Lola Petticrew was in their parents’ house in Ballymurphy on the May afternoon in 2021 when the word came through. Justice Siobhán 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 “entirely innocent” 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.
“I cried my eyes out,” Petticrew says.
“We 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.”
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 feral sister in Shadows, and they would soon sign on for a part in She Said, an acclaimed drama chronicling the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal. But the role that announced them (Petticrew uses they/them pronouns) – that steely, ethereal performance as the republican paramilitary Dolours Price in Say Nothing – was still in the future.
Now Channel 4 is set to release Trespasses, a five-part drama of Louise Kennedy’s novel, 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’s an age gap, the religious and class divide, and other complications. It’s 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’s 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’s relationships with her alcoholic mother (Gillian Anderson), her lover (Tom Cullen) and the McGeown family, whom she tries to protect from engulfing sectarian hatred.
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’s a triumph.
“I think we managed to pull it off. I hope we did,” they say.
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’t compete with Belfast. Nowhere can.
“I’m a terrible homebird,” they confess, nodding at the absurdity of complaining about a six-month television drama assignment in New York.
“I just would love to be at home putting up Christmas decorations. I’ll get back just before Christmas. I’ll 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 – the lights and the smells and everyone in the pubs and the doors are all open and you can hear everyone and ... ”
Their voice tails off. And instead, you’re stuck in stupid New York.
“Which is also really beautiful. But it’s not quite Belfast.”
Petticrew bursts out laughing. They are frequently described as one of the North’s “Ceasefire Babies”, born in 1995. It’s 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 – many of the traits Petticrew has poured into both performances – have carried through the 30 years since the ceasefire. Hence Petticrew’s 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.
“I 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 ‘history’. But it’s 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’d be running in and out of each other’s houses. I remember the community got a massive pool one year and all the kids would jump into it. Féile! Barbecues! It was truly my favourite place.”
I’m nonbinary and bisexual and I live somewhere in the sphere of it all and not anywhere really rigid. Rigidity doesn’t help us
— Lola Petticrew
Petticrew puts animation and energy into everything they talk about, in that west Belfast singsong accent. There’s 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 – those searing performances, a Bafta nomination, a week at the Emmys – is attributable to an unlikely series of events. First the willingness of their parents to find the money that wasn’t really there for drama class. Then their childhood friend Anthony Boyle (riveting as Brendan “The Dark” Hughes in Say Nothing, and more recently as Arthur Guinness in House of Guinness on Netflix) cajoled his faculty teachers at Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama into giving Petticrew an audition – 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 “Nordie”.
“Being 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’s 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’m 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 – and I would be thinking, Lads, how do ye not know? You are a hop, skip and jump from Belfast.”
For the photo shoot for this article, Petticrew had a T-shirt custom-made with the words “1/3 children in West Belfast live in poverty”. The statistic enrages Petticrew.
“One 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’ve 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 – 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’t care less. They call it a peace process. It makes me want to laugh and makes me want to cry because it doesn’t feel like there was much of a process. We didn’t have a truth and reconciliation process, like in apartheid South Africa – people being able to talk and say what happened. It was like: it’s done now. Everybody be quiet. It’s over.”
The Petticrew house wasn’t 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, Sinéad O’Connor, 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.
“The police would come into the estate in their big jeeps and do doughnuts and call us ‘rats’ in an attempt to egg us on. And it was kids they were targeting.”
Petticrew’s parents were west Belfast kids: their mum had Lola, the eldest of three, young. “They weren’t terribly educated in the formal sense, but they were creative people.” One time the Petticrew children were sat down one Christmas by their dad, who told them Santa was finding it tough “to get to all the houses”. He might not make it down the street. Lola, the eldest, absorbed the message behind the message.
When all these men went to jail and were on the run, it was the women who made west Belfast tick
— Lola Petticrew
“I remember talking to Anthony Boyle about it and he said something similar. There were a lot of people growing up where Santa didn’t 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 – that’s what she said – when she was a kid. Because she didn’t get. And she worked hard to be a good girl.”
If admirers of Petticrew’s turn as Dolours Price want to know the source of the torrents of repressed emotion in the performance, it’s 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 and Boyle.
“He was like, ‘Look at the careers you have!’” they say, eyes widening in indignation.
“Is 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’m doing – at all. For every me or Kneecap, there’s 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’d tell you to f**k off. And rightly so.”
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’d share stories buried for decades. Petticrew is careful to stress that the portrait of Dolours Price is just an interpretation.
“There was Dolours in real life, the Dolours in Patrick [Radden-Keefe]’s book and then the Dolours on the script that I did. And that’s the part I was in charge of. I think that’s where it works best, when you allow those things to dance in the grey areas and you can have deeper, more meaningful conversations.”
[ Dolours Price: ‘Her name is Latin for sorrow. That describes her life’Opens in new window ]
But Price’s life experience stayed with Petticrew. Both are past pupils of St Dominic’s Grammar School for girls, on the Falls Road – as is former president of Ireland Mary McAleese. You don’t simply shed the spirit of a character of that complexity when the final scene is called. Boyle remains their soul mate – they play spouses in Clio Barnard’s upcoming film adaptation of Keiran Goddard’s novel I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.
“Which is hilarious.”
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.
“He is so talented. And to make people make TikTok videos about how hot the ’tache is. Like I can’t believe the Provie ’tache is trending on TikTok! I think people were particularly haunted in Say Nothing by Brendan Hughes. He’s this revolutionary loved by everyone in the community. And there’s a mural of him. And then he’s sitting in that flat, drinking whiskey, no money, no nothing. I think there’s a sense that people of that generation – they almost stay the age they were then.”
As a project, I See Buildings was loyal to Petticrew’s 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’s touchstones. Watching Vicki McClure in the closing scenes of This Is England ’88 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’s dream role would be to play Sinéad O’Connor, a childhood idol.
“Whether or not that ever happens, she’s 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. Sinéad wasn’t that. I was so drawn to her.”
To protect yourself artistically, it is best to keep yourself out of ... the shite
— Lola Petticrew
Petticrew was in a pub in London with the Say Nothing crew when news filtered in that O’Connor had died. They took themselves off the bathroom and cried. If O’Connor’s 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.
“I’m nonbinary and bisexual and I live somewhere in the sphere of it all and not anywhere really rigid. I suppose that’s the lens through which I see life. Rigidity doesn’t help us. That label of a ‘queer film’ or a ‘queer TV’ show – all of that stuff is the marketing of things anyway, isn’t 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?”
There is a touch of contempt in the way Petticrew says the word “brand”. 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’t take a great stretch to see how they could become a ringer for Sinéad O’Connor.
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 ...
“Chutzpah,” Petticrew declares. “Yeah. I think that is true to a lot of women I grew up with in the North. It’s 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’t. 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.”
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.
“I 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’s 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’ll 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’ve 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?
“I just want to do projects that I am passionate about. I think there’s a want for me to be a little bit more quiet about things I believe in – shut up, smile, wave, wear pretty clothes and promote the thing. But it’s just not for me.”
By 5pm, it’s 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.
Trespasses starts on Channel 4 on Sunday at 9pm
