Thaddea and Eileen star in hit Netflix show

7 April 2021

LOCAL actors Thaddea Graham and Eileen O’Higgins are proving intriguing characters in Netflix’s new series, The Irregulars – the telling of the Sherlock Holmes story like never before.

Thaddea, a former Killinchy Primary School pupil, plays one of the lead roles as Bea, the leader of a gang of London street kids who investigate some of the great detective’s cases for him.

Her character is a fierce, smart and brave 17 year-old whose sister and friends get caught up in a world of dark magic and the occult hidden in the city at the time where a supernatural cause is behind the crimes.

A second series of The Irregulars is in the pipeline as the show is already a hit and was the second most watched Netflix show in the UK last week.

Last seen in the BBC comedy drama series, Us, with Tom Hollander and Saskia Reeves, where she played a busker using her local accent, Thaddea burst on to our TV screens last year.

Now living in London, the 23 year-old actor is also a successful singer songwriter has built up an impressive body of work since leaving the Arts Educational School in London after attending school in Belfast.

She admitted that she didn’t know much about Sherlock Holmes before doing the show.

“We see this very iconic world through the eyes of this young street gang,” said Graham.

“What I love about it is that these aren’t your typical heroes. They don’t have magical superpowers; they can’t fly or anything.”

She explains how the great detective, played by Henry Lloyd-Hughes, where his Sherlock Holme’s partner Alice is played by Eileen O’Higgins from Castlewellan, comes to be associated with the street kids.

“Dr Watson comes to me and he says, ‘I have a business proposal: I need you to go round the parts of London that I can’t access because I’m a posh man’,” said Thaddea.

“So Bea starts collecting all this information, and then the supernatural element comes in, and she goes, ‘What the hell have you got us involved in?’ And it just starts to spiral and get more intricate.”

While the main characters may be teens, The Irregulars deals with some very dark issues and shows violent scenes.

“All of these characters have been affected by grief in some way, and that’s a very universal theme that unfortunately everyone is going to have to deal with, and maybe some people have already dealt with,” explained Graham to NME. “And really trying to connect those and to ground those thoughts, I think if you didn’t, it would almost be disrespectful to the people who have lived similar lives. So

I don’t think it’s something to take lightly.”

Graham recently admitted that she had thought of a career in law before her mother made her rethink and acknowledge her love of being involved in the creative arts.

She also appeared in another popular Netflix series last year, fantasy epic The Letter for the King.

Eileen O’Higgins is known for her period drama work, having starred alongside Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots and Brooklyn. She also starred alongside Belfast actor Michael Smiley in Dead Still, a black comedy crime drama set in Victorian Dublin, which was aired on RTE last autumn.

O’Higgins appears in several episodes of the first series but it’s unknown whether she will return in the second season.

The Irregulars is available to stream now on Netflix.

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