Lola Petticrew Wants the End of ‘Say Nothing’ to Spark Tough Conversations

This article contains spoilers about the entirety of Say Nothing, through to the series finale.

Anyone who watches Say Nothing will remember the name Dolours Price. FX’s sprawling limited series (now streaming on Hulu) spans decades in its riveting, fraught, ultimately tragic portrait of that Irish Republican Army soldier, portrayed by Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake in alternating timelines. Dolours leads deadly attacks, goes on hunger strike, facilitates the disappearance of people in her community—all in the initially romantic, later brutal pursuit of Irish independence. She’s our guide through The Troubles in Northern Ireland, expressing the kind of conflicted moral perspective that keeps her choices interesting, surprising, and all too human.

the inciting incident for the Patrick Radden Keefe book on which the series is based. As Say Nothing theorizes, it fell on Dolours to kill Jean, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so—leading her once reluctant and eventually militant sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe), to pull the trigger instead.

It’s a dark ending to a dark story, something. Petticrew didn’t shy away from in their performance. But as the actor tells me in a wide-ranging postmortem interview, they felt plenty of weight as well. After all, Dolours’s story hit very close to home.

Vanity Fair: How would you describe Dolours’s overall arc in the show?

Lola Petticrew: A pretty epic arc. And it doesn’t feel like an arc that a female character gets a lot. I don’t think that Dolours is your typical lead. She’s not so much a hero for a lot of people, and at times it seems like it might be quite difficult to get an audience on her side. But I had to put that out of my mind and really trust that the show would do what it would do, which is present these people in the context of the situation, making a decision, and letting the audience decide whether it’s something that they think that they would do—that they agree with. There aren’t really heroes or villains, it’s just people in a pretty shit situation trying their best.

What did you think about her relationship with Marian? Dolours ultimately can’t go through with killing Jean, and so her sister completes the task on her behalf.

So much of what I’m doing is just completely from Hazel. Every time that I walked into a room on set, when the cameras were going, it was quite natural that the first person that Dolours was looking for was Marian. They’re so symbiotic. And luckily with Hazel, it was pretty much instantaneous, that sibling chemistry. I’m grateful every day that they cast Hazel Doupe. Everything they do is in symbiosis with each other and in movement with each other. Hazel had everything very specifically plotted in terms of her performance, and where I was moving, and what she was willing to reveal and not reveal in specific episodes and scenes. It was really incredible to watch.

What was the most challenging element of playing this character?

The responsibility that I felt, being from West Belfast and still living in Belfast. This story is really a story of my community and my people, and I felt a massive responsibility to get it right. Sometimes it was hard to push that to the side and not let the weight of that bear down on me too much, so I was able to do my job. I love being from West Belfast. I think it’s the best place in the world with the best people in the world, and I just really wanted to do right by them.

Along those lines, what was it like filming the Old Bailey bombing episode, where Dolours leads a deadly attack in London?

That was tough stuff. It was a long time into the shoot, at the midway point, and your body starts telling you that you might be a bit tired. But I had Hazel, and she was my saving grace through everything. It felt really special to have somebody going through the exact same thing that I was going through, and we really leaned on each other a lot, especially during episodes five and six.

Episode six focuses on Dolours and Marian in prison, arrested after the bombing, and depicts your characters going on hunger strike. It gets very intense as the staff tries force-feeding them.

It was really hard physically and mentally and emotionally. We shot it in Shepton Mallet Prison, which was a real prison, so the entire environment was really oppressive. That felt really heavy on my heart.

Can you say more about the physical aspect?

We did a lot with makeup and we did a lot with clothes, and I did a little bit [of weight loss] myself. If people want to do really extreme weight drops and that suits them, that’s fine, but I feel like you have to be physically well enough to work to your best ability—and that’s what I wanted to do. The hardest part physically was your body being brutalized in those force-feeding scenes and in the scenes where we were fighting the police wardens. The loneliness. But the abuse of the body—that felt like it was the most challenging.

We had a fantastic intimacy coordinator, and we did a lot of rehearsals. Everybody that was going to be in those scenes, we got to know each other and we got to be comfortable with each other and each other’s bodies. Safe words, rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals, and just trying to let it go at the end of the day.

You don’t always get rehearsals in TV.

No, you don’t. We got a little bit at the beginning of this, but they set aside the time to rehearse a lot of episode 6 before going in. They were really respectful of everything that Hazel and I were going through physically and mentally. And yeah, I mean, it’s all down to the incredible team.

Was there any part of Dolours’s story that opened your eyes to her part in the conflict in a new way?

Yeah. I knew a lot about the war, growing up, and I knew about Dolours and Marian, and I was aware of the story. But those two are sort of lesser-known figures within the tapestry of the entire thing, so I definitely learned a lot more about their part in the conflict. Growing up, everybody knew the names of the 10 men who died on hunger strike in 1981, but there would be people that didn’t know Dolours and Marian. And without those young women going on hunger strike and fighting being force-fed to the point where they were taken off the force-feeding, that led to those men being able to be made martyrs in 1981. Without the Price sisters, you wouldn’t have those 10 martyrs in 1981. It’s a massive piece of that history.

The show works in the gray area, though. You’ve talked about playing the Dolours on the page as opposed to the one you could learn about in research, but still, there’s a lot of room for thorny conversation in the way you approached her, right?

My hope for the show was always that it would have an ability to start conversations. Had we had English money or Irish money, if this was BBC or RTE—I just don’t think it would be made by those people anyway. And so [American money] really allowed us to be brave with it. And in that, it has the ability to start what I think will be hard conversations. Healing isn’t linear and it isn’t always clean, but there are conversations that need to be had about how we move forward as a country, as a people, and what the future looks like for here—and for people like me, who are somewhat young adults who live here and want to continue living here.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and she’s a controversial figure. In terms of people who have Republican sympathies, there’s probably a ton of misogyny in the way that these women were treated and the way their stories aren’t told as widely as the men’s. A lot of people see her as an out-and-out villain. What’s really great about this show is that it allows us to see that it’s a lot more complex and layered than that. The big question that hits everybody in the face when they watch it is, “Would I do that? Is that something that I agree with?” It’s morally challenging.

Why don’t you think that more local money would make this show?

Fear. Definitely. The show says a lot of big, brave things, and certainly English money would be too afraid to say them because their government was instrumental in what happened. This show and the perspective that it chooses to take is quite controversial.

I hope that also for people in Britain, whose government and country were massively not just instrumental but responsible for what happened during that period of time and what’s happening now, that this would be a stepping stone for them to consider, educate themselves. And the same for people in the US. It’s such a recent history. Ireland’s a country that everybody knows and everybody loves, but for some reason not a lot of people know about this very recent, very tragic history.

Is controversy something you generally, even beyond this topic, lean toward as an actor?

You shouldn’t shy away from it. Some of the greatest art is controversial. You should never be afraid to make the art that you want to make.

Do you have any anxieties about how this will be received at home?

Oh, totally. I’m a ball of nerves. I feel like I’ve been on an in-breath for the last year. I think it’s really normal and healthy to be anxious. It means you care. I would be really worried if I wasn’t feeling sick about it.

This being a project that’s so close to home—I got to shoot it with one of my best friends in the world, who I’ve known since I was 11, every day that I walked on set. I was looking across at Anthony Boyle, and I was like, “How did we get here?” We used to run around the park outside his house together. I actually shot my first self-tape in his mummy and daddy’s living room. To go from that to being on set together, having known each other for going on 17, 18 years now, it felt incredible.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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