Philippa Dunne is back in her old neighbourhood. As a student in Dublin, the Amandaland star rented with a group of girls near the Black Church, close to the Gate Theatre, never imagining as she walked past the theatre every morning that she would one day be on its stage.
“That was for real actors. It was like, that’s where real actors go and work, and that’s serious business in there now,” she says from a backstage sofa at the Gate, where she will soon appear in Eureka Day, an ensemble comedy following an inclusive, liberal-minded school in Berkeley, California, as it deals with a health scare.
As I meet Dunne, she is in the third week of rehearsals with the cast and director Roy Alexander Weise. It’s been an “intense, but great intense” period in which they have “talked about every inch and every angle of each page” of Jonathan Spector’s play.
“It’s such an indulgence, and I absolutely love it. It’s what makes the thing so amazing,” she says.
She hasn’t done “live stuff” for years, and the last time she did it was with her friends from the comedy group Diet of Worms, “all very relaxed”. But last year she got the urge to keep things interesting for herself.
“I was kind of, like, I daren’t think about theatre, because that’s too terrifying,” she says. “But whenever I worked in Ireland and was around other Irish actors, I was always so envious of how close they were, because they all knew each other through theatre. I thought I would love to get that camaraderie.”
In Eureka Day, Dunne plays Suzanne, one of five school board members trying to navigate their way through a mumps outbreak.
[ The Gate’s new season: Eureka Day, An Ideal Husband and Poor top the billOpens in new window ]
“They’re all very highly educated people. They love a back and forth,” she says.
Each character has a different take on vaccines, but the play – first performed in Berkeley in 2018 – is not strictly about vaccination.
Anne has a breaking point, but she’s just very gentle. She genuinely wants the best for everyone. She wants the best for Amanda
— Philippa Dunne
“It’s about how people, through their own trauma, through their own viewpoints on the world, through their own position in the world, come to the decisions they make, and the consequences of that,” she says.
“We can take life as black and white. It’s actually this big splodge of grey.”
Dunne has relocated to Dublin for the run, though there will be “a little bit of commuting” back to southwest London, where she lives with her husband and their five-year-old daughter.
She was in Dublin last summer to shoot Tall Tales & Murder, Stuart Carolan’s upcoming RTÉ-BBC screwball crime drama, and also the summer before that to make RTÉ family series Showkids.
“I love getting back to Ireland, and that’s why, when the Gate approached me, I knew I really wanted to get back and perform to an Irish audience. I will always come back to Ireland for work, in a heartbeat.”
Dunne, now 44, describes herself as being from both Dublin and Mayo, having been born in the capital to Dublin parents, before moving west when she was three.
14/01/2026 – NEWS – Actor Philippa Dunne for the Magazine. Laura Slattery Interview. Photograph: Alan Betson / The Irish Times
Growing up in Castlebar with her two brothers, she consumed as much comedy as she could. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was an early favourite, then she watched her brother’s borrowed copies of satires Brass Eye and The Day Today, which “led into [Alan] Partridge” and various stand-up DVDs. She discovered she loved it all.
“Humans are really well able to create misery and gloom, but the flip side is that we can create amazing laughter. We have both traits in us. It’s that power of creation. I can create a laugh and it lifts the whole room. It’s amazing.”
She decided she wanted to be an actor at the age of just four, but when friends told her speech and drama classes involved learning poems, she was unimpressed.
“There wasn’t enough drama in it for me. I was like, where’s the drama?”
The one third-level drama course, at Trinity College Dublin, had something like 26 places for the whole country.
“I went for it, and I spectacularly failed, because I had no performance experience. I didn’t know how to audition, so it was an absolute wreck. I was devastated that I didn’t get in.”
Diet of Worms
Happily, while doing an arts degree in UCD – she laughs as she tells me she studied archaeology and Greek and Roman civilisation – she met her “four mates” (Amy Stephenson, Rory Connolly, Niall Gaffney and Shane Langan). They formed Diet of Worms and spent the Noughties taking sketch shows to the Edinburgh fringe – in 2007 they performed a month-long festival run in a swimming pool, with water up to their waists.
“Bonkers. These are the things you only do in your 20s,” she says.
Eventually she got an agent and started “plugging away”. Some comedy fans will recognise Dunne as Geraldine Devlin, Clare’s mam in Derry Girls, but her big breakthrough role arrived a couple of years earlier when she was cast as kind-hearted, easily exploited Anne in the hit BBC sitcom Motherland, which ran for three series from 2016.
The good news for Dunne was that Anne made the leap into last year’s successful spin-off, Amandaland, in which she reconnected with her “BFF”, the more alpha Amanda (Lucy Punch). “They come as a package,” she says.
Anne is soft and socially awkward, but she does occasionally show she has it within herself to stand up to Amanda.
“She has a breaking point, but she’s just very gentle. She genuinely wants the best for everyone. She wants the best for Amanda. She will go to the ends of the earth for her.”
Unlike the Californian characters in Eureka Day, who have no qualms about stating their opinion, or Amanda, whose insecurity manifests as vanity, Anne is a humble person. “She just doesn’t brag,” Dunne says.
Amandaland: Philippa Dunne, Lucy Punch and Joanna Lumley. Photograph: BBC
Everyone behind Amandaland is “thrilled and relieved in equal measure” that the spin-off has found its audience, and Dunne knows from encounters with the show’s fans that viewers are fond of Anne, the taken-for-granted underdog with a chemistry PhD and a talent for making sausage rolls.
“People love Anne, and it really touches me. It really makes me feel good.”
At home in Ireland, there’s no getting ahead of herself, however. On Christmas Day, about 10 people in her family sat down to watch the Amandaland festive special at her brother’s house in Galway.
“By the time it was finished, it was just me and my mam. Everybody had got up and walked away! I was, like, okay, great leveller.”
With its cast of children now in their teens, Amandaland swaps the school gates of Motherland for the football-pitch sidelines, meaning that Anne remains further along the parenting journey than Dunne herself.
“I did have a bit of imposter syndrome on Motherland because I was like, what is all this?” she says “And then I had my own child and the penny finally dropped, what the school-gate business meant. It was just, ah, right, I get what this is about now. I get the stress of it all, and the noise and the panic and the sheer volume of people all of the time.”
Philippa Dunne: ‘If I hear an audience laughing in the Gate, I know that will kick something off in me.’ Photograph: Alan Betson
Amandaland – which was co-created by Sharon Horgan and made by her production company, Merman – is poised to return to BBC One this year, with the second series, written by co-creator Holly Walsh and Laurence Rickard, already completed.
When Dunne was on set filming the Christmas episode with Joanna Lumley, who plays Amanda’s mother, Felicity, and guest-star Jennifer Saunders, she tried to “absorb every single second” of it, she says.
Then she “did the really cringey thing” of asking the reunited Absolutely Fabulous pair for a picture together, because she wants to remember, in years to come, that she really did get to work with them.
“And they’re very sound, very normal, lovely women, so it was just a pleasure.”
She wants to keep diversifying, keep pushing herself, and work with as many different people as she can. She foresees more live comedy in her future, if only because the gratification of an instant audience response can be addictive.
“If I hear an audience laughing in the Gate, I know that will kick something off in me and I’ll need to keep hearing that.”
She’s also keen to keep working as long as possible.
“If I can work into my 80s, into my 90s, I will. I come from a long line of women who live into their 100s. I don’t know if I’ll be working in my 100s, but you’ll have to force me out of the job.”
Eureka Day is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, January 30th-March 7th. Amandaland is on RTÉ Player