An Exclusive Look at ‘Bad Sisters’ Season 2: Sharon Horgan Talks Life After Being Pricked
Going deep inside ourselves is Horgan’s specialty, honed on shows like Disaster And Mother Earth. Sorrow goes hand in hand with joy in Bad sister, had a wedding and a funeral. She felt she had something to share on the subject. Midway through the season, her father passed away. “It was an incredible thing to go through. The last place I wanted to be was work, but at the same time, it really, really helped me,” Horgan says. “Any storyteller will tell you that when you get to that stage in your life, it’s just a part of your life, so it becomes a part of the stories you want to tell.”
Personal experience also inspired one of Eva’s 50-year-old stories this season: her consultation with a menopause specialist. (“Is that real?” Angelica exclaims when introduced to her. “It sounds like makeup!”) “I have one, but she’s not fit “Menopause coach,” Horgan admits with a chuckle. “No one really delves into that too much. And for me, that was important to Eva’s story, and the idea that she’s closed herself off a little bit from love. But she’s a woman with some disposable income and, like, why wouldn’t you ask someone for help with the sweat and the emotional trauma?”
Learning more about menopause and how it changed her body “made a huge difference in my life, so I wanted to bring that in in some way,” she continues. “There’s a lot of things, story-wise, that I wanted to talk about through these sisters. But in a show like this, the suspense is what really drives it. And so the other stories add color and three-dimensionality to the characters.”
Much of the fun of the first season was watching the sisters bond and bicker loudly. To the outside world, they looked like “a gang,” as one of the neighbors called them. Horgan was worried that they might not have enough group scenes this time around, but the reality was that they had to cut some scenes. “It wasn’t like Sex in the City—we don’t always just meet for lunch!” Instead, the writers lean into smaller groupings. Bibi and Becka might go on a spy mission together, or Ursula and Eva might share an emotional moment. Some of the sisters also have love interests to balance things out, including Bibi’s wife Nora (Yasmine Akram), Becka’s new boyfriend is Joe (Peter Claffey) and her ex, Matt (Daryl McCormack).
