{"id":128404,"date":"2025-11-08T08:45:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T08:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/128404\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T08:45:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T08:45:24","slug":"new-york-is-beautiful-but-its-not-quite-belfast-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/128404\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018New York is beautiful. But it\u2019s not quite Belfast\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lola Petticrew<\/a> was in their parents\u2019 house in Ballymurphy on the May afternoon in 2021 when the word came through. Justice Siobh\u00e1n Keegan had ruled that the 10 people shot and killed by members of the British parachute regiment on the green in Ballymurphy over two shocking August days some 40 years earlier had been \u201centirely innocent\u201d of any wrongdoing. The reaction in the estate afterwards was a strange combination of joy and heartbreak released: adrenaline unbottled. The family members returned from the court, hanging out of car windows like a team victorious. Emerging from the houses, people began banging pots and bin lids off the ground. There was cheering and tears.<\/p>\n

\u201cI cried my eyes out,\u201d Petticrew says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know a lot of those families. And it has been brutal for them. My granny went out and banged the pot she banged when Bobby Sands died. It was … a beautiful day.\u201d<\/p>\n

By then Petticrew was already ascendant as a young actor building an eclectic, singular CV. They played a closeted teenager in the offbeat romantic comedy Dating Amber<\/a>, a feral sister in Shadows, and they would soon sign on for a part in She Said<\/a>, an acclaimed drama chronicling the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal. But the role that announced them (Petticrew uses they\/them pronouns) \u2013 that steely, ethereal performance as the republican paramilitary Dolours Price<\/a> in Say Nothing<\/a> \u2013 was still in the future. <\/p>\n

Now Channel 4 is set to release Trespasses, a five-part drama of Louise Kennedy\u2019s novel<\/a>, in which Petticrew plays Cushla Lavery, a bright and fiercely independent young Catholic schoolteacher trying to navigate a forbidden love affair with a Protestant barrister. There\u2019s an age gap, the religious and class divide, and other complications. It\u2019s the 1970s again, when Belfast is adrift in a poisonous fog of mistrust and killings. The show is faithful to the pacing and tone of Kennedy\u2019s novel: slow-burning with a sombre atmosphere lit by vivid flashes of humour and despair and love among people trying to make lives in a society falling asunder. The performances are exceptional, but Petticrew carries the nervous tension of the entire drama. The story revolves around Cushla\u2019s relationships with her alcoholic mother (Gillian Anderson), her lover (Tom Cullen) and the McGeown family, whom she tries to protect from engulfing sectarian hatred.<\/p>\n

Dolours Price was one of the more discussed figures of the republican movement, while Cushla Lavery is a fiction. But through both roles, Petticrew has paired two unforgettable portrayals of 1970s young Northern Irish womanhood, barging into a mythology told mainly by and for men. It\u2019s a triumph.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we managed to pull it off. I hope we did,\u201d they say.<\/p>\n

Right now, Petticrew is in New York for six months filming a drama series for Hulu loosely based on Black Widow, the Debra Winger film from 1988, along with Emily Rossum and Scoot McNairy. Petticrew plays a woman on a revenge mission after being sex-trafficked at a young age. When we meet, the appointed coffee shop in Brooklyn is packed, so we sit outside on a park bench amid the Sunday afternoon strollers and beer drinkers and chat through dwindling sunshine. Petticrew will be here until Christmas, and although New York is fabulous, they laugh and say it just can\u2019t compete with Belfast<\/a>. Nowhere can.<\/p>\n

\"SaySay Nothing: Lola Petticrew as Dolours Price. Photograph: Rob Youngson\/FX <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a terrible homebird,\u201d they confess, nodding at the absurdity of complaining about a six-month television drama assignment in New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just would love to be at home putting up Christmas decorations. I\u2019ll get back just before Christmas. I\u2019ll miss putting up the tree and putting the dog in costumes, and going to the Belfast Christmas market. I love walking around Belfast in the winter \u2013 the lights and the smells and everyone in the pubs and the doors are all open and you can hear everyone and … \u201d<\/p>\n

Their voice tails off. And instead, you\u2019re stuck in stupid New York. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhich is also really beautiful. But it\u2019s not quite Belfast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Petticrew bursts out laughing. They are frequently described as one of the North\u2019s \u201cCeasefire Babies\u201d, born in 1995. It\u2019s a dividing line that troubles them, because Belfast before and after the peace agreement cannot be two clean distinct universes. How could it? As well as the shocking legacy of violent death and torture and bombings, the stubborn continuity of human memory, loss, hurt, laughter, love and rage \u2013 many of the traits Petticrew has poured into both performances \u2013 have carried through the 30 years since the ceasefire. Hence Petticrew\u2019s tears, in Ballymurphy, for people who were shot dead a quarter century before they were born. Petticrew did not know the victims, except as vivid absences whose names floated around the estate decades after they were shot. So even as a child, Petticrew and the kids of their generation had an instinct.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I was aware my whole life. When you grow up in communities like Ballymurphy, I thought the world began and ended on the Falls Road. Even going into town seemed so far away. Maybe in the truest sense of that word, that time is \u2018history\u2019. But it\u2019s not because it permeates every sense of your life. When I talk about Ballymurphy, I light up. For me there are no people like them. I grew up with not a lot of money and there is a lot of intergenerational trauma in the west Belfast community. But people are funny. And they try to find the joy in things. There is a sense of community that I had growing up. We have massive street parties and we\u2019d be running in and out of each other\u2019s houses. I remember the community got a massive pool one year and all the kids would jump into it. F\u00e9ile! Barbecues! It was truly my favourite place.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m nonbinary and bisexual and I live somewhere in the sphere of it all and not anywhere really rigid. Rigidity doesn\u2019t help us<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Lola Petticrew<\/p>\n

Petticrew puts animation and energy into everything they talk about, in that west Belfast singsong accent. There\u2019s a warmth and mischievousness in their observations. But as the conversation turns to problems specific to west Belfast, their natural humour is accompanied by a fiery sense of injustice. As Petticrew sees it, this life they have stumbled into \u2013 those searing performances, a Bafta nomination, a week at the Emmys \u2013 is attributable to an unlikely series of events. First the willingness of their parents to find the money that wasn\u2019t really there for drama class. Then their childhood friend Anthony Boyle<\/a> (riveting as Brendan \u201cThe Dark\u201d Hughes in Say Nothing, and more recently as Arthur Guinness in House of Guinness on Netflix<\/a>) cajoled his faculty teachers at Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama into giving Petticrew an audition \u2013 after they had dithered over the application for fear of rejection. Acting propelled them from the security and boundaries of Ballymurphy through class structures that they found at once mind-blowing and alienating, with awkward conversations that made Petticrew acutely conscious of the outside perception of what it was to be a \u201cNordie\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing in drama school was a trip for a lot of reasons. I had never been around wealth before. Our idea of class is so funny. Because there were people in drama school calling themselves working class and I was like, What?! I remember going in to an ex-partner\u2019s house and thinking they were rich because they had a kitchen island. And their parents drank wine at dinner! If you talked about someone you knew being in jail, jaws would drop. Where I\u2019m from everyone knows someone who was in jail. Or bomb scares going to school. I lived in Dublin for a few years. I sometimes felt I was this thing to be wheeled out, like a circus freak. People would ask questions \u2013 and I would be thinking, Lads, how do ye not know? You are a hop, skip and jump from Belfast.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"LolaLola Petticrew in New York. Photograph: Timothy O’Connell <\/p>\n

For the photo shoot for this article, Petticrew had a T-shirt custom-made with the words \u201c1\/3 children in West Belfast live in poverty\u201d. The statistic enrages Petticrew. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne million per cent. Aye. My generation are going: okay, we see why [the peace agreement] was done. Nobody wants bombs and bullets and death and murder everywhere. But we were promised this big, bright future … Now you\u2019ve got more people dying by suicide, post ceasefire, than died during the entire war. That statistic came around 16 years after the ceasefire. Growing up in west Belfast, suicide being high in young people \u2013 I think that is political violence. It is a direct result of apathy towards people from west Belfast by the British state, who refuse to clean up their mess. From Springhill to the Shankill. At the end of the day, the British state is directly responsible for all of it and they couldn\u2019t care less. They call it a peace process. It makes me want to laugh and makes me want to cry because it doesn\u2019t feel like there was much of a process. We didn\u2019t have a truth and reconciliation process, like in apartheid South Africa \u2013 people being able to talk and say what happened. It was like: it\u2019s done now. Everybody be quiet. It\u2019s over.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Petticrew house wasn\u2019t flush but the children never wanted for anything. Petticrew describes a childhood rich with bedtime stories, with fun, with a dad who could turn his hand to playing any instrument. Artists such as The Cure, Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor, old punk tunes always on the stereo (one of the first things Petticrew did in New York was make a pilgrimage to the site of the revered and vanished live venue CBGB). For kids, Ballymurphy estate was an open house with an edge. The Police Service of Northern Ireland, formed in 2001, became the unofficial bogeymen to kids.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe police would come into the estate in their big jeeps and do doughnuts and call us \u2018rats\u2019 in an attempt to egg us on. And it was kids they were targeting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Petticrew\u2019s parents were west Belfast kids: their mum had Lola, the eldest of three, young. \u201cThey weren\u2019t terribly educated in the formal sense, but they were creative people.\u201d One time the Petticrew children were sat down one Christmas by their dad, who told them Santa was finding it tough \u201cto get to all the houses\u201d. He might not make it down the street. Lola, the eldest, absorbed the message behind the message.<\/p>\n

When all these men went to jail and were on the run, it was the women who made west Belfast tick<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Lola Petticrew<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember talking to Anthony Boyle about it and he said something similar. There were a lot of people growing up where Santa didn\u2019t quite make it. This whole naughty and nice list, that takes on a different meaning. I remember talking to my granny about it. She said she thought Santa was a c**t \u2013 that\u2019s what she said \u2013 when she was a kid. Because she didn\u2019t get. And she worked hard to be a good girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

If admirers of Petticrew\u2019s turn as Dolours Price want to know the source of the torrents of repressed emotion in the performance, it\u2019s here, in west Belfast. Not so long ago an English journalist awkwardly suggested that at least all those decades of deprivation and oppression had led to the creative burst embodied by Petticrew, Kneecap<\/a> and Boyle.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was like, \u2018Look at the careers you have!\u2019\u201d they say, eyes widening in indignation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that a good trade-off? Well, we are four or five young people from west Belfast. We are the exception to the rule. And I am not negating my hard work, but a lot of it was luck. The system is not set up for someone like me to do the things I\u2019m doing \u2013 at all. For every me or Kneecap, there\u2019s thousands of kids in west Belfast who will never have the opportunity. Kids who are talented and smart, much more talented than I, who will never be afforded the opportunity I had. If you said to your average person in Belfast: do you think all the trauma was worth it for the thriving TV and film scene here, I think they\u2019d tell you to f**k off. And rightly so.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the weeks after Say Nothing had finished filming, Petticrew fretted about what people in Belfast would think, fantasising about holing up in a cottage in Donegal until the furore had passed. As it happened, strangers would approach Petticrew and Boyle in the city centre and just talk. They\u2019d share stories buried for decades. Petticrew is careful to stress that the portrait of Dolours Price is just an interpretation.<\/p>\n

\"IrishIrish actor Lola Petticrew in New York. Photograph: Timothy O’Connell <\/p>\n

\u201cThere was Dolours in real life, the Dolours in Patrick [Radden-Keefe]\u2019s book and then the Dolours on the script that I did. And that\u2019s the part I was in charge of. I think that\u2019s where it works best, when you allow those things to dance in the grey areas and you can have deeper, more meaningful conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Dolours Price: \u2018Her name is Latin for sorrow. That describes her life\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

But Price\u2019s life experience stayed with Petticrew. Both are past pupils of St Dominic\u2019s Grammar School for girls, on the Falls Road \u2013 as is former president of Ireland Mary McAleese. You don\u2019t simply shed the spirit of a character of that complexity when the final scene is called. Boyle remains their soul mate \u2013 they play spouses in Clio Barnard\u2019s upcoming film adaptation of Keiran Goddard\u2019s novel I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich is hilarious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Petticrew is very proud of Boyle, teasing him when he wins awards and delighting when his regulation 1970s moustache began to trend on social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is so talented. And to make people make TikTok videos about how hot the \u2019tache is. Like I can\u2019t believe the Provie \u2019tache is trending on TikTok! I think people were particularly haunted in Say Nothing by Brendan Hughes<\/a>. He\u2019s this revolutionary loved by everyone in the community. And there\u2019s a mural of him. And then he\u2019s sitting in that flat, drinking whiskey, no money, no nothing. I think there\u2019s a sense that people of that generation \u2013 they almost stay the age they were then.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a project, I See Buildings was loyal to Petticrew\u2019s vision of film as art: low budget, high aspirations and involving the Birmingham community where filming took place. The work of Shane Meadows, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are Petticrew\u2019s touchstones. Watching Vicki McClure in the closing scenes of This Is England \u201988 gave them a sixth sense that acting could be a life. Los Angeles and the glittery machine of Hollywood has not turned their head. A week at the Emmys bored them stiff. Petticrew\u2019s dream role would be to play Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor, a childhood idol.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether or not that ever happens, she\u2019s my North Star. She embodied everything I wanted to be. She was righteously angry and spoke truth to power. She wore amazing f**king combat boots and had a shaved head. I grew up in an era of polished, sexualised pop stars. Sin\u00e9ad wasn\u2019t that. I was so drawn to her.\u201d<\/p>\n

To protect yourself artistically, it is best to keep yourself out of … the shite<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Lola Petticrew<\/p>\n

Petticrew was in a pub in London with the Say Nothing crew when news filtered in that O\u2019Connor had died. They took themselves off the bathroom and cried. If O\u2019Connor\u2019s music drew Petticrew in, it was surely her fearlessness that spurred on her devotion. Petticrew is an outlier in the safe, commercial savvy era of film and cinema, where the lines between art and luxury advertising are often indistinguishable.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m nonbinary and bisexual and I live somewhere in the sphere of it all and not anywhere really rigid. I suppose that\u2019s the lens through which I see life. Rigidity doesn\u2019t help us. That label of a \u2018queer film\u2019 or a \u2018queer TV\u2019 show \u2013 all of that stuff is the marketing of things anyway, isn\u2019t it? If you are interested in the story, you make it. The rest of it is marketing. Now they just want you to make TikToks and have followers and go to fashion shows and be the face of a brand. At what point can you call yourself an actor?\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a touch of contempt in the way Petticrew says the word \u201cbrand\u201d. New York is the spiritual home of the arresting billboard, and it believes in the allure of the movie star. Famous faces dominate the subway posters and hoardings. Petticrew has a chameleon-like quality: striking in appearance but with a look that is adaptable. It doesn\u2019t take a great stretch to see how they could become a ringer for Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor.<\/p>\n

\"Trespasses:Trespasses: Ois\u00edn Thompson and Lola Petticrew. Photograph: Peter Marley\/Channel 4 \"Trespasses:Trespasses: Michael Agnew (Tom Cullen) and Cushla Lavery (Lola Petticrew). Photograph: Channel 4 <\/p>\n

We chat for a while about the anticipation of waiting for the broadcast of Trespasses, and the critical reception. Petticrew is proud of the work, effusive in their praise of Anderson and their other costar, Tom Cullen, and fascinated by its depiction, through Cushla, of countless women in the North who fought everyday life with a kind of …<\/p>\n

\u201cChutzpah,\u201d Petticrew declares. \u201cYeah. I think that is true to a lot of women I grew up with in the North. It\u2019s funny. I think people see these big, hard, stoic men and I think they have a lot of pain and wish they had somewhere to go and talk about it. But they don\u2019t. And for every hard, stoic man there was always a woman behind him dishing up soup to 20 men. Those are my memories. The women getting things done and sorting things out. And when all these men went to jail and were on the run, it was the women who made west Belfast tick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if big-budget Hollywood roles are offered and Petticrew takes them on, the routine Hollywood dream of gilded seclusion in rococo mansions with Pacific views is not for them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have no interest. I want to live at home because I love it. I want to build a better future there. My family is there. It\u2019s good for my mental health. And I also think to have any longevity in this game and to protect yourself artistically, it is best to keep yourself out of … the shite. I\u2019ll be 30 this year. I used to be so afraid of birthdays, but I am so excited. I feel like I finally know myself a bit. All of that anxiety of your 20s: I know what I care about. I\u2019ve an amazing partner. I love my family. I am at an amazing place in my life. I get to do what I love, and I care what I care about and actively try to make it better. You know. What more can you ask for?<\/p>\n

\u201cI just want to do projects that I am passionate about. I think there\u2019s a want for me to be a little bit more quiet about things I believe in \u2013 shut up, smile, wave, wear pretty clothes and promote the thing. But it\u2019s just not for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 5pm, it\u2019s turning chilly and they have an early filming call. And the apartment needs cleaning. Lola Petticrew wishes you the best, offers a cheery wave and marches briskly up through the artfully designed shopfronts of Fulton Street reflecting the aspirational Brooklyn lifestyle: a streak of pure undiluted Belfast.<\/p>\n

Trespasses starts on Channel 4 on Sunday at 9pm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lola Petticrew was in their parents\u2019 house in Ballymurphy on the May afternoon in 2021 when the word…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[31264,4501,75255,75253,93,61,60,10366,75252,709,75254],"class_list":{"0":"post-128404","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-anthony-boyle","9":"tag-belfast","10":"tag-brendan-hughes","11":"tag-dolours-price","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-kneecap","16":"tag-lola-petticrew","17":"tag-magazine","18":"tag-patrick-radden-keefe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}