Bad Sisters Season 2 crushed our hearts when beloved Garvey sister, Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), dies in a car crash at the end of Episode 2 of the Apple TV+ hit. With the emotional moment guiding the rest of the season, executive producer and director Dearbhla Walsh, who directed the car crash episode, shared that there was “pressure” to effectively execute that shocking moment, that impacts the rest of the season.
“It was really knowing that there was going to be such a dramatic moment, there was a lot of pressure in how to do that and how it could feel real,” Walsh told Yahoo Canada. “My key approach to that…was feeling with the character and to be close to her, and so I designed the sequence all as one shot. And even though we do some cuts in it, keeping to that approach of one shot meant we had to very carefully choreograph it, what the camera was seeing, how, and when cars passed, et cetera.”
“It was probably one of the more complicated sequences I’ve ever done. … We made some very strong choices about what you would see and what you wouldn’t see, and often in action sequences people shoot everything, and then you make the decision in the edit. … So it was a risk.”
Watch Bad Sisters Season 2 on Apple TV+ with 7 days free, then $9.99/month
In terms of what was interesting in the Bad Sisters storytelling to have this tragic moment that becomes a shadow over everything the Garvey do and go through moving forward, Walsh highlighted that it gives the story “added emotional depth.”
“There’s not one of us, I think, who haven’t been touched by some tragedy in our lives, and it was amazing amongst the crew, amongst the cast themselves, how many people were able to connect with, how do you move on? And also how you’re affected by that forever,” Walsh said. “Everybody’s affected by the abuse Grace experienced in [Season 1], and the effect of ‘The Prick’ in all their lives, and then how the family unit changes after Episode 2 is affecting and effective, I think. And then the thriller plot keeps interrupting to keep propelling the story forward.”
“Everything pays off, I think, very beautifully. I still keep crying at the same couple of moments in the series, even though I’ve seen it many times.”
‘We wanted to show the brutal reality of the damage’
In a virtual press conference earlier this month, the show’s creator and star, Sharon Horgan, shared that there was a lot of thought put into Grace’s story for Season 2 of Bad Sisters.
“There’s certain things you have to do within a show to keep it compulsive and entertaining, and to give your characters an engine,” Horgan said. “If you are going to continue a show like Bad Sisters, it needs something very sort of big and propulsive to motor it.”
“It’s a tragedy. What happened to her in that first season is a tragedy. You don’t just kill the father of your daughter, and life just doesn’t sort of become rosy. And we didn’t want to fulfill that sort of idea that it can be a fairy tale. We wanted to show the brutal reality of the damage that can happen, and to try to find a way to find light at the end. They’re all together. They’re still a family who need each other.”
Horgan added that there were nerves about still being able to balance the comedy of Bad Sisters that fans have loved, with the more tragic moments in the story. But a guiding light was ensuring that the story showed the real devastation of an abusive relationship.
“I think because of the tone of the show, … there’s a lot of comedy that exists alongside the tragedy of the drama, the thriller of it, and so we were nervous that we’d be able to continue to create that tone successfully,” she said. “But I felt it was important to show the worst thing that could happen and [Grace] was, as a character, so isolated in that first season, and so much damage was done already to her. She was so vulnerable and so removed from her sisters, and had become so good at keeping secrets and lying that she was almost sort of lying to herself.”
“I think the fallout from that is, when things did go bad again, the sort of shame, the build up of that shame, and not being able to tell her sisters until it was too late, I wanted to show … how devastating that could be, and how devastating being in an abusive relationship could be. And when you’re not getting help, when the people who should be protecting you, the institutions, the police, when they’re the people that you kind of almost have to be afraid of, we wanted to show the kind of damage that could happen. … For these sisters to kind of lose everything and to want to find out what happened to her, to get the bottom of it, we needed to give them a sort of mission.”