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10 hours ago
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Casual sex. Relationships. Parenting. Sharon Horgan has already seen us through several life stages via hit comedy dramas such as Pulling, Catastrophe and Motherland.
Now, with her latest show Youth, Horgan puts the spotlight on 50-something women, imbued with her trademark tightly balanced mix of hilarity and pathos.
The HBO Max series sees Horgan's character, Alex, gamely attempting to juggle a stressful publishing career while looking after a teenage son and elderly parents. She's part of the so-called sandwich generation, those in midlife who have to juggle caring responsibilities for old and young while often working, too.
And that's not all - Alex is also back in the dating game following a divorce.
I'm curious to know how much of Youth is based on Horgan's own experience. The star is divorced and has two daughters.
"We've all got kids who are kind of adults now and parents who are getting older and ailing in some cases. There is a chunk of my life in there, an… autobiographical element for sure. But the good thing about writing autofiction is that no one really knows which bits are real and which bits aren't, I guess, except the people [in it]!"
The hit writer, producer and actress mulled over the idea for Youth before going on to make Apple TV's Bad Sisters, coming back to it after the dark comedy ended.
The 56-year-old says she was keen to "write about this particular time in a woman's life... through the lens of a mother of a son".
Horgan wanted the story to be "post-divorce and "menopause adjacent".
"And I wanted it to be a comedy, you know? Because there's a lot that's very funny about our bodies failing!"
But it's not just her comedy chops that have gained her a loyal following - a big factor in Horgan's success over the last 20 years or so is the authenticity she brings to her work.
"I spent a lot of time trying to make it as real and as accurate as possible and trying to put in my faults as a parent and mistakes as a woman, my own sort of anxieties and insecurities," she says.
"I try to put all that in there… and hope that's a universal feeling because it's really madly important to me that women, especially, watch it and see themselves reflected back."
She says that Youth "felt like the next stage on" from her popular sitcom Catastrophe.
The series, which first aired in 2015 on Channel 4, followed the lives of 40-somethings Sharon and Rob (played by Horgan and Rob Delaney), a couple who got together suddenly after their brief transatlantic fling resulted in pregnancy.
"This [show] feels part of the same trajectory, almost, which was fun and really helpful when it came to trying to figure out what the tone was, although I hope it's kind of doing its own thing," Hogan explains.
