'Say Nothing' creator didn't what to let down Belfast stars Anthony Boyle, Lola Petticrew in the Troubles show

Based on the bestselling 2018 novel by Patrick Radden Keefe, the FX show Say Nothing (on Hulu in the U.S., Disney+ in Canada) takes us to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the conflict between Protestant loyalists, and Catholic nationalists who wanted Northern Ireland to break free from British rule. Starring Lola Petticrew, Hazel Doupe, Maxine Peake, Anthony Boyle, Josh Finan and Judith Roddy, the story is focused on two women, Dolours Price and Jean McConville, connected by this moment when McConville was kidnapped by Irish Republican Army (IRA) members in 1972.

The setup for the series is that Dolours Price (played by Maxine Peake at this point in the series) is giving her testimony for the Belfast Project, an oral history of the Troubles collected by researchers from Boston College. As Dolours is talking about her involvement in the IRA, the series jumps around in time, spanning 40 years, going back to when Dolours (the younger version played by Lola Petticrew) and her sister, Marian Price (Hazel Doupe), joined the IRA.

The sisters weren't particularly happy with the restrictions around how involved women were in the IRA, so they pushed to be more active participants in the robberies and bombing that took place. Gerry Adams, played by Finan, is leading the charge in a lot of these attacks, but as the disclaimer in each episode reads, the real Gerry continues to deny that he was a member of the IRA.

Dolours famously led a car bombing attack in London, at the Old Bailey Courthouse, in 1973, with more than 200 people injured. She was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport, along with her sister, being sent to an all-male prison. When they arrived they went on a hunger strike, demanding to serve their sentences in an Irish prison.

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'Unprocessed trauma' from the Troubles

With so much rich storytelling in Radden Keefe's novel, the show's creator Josh Zetumer had a lot to work with to crafting this series.

"It's gripping, it's suspenseful, it's emotional, it's got vivid characters with real psychological depth, and I think for me, a huge part of it was you have so many characters with unprocessed trauma," Zetumer told Yahoo Canada.

"You have characters who are trying to speak about ... terrible things that have happened during this conflict, both the perpetrators and the victims. And this idea of silence and the sort of destructive power of silence, the idea that you want to talk. You want to be able to process your trauma, and the IRA and sort of society at large is telling you, you can't speak. You can't process your trauma. ... I grew up with therapist parents and so this idea of unprocessed trauma was something that was really close to my heart."

Radden Keefe was involved in the series, regularly in the writers room, and wanted to ensure that the series stayed "true to the emotional truth and the historical truth." Additionally, it was crucial for him to have Irish actors involved it the project.

"I'm American. I'm an outsider. It's an American studio. It's an American screenwriter. But I think there are advantages to being an outsider when you tell a story like this," Radden Keefe said. "If you're going to do it though, you have to do it in a way that feels very authentic."

"I really wanted a cast that was mostly Irish. I didn't want English people or Americans, for that matter, pretending to be Northern Irish. And we felt as though the more people who are involved who have skin of the game, who have family in this place, who really know this kind of experience, the better. So to have people like Lola and Anthony there on set every day, embodying these people, it becomes a kind of a check on you. Because you realize that nobody has more at stake, in a way, than they do in getting this story right, because it's their story."

Both Petticrew and Boyle's families are from Belfast, so they had a particular connection to the series.

"My parents and Anthony's parents and our grandparents, that was their lived reality," Petticrew said during a virtual press conference ahead of the show's release. "So any sort of story that they have about their childhood or growing up or young adulthood is in that time."

"I think that's why, for Anthony and me, it felt equal parts scary and also equal parts incredibly special ... It's dealing with the questions, things like intergenerational trauma and how we heal, and it has all the big questions that we as young adults from Belfast find ourselves with now, about moving on and truth and reconciliation, and justice. But for our parents, this was their lives."

Zetumer also stressed that it was important to not let down anyone who's particularly invested in the reality of the Troubles and the resulting impacts on generations of families from Northern Ireland.

"Lola and Anthony, in particular, probably have more skin in the game than anyone," Zetumer said. "I think all of us on board, we really just wanted to do temperature reads and make sure that everybody felt comfortable with everything that was being portrayed on screen."

"They lived there. I needed them to be able to walk through Belfast, their heads held high, being proud of what they'd done. I feel the same way about our incredible director, Mike Lennox. ... A huge part of it is just not wanting to let those people down because they're closer to the story than anyone."

'Intimate,' 'intense' and 'claustrophobic' prison episode

While much of the series really effectively navigates several different characters involved with or connected to the IRA, Episode 6 is a particular highlight, which is when Dolours and Marian are in prison and went on a hunger strike, eventually being force fed by the prison to ensure they wouldn't die.

As Zetumer explained, the script came from writer Clare Barron, who could really "get under the skin" of the characters. It's directed by Alice Seabright, who only worked on that one episode in the series, tasked with managing this emotionally and physically demanding part of the story.

"The script, it was a hard read, and aptly, because the experience was so traumatic for everybody involved and Alice was able to juggle this really difficult, demanding shoot and maintain this incredible attitude," Zetumer said. "She was doing movement exercises with the actors. She ran it almost like a repertory theatre company for that one episode, and everybody had so much respect for her. And so much respect for the way that she never let the challenges of the episode, or how dark the material was, affect the work environment, or anybody's attitude."

"And she and [director of photographer] Kanamé Onoyama, who everybody should know about because he's absolutely incredible, they had such an intimate relationship with the actors. ... If you look at those force feeding sequences, the camera is right there and you were just right in it with them. And the result is that you get this story where the aperture is narrowed so tightly on the sisters and the camera is so close, you really have this sort of intimate and visceral episode that's not really like any of the other episodes in the show. I think everybody in the end is really proud of it and hopes that we're honouring the story of what happened."

Disney+

Watch Say Nothing

Watch Say Nothing on Disney+ with plans starting at $8.99/month

$9 at Disney+

Radden Keefe added in a separate interview that there was always the notion that Episode 6 would be the moment where the only point of view was these sisters, which differs greatly from the rest of the series.

"It's kind of unique in the series, because it's not servicing multiple different stories," he said. "We wanted it to feel intimate, even claustrophobic, and that you would sort of be there in their space, and the kind of horror of what they were doing to themselves."

"And the shoot for that, I was there, was very intense. We filmed in ... an empty prison wing and every day Lola and Hazel were coming in, and I think it was a deeply emotional experience for them, and I think it translates on screen. Both in terms of what they were going through and the sort of defiance of what they were doing, but also in terms of their relationship with one another, the degree to which the sisters were kind of a lifeline for each other."

'A lot of the history is often filtered through people's perceptions'

A core element in the series, something that was maintained from Radden Keefe's novel, is an intimate exploration of these people where no one is really being labelled as purely a villain or a hero. It's that complexity that makes Say Nothing stand out from other depictions of the Troubles.

"The Troubles is one of those subjects that's very vexed and you have partisans on both sides, and I think a lot of the history is often filtered through people's perceptions," Radden Keefe said. "To me, a lot of the different accounts of these types of people are quite caricature-ish. You have, on the one hand, people who think that they're heroes, on the other, people who think that they're villains."

"I'm not interested in those kinds of two-dimensional caricatures. I'm interested in real stories in which you come to understand somebody in intimate enough terms that you maybe understand their motivations, but then also you can look in an unblinking way at the horrible things that they do. It's not that you're absolutely suspending judgment in the sense that you're kind of covering up the bad things they do, it's that you see them with an open mind, hopefully, in all their complexity."