Castlewellan actress Eileen shines in dark drama

Castlewellan actress Eileen shines in dark drama

4 November 2020

CASTLEWELLAN actress Eileen O’Higgins shows her feisty side in a dark dark new comedy drama set in Victorian Dublin on RTE.

The best friend of Irish Golden Globe winner Saoirse Ronan, Eileen plays the headstrong niece of a memorial photographer played by Luther star Michael Smiley from Belfast, in Dead Still, a six-part series which started on Sunday.

Her uncle, Block Blennerhasset, takes pictures of the recently deceased —often propped upright and eyes wedged open as if still alive — with their mourning family members included.

Higgins’ character, Nancy Vickers, helps out her cantankerous uncle with the help of gravedigger Conall Malloy played by Kerr Logan, who has previously appeared in Game of Thrones.

However, when a photographic plate of one of Blennerhasset’s recent subjects goes missing, it brings the trio to the attention of Dublin Metropolitan Police detective Frederick Regan, played by Aidan O’Hare, and the macabre fun begins.

Shooting for Dead Still took place in the outskirts of Dublin, mostly in south Dublin, with scenes in the famous Glasnevin Cemetery and the Gravediggers pub with Dublin’s Georgian mansion houses used to full effect. 

Eileen said: “Nancy comes to Dublin from living in the Irish countryside with a repressed family, and she was itching to get out of there.

”It’s refreshing to play a character that has her own engine. She’s not there to serve any of these other characters. And she has a strong moral compass: if she thinks that somebody hasn’t behaved appropriately, she’ll tell them.”

It’s the latest high-profile production for the TV and movie actress who is a past pupil of Assumption Grammar School in Ballynahinch.

She and former Killinchy Primary School pupil Thaddea Graham will also be seen in the forthcoming Netflix drama, The Irregulars, which gives an alternative take on the Sherlock Holmes investigations.

Eileen has starred over the last few years alongside Ronan in the films Brooklyn and Mary Queen of Scots (2018), as well as the BBC wartime drama, My Mother and Other Strangers.

Eileen is is next up is Nowhere Special, a film shot in Belfast starring James Norton about a terminally ill single father trying to find a new family for his son

After that, she will be seen in the psychological drama, Here Before, which was filmed in Belfast.

It was while filming Brooklyn, the Oscar-nominated story of a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, that Eileen met and befriended Ronan, who was born in the US but raised in Co Carlow.

It seems like it was friendship at first sight for the pair. “When we met it felt like we were instantly on the same wavelength,” said Eileen. “Like when something happens that’s not necessarily funny but you think it is, and you look around and see who else thought it was funny, she was always looking around too.

“She’s very witty, she’s very funny, she’s incredibly kind. When we meet up now, because we’re both Irish, people presume we met at school. Only in Ireland would people see us as the girl from the North and the girl with the strong Dublin-via-Carlow accent.”

She jumped at the chance to return home to Co Down when filming of The Irregulars in Liverpool was halted for four months during lockdown.

Now living in London, Eileen, the daughter of Kathleen and Brian O’Higgins, grasped the chance to make the use of the downtime and go back home to see her five brothers and sisters.

“At the start we were told filming was paused for two weeks, and rather than have them book me transport back to London, I asked to go home instead,” she said. 

“My family live near the beach and mountains; they were all there. Because I’ve been away so much and I have a huge family, I feel guilty about not seeing them so I was glad I spent four months there.”

Eileen told the Irish Sun about  this week about her “massive family” and joked: “I was greedy when they were handing out the brothers and sisters. I was like, ‘Yeah I’ll have another one’.”

She added: “It’s boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl, all the way through. So there’s six of us and my oldest brother’s married and has two kids that are a boy and a girl, funny enough.

“But then my mum and dad both come from really big families. Mummy’s one of eight and daddy’s one of 11. So I have well over 60 first cousins.”

The only one of her family to go into acting, Eileen said her family “thought I’d lost my marbles” when she began to think of it as a career.

When Assumption Grammar announced that a drama school were visiting Belfast to recruit students, it gave Eileen the courage to try it out.

“I was super shy, but I also knew that when I acted, I did well at it,” she explained.

The next year she attended the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, living away from home from home for the first time while being the only Irish student there at the time.

Eleven years after her first steps into acting — while surviving financially doing a myriad of temporary jobs, Eileen is now getting a range of roles that many other peers can only dream of and is growing in confidence.

She said: “I found my feet at that point,” she reflects. “I guess the more you work, the more you learn. I’ve been fortunate enough to be on set with so many great actors, and I sit there like a sponge, hoping by some form of osmosis it will suddenly infiltrate how I approach something.”

Dead Still is on RTE One on Sundays from 9pm and can also be viewed on the RTE player, Amazon Prime with Acorn TV.