Sharon Horgan opens up about dark humour, ageing and inspiration behind Youth

Sharon Horgan is a creative dynamo – a BAFTA winner whose credits include Pulling, Catastrophe, Motherland, Divorce and Bad Sisters. Now in Youth she plays a woman who is juggling the myriad demands of middle age.

So how much does she draw from her own life, are nice characters overrated – and is there anything that’s too dark to make a joke about?

Youth is about Alex, a 50-year-old divorcee who is navigating life with a teenage son and elderly parents. Why does that resonate?

It’s a very specific time, but loads of people relate because they’re living it. I’m not fixing anyone, and it doesn’t make it any easier.

But seeing it, you realise it’s okay to feel miserable that your kids aren’t doing well, or that your parents rely on you too much. And you can still go out and have fun.

It feels like a companion piece to Pulling, a riotous look at three 30-something single women, and Catastrophe, which was a portrait of a marriage. Was that the plan?

It’s a happy accident. Those three have the most connected timeline, like a diary of life’s events. And coming off Bad Sisters, having those two in my head was really useful in giving me a marker for the ratio of comedy to tragedy and for how much to pull from my life.

Do you process your own experiences through writing about them?

I wrote Pulling a good few years on from when I had lived that experience. With Catastrophe, too, I was a bit further along than the character – I had two kids but they weren’t babies. But with Youth, I was slapbang in the middle of it when I started writing – I had just come out of a long relationship and I was thinking, “I don’t know if I can do this any more”, so it took me a while to get round to properly writing the show. By then, I had processed loads of stuff, about ageing, heartbreak and past relationships, which meant I wasn’t writing with any bitterness, which is good.

Have people recognised themselves in your work?

Quite often. I didn’t use to warn anybody, until I got an email out of the blue from a girl I used to live with, and then an ex. Now if I use something connected to someone, I give them a heads-up and usually the response is lovely. A friend who’s basically Meg in Motherland finds it hilarious. It’s observational work, so it’s hard to avoid. If I was to shut my ears and eyes to everything around me, I don’t know what I’d write about.

In Youth, Alex is diagnosed with arthritis of the jaw and told by her doctor to give “no more blow jobs”...

That didn’t happen to me. With me, it’s my knees.

How easy is it mining later life for laughs?

Life gets harder and you’re much more exposed to the reality of how short life is, but I don’t know if it makes things any less funny. Even at the worst moments in my adult life I feel as if it’s always been darkly funny and I’ve always relied on that – as has my family. Apart from our childhoods, the thing that connects me with my brothers and sisters the most is that we take the piss out of each other and have a laugh.

You wrote Pulling with Dennis Kelly and Catastrophe with Rob Delaney, but you wrote Youth largely on your own. How was it different?

I had a writers’ room and some great writers took middle episodes, but a lot of it was solo. You’re in a vacuum. You don’t know if it’s funny, and there’s no co-pilot giggling beside you. It takes longer without that other brain. But I loved being my own boss, writing when I wanted and stopping when I wanted, being totally in charge of the destiny of the thing.

I miss how Dennis and Rob filled my gaps and complemented me, as I complemented them. But you find other ways to collaborate.

You’re not afraid of flawed characters. Nice is overrated, isn’t it?

You don’t want to follow someone who isn’t likeable. They can be dicks, they can make bad choices, but you’ve got to want to be on the journey with them. They can’t be monsters. They’ve got to stay human, and they’ve got to f*** up. Otherwise, where’s the funny? And what do they learn?

Alex’s relationship with her son, Ruari (Aran Murphy) is tender but unsentimental. How did you get inside a teenage boy’s head?

It took a lot of work. In the writers’ room we had younger male writers consulting on friendships, isolation, sex, being a virgin. I didn’t want a “TV kid”. The tricky bit was that he says very little, but then we cast Aran, who’s brilliant at showing an interior world. He’s awkward, insular, a smart arse. Everything a teenage boy is. I loved playing his mum.

You have seven BAFTA nominations – do you feel successful?

In some rooms, yes. In some rooms, absolutely not. I feel successful in that I’m doing what I want to do and have done consistently for years. That’s a massive thing because you have to work so hard to make those shows. Reaching a pinnacle in your career sounds terrifying because then you’d be like, “Now what?”.

Youth is available to watch on Mondays on HBO Max

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