In the interview with RTÉ Entertainment, Eileen Walsh revealed she was anxious that she wouldn’t be able to perform when the lights went on Small Things Like These.
Walsh is back on screen with Murphy her life-long friend and Disco Pigs theatrical co-star in a just-released adaptation of writer Claire Keegan’s bestseller with the first offering out of Murphy’s newly formed production house labelled Big Things Films.
Later, she has another runz as Eileen – the fictional wife of the character that Murphy assumes, Bill Furlong – and she is as usual outstanding.
Reflecting on the filming process of Small Things Like These in New Ross, Co Wexford, Walsh said she had the kind of pressure when going into the first day of filming the show.
“I still think that Cill had a different amount of pressure put on him because of the producing and then the Oscar,” she said to RTÉ Entertainment, “but really I was SO worried! I remember walking around with my sister the week before we started filming and I said to myself, I hope I can act?”
“This is the first time I felt it,” is a common phrase many of them used, ticking in the back of their minds while the killing went on.” That is probably what it feels like to have gone, ‘I think I’d be right for this’, then all of a sudden you go, ‘Yeah, I hope you can bring it now!’ (Sucks in air) So, scared.”
Tim Mielants directed Small Things Like These has a Magdalene Laundry in focus as Murphy’s character Bill is at a turning point in his life in December 1985.
However, Walsh noted when it comes to portraying the women of the Magdalene Laundries and their children, then it is impossible to go overboard with the drama: ‘‘We can’t do all that trauma you know, we can’t,’’ he said.
But what you can do is pull down into, ‘What does it mean to this story, this couple, this man right now?’ and then if you play that right then you move up and get the history that follows it in. Otherwise it would be drowned like in expectation.”
Just like Murphy, real-life narratives of Magdalene Laundries have been approaching Walsh since she started writing Small Things Like Things. She had a role in one of the young women for Peter Mullan’s film Magdalene Sisters, which was produced in 2002.
‘The other day I was taking my dog for a walk in London, and I happened to run into a man who was the son of the woman who wrote this book that’s called The Light in the Window’, she continued.
[She was] A midwife who penned the to having to work for Magdalene [Laundry] as a midwife obviously and assist the girls to deliver.
‘And I just thought, Oh my God up in Scrubs, Wormwood Scrubs, there’s open space in Old Oak Common, west London and here I am and I meet the son of her’. That seems rather stunning in terms of the number of people who have been impacted by it and are still continue to be.
