways be for me as the baby sister."
Rachel Walsh is a mess when we first meet her in the opening scene: blitzed on drink and drugs and self-loathing. "With Rachel, I wanted to understand why she was in so much emotional pain and suffering," says Menton, who is a revelation in the role, nailing the many shades of her conflicted character.
"When we started filming, Ian [Fitzgibbon, director] rang to say that we were going to start with the scenes of Rachel in rehab. Straight in at the deep end! But I'm glad we started there because it made me realise what Rachel was masking. Gabor Maté, the renowned Canadian physician, says: 'Don’t ask ‘Why the addiction?’ Ask ‘Why the pain?’ so I always used that as my compass when playing Rachel and it informed my choices when she interacts with the various family members."
Caroline is the only actor in the Menton family. "I couldn’t imagine doing anything else," she says simply. Following her time studying at UCD, she went to London, where she studied at RADA and has notched up a few credits, including the well-received Irish horror film, Oddity (she was on the train to the Edinburgh Film Festival for the film’s premiere when her agent called to tell her she had got the part of Rachel Walsh) and a role in the revival of All Creatures Great and Small.
"I have two stage projects in the pipeline and I’m really hoping that they will happen, as theatre is something I’d love to do next." But with many more Rachel novels available in the Marian Keyes canon and with Stefanie Preissner currently writing a second season of The Walsh Sisters (yet to be greenlit), I suspect we haven’t seen the last of Rachel.
"Rachel is every colour of the rainbow," says Menton, who, apart from watching those Gabor Maté videos, researched for the part by meeting an addiction counsellor as well as a recovering addict. And then there’s her own experience of family.
"Rachel is textbook middle-child syndrome: she got lost in the mix. She was left to her own devices and went down a windier road than, for example, by-the-book Maggie." In an early scene in the drama the sisters compare each other to various brands of sweets, with Rachel saying: "I’m a Jelly Baby because everyone bites my head off." So, what sweet would Caroline Menton be?
"I always saw myself as someone who tried to keep the peace in the family, so maybe I’m something with caramel in it, a smooth chocolate. Or maybe I’m a Mars Bar!"
Carrie Crowley, Mammy Walsh
I met Mammy Walsh the day after Mother’s Day. "Yesterday, my five ‘daughters’ gave me a gift of a Current Tide clock," she says. Or at least the actress Carrie Crowley does, revealing not only her love of sea swimming but also how she immerses herself in a role.
"It’s the same with any acting job that I’ve done. Once you know who you are, you’ll start behaving like that character. On The Walsh Sisters there were times I’d be thinking, ‘Oh Mammy wouldn’t like that!’ In some weird way, you become your character. And when the girls gave me the clock, I found that really moving, maybe because I’m not a parent and it was like ‘my girls that are not my girls at all’ are like family.’"
Six months on and Carrie is at home in Dublin, where she lives with her husband, Ross. She has the morning off ahead of rehearsals for the stage play, Konstantin (an imagining of what happens after that final act of Chekov’s The Seagull) and life is good. "I’m looking at my tidal clock right now as it’s hanging on the wall here at home," she says. "I’ve had my sea swim earlier this morning."
When we met in March, she was accompanied by co-star, Aidan Quinn, Daddy Walsh. In person, the duo had a chemistry that also fizzes on screen. "I loved being in Aidan’s company and he was so kind to the girls," she says. "I just so enjoyed being his wife." She laughs at this notion before adding: "Ah no, he was a total dote."
The Walsh Sisters’ DNA, just as in the original novels, is all about family. "You really get a sense of family from the show and that is key," says Crowley. "We see that these five sisters, each more complex than the other, are so different and yet they are still family.
"I have just one sister, so it was just the two of us. Neither of us have children but a lot of friends are from big families. Mammy Walsh always wants things to be done in the right way because there might be somebody looking. I’d say that she’s one of those women who probably irons their knickers. But every now and then, she crumbles, and you realise that there is a vulnerability behind that shell and that’s what makes her interesting to me: she is human."
Back in the 1990s, Carrie Crowley was everywhere: from kids TV (The Morbegs and Echo Island) to anchoring her own chat show, Limelight and co-hosting the Eurovision Song Contest with Ronan Keating in 1997. She was everywhere and then she wasn’t.
Stepping back from the treadmill, the former primary school teacher decided to focus on what really mattered to her professionally: acting. She built up a formidable CV with parts on stage and screen, including TG4 Irish language dramas The Running Mate and An Crisis, The Clinic for RTÉ and a four-year run as Jackie Ferguson in Fair City. In 2023, she was nominated for an IFTA award for her performance in the Irish language film, An Cailin Ciúin, a luminous screen adaptation of Claire Keegan’s short story, ‘Foster’.
"I think it made people take me more seriously, gave me a bit more standing, as opposed to ‘Yer woman who used to work on the radio or was doing ‘a bit of acting’.," she says of the 2022 film. "It was that role that made people realise that ‘Ah I get it now! This is what you do, this is your world’. And I subsequently got offered more stuff.
"So yes, it has been interesting and has probably changed people’s perception of me as an actor. It changed me as well. Afterwards, I thought that if I never make another film, I can die happy because that was a beautiful piece of work, the film itself, and I was lucky enough to be part of it."
She is now busier than ever, with a new documentary series, Buildings Beo ("I’m so proud of that show") on TG4, Konstantin at the Dublin Theatre Festival and of course, The Walsh Sisters coming to RTÉ this week.
There is also Carrie in a balaclava in the Irish language heist thriller Aontas. Beyond that, she’s quietly hopeful that she’ll be back on screen as Mammy Walsh for a second season. "Do you know that Louisa gave me her pants?" Ah no! "It was the last day of filming and amid the farewells, Carrie’s co-star, Louisa Harland, gifted her a pair of her baggy jeans that Crowley had (not so secretly) coveted. "It was so lovely with my girls," she says. "It’s like being part of a big family."
Konstantin by Lauren Jones is at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from October 2 to 4 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival (dublintheatrefestival.ie).
Louisa Harland, Anna Walsh
"As I haven't done a lot of acting in my own voice, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to act at all."
Louisa Harland is talking about playing Anna Walsh and is joking, of course. Sort of. Up to now, we’ve seen (and heard) the talented Dubliner as the uniquely idiosyncratic Orla McCool in Derry Girls and as a Cockney-spouting 18th Century highwaywoman in Renegade Nell.
"The accent was my biggest worry going into The Walsh Sisters and because of that, I think I brought parts of myself to the role of Anna, elements that you can’t hide away from, that made it quite personal. It was also totally freeing and maybe a bit vulnerable but so lovely."
So, you’re not really acting in this then Louisa, are you? "The jury is still out!" she quips. All the assembled journalists laugh too, because we know that jury won’t be out for long.
Like so many others, Harland was a fan of Marian Keyes’ work. "Who isn’t?" she says. "She’s the holiday read go-to." During filming, all the ‘Walsh siblings’ were invited to Marian’s home for tea, the author just as excited as her guests that her books were being re-imagined for the screen by her friend, Stefanie Preissner.
"Marian said to me that Anna might be the soundest of them all, so I had that in the back of my head the whole time," says Harland of playing the Walsh sister who lives with her struggling sibling Rachel, and yet cannot see the wood for the trees. "I didn’t realise how emotional and dark the story would be," she admits. "I think we leaned into the darkness because that is where the truth is in the story and the scripts."
Harland, the youngest of three sisters, always wanted to act. Before she moved to London at 19 to study drama at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, she had already scored a small part in gangster series, Love/Hate. She made Lost in London, a one-take film that was broadcast live to cinemas and helmed by Woody Harrellson, before Derry Girls came calling.
Between seasons of Lisa McGee’s classic comedy, she was back to working in a pub to make ends meet. Her lead role in Renegade Nell, a Disney drama written by the great Sally Wainwright, changed everything.
Now, The Walsh Sisters posed questions for her. "I didn’t know if I could act without putting on a voice!" she says. "I thought Anna might just have to be exactly like Louisa, but I kept going back to the books and found our differences!"
Watch The Walsh Sisters on Sundays at 9:30pm on RTÉ One. Catch up later on RTÉ Player.
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