Irish actor Fiona Shaw received her first two Emmy nominations in 2019 – in the categories of Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her role in Killing Eve, and Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her role in Fleabag.
The two performances were the result of a fruitful creative relationship with producer and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who she describes as the “daughter I wish I’d had”.
Speaking on The Irish Times Women’s Podcast, Shaw says that the Fleabag and Killing Eve creator is a “person who is full of life. She’s got much more confidence than I would ever have had at that age”.
Shaw first worked with Waller-Bridge on her smash hit spy thriller Killing Eve in 2018 and tells podcast presenter Kathy Sheridan that the English star is, “really something else”.
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The screenwriter had seen Shaw’s critically acclaimed performance in The Abbey’s Medea and sought the actor out to play the role of Carolyn Martens, the resourceful head of the Russia Desk at MI6 on Killing Eve.
“Phoebe Waller-Bridge took me to lunch and asked me if I would do Killing Eve. And I can honestly tell you, when I read Killing Eve, I just thought, this is very strange. I don’t know what it is. I thought, ‘Is it funny? Maybe it’s serious’”.
The pair collaborated again on Waller-Bridge’s tragicomedy Fleabag.
However, the role almost didn’t happen, and only came about because the filming of Fleabag ran over which meant the Harry Potter star was available to do the role.
“I was in the middle of doing Cendrillion at Glyndebourne, and I was directing it, and it’s a huge opera and I said, ‘I can’t do anything in your Fleabag, I just can’t’. And then weirdly, Christmas came and went, and she said, ‘We’ve overrun’.”
Shaw particularly praised the screenwriter’s ability to rewrite scenes while starring in them, adding, “she can spin plates like nobody else”.
The Cork star also discussed her latest film, Park Avenue, which features a fraught mother-daughter dynamic.
In the film, Shaw bares all with a nude scene, of which she says she didn’t mind doing.
“The team on it was quite a small team,” she says praising director Gaby Dellal and producer Diana Phillips.
She goes on to say, “When you work with good people, as with these two, you do anything for them.
“You don’t feel you’re exposing anything that you will regret. You’re just enjoying being the human they need you to be for that”.
You can listen back to the conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
