Caoilfhionn Dunne shares how Industry role prepped her for Lisa McGee show

Caoilfhionn Dunne is no stranger to a buzzy TV show from Love/Hate to Industry. She’s now one of the stars of Lisa McGee’s new show, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.

And of course, she tells us that the idea of working with the woman herself was one of the reasons she jumped at the role.

“Firstly Lisa McGee is a huge draw for anything because she’s just amazing. I don’t really get to do a lot of comedy, I’ve spent a lot of my career crying at strangers for money,” she tells VIP Magazine at the red carpet in Belfast.

“It’s nice to break out and do something that’s big and fun. I think making people laugh is a gift, and I think people need to laugh a bit more now than ever, I jumped at the chance to do a comedy.”

Of course, Caoilfhionn is a proud Dublin woman but you wouldn’t realise that with her pitch perfect Belfast accent in this show. But mastering the accent had her “scared”.

“It was hard, I was scared. You don’t want to be a blow in and make a mess of it, you want to do right by the people that put you there and the people who live here. You want to justify your reasons for being here. So I worked hard and I listened hard,” she explains.

“We had people from Derry on the crew, people from the country, people from London, people from Dublin. It was trying to tune in. I worked hard but then that voice just becomes the character’s voice and you’re not doing an accent you’re just doing Dara’s voice.”

She managed to use her experience from the BBC’s breakout show Industry which was quickly snapped up by HBO to keep her accent up.

“Jackie Walsh from Industry is from Belfast so I had already done it on TV. I had Conor MacNeil opposite me to listen to when I was doing that. I spent as much time just speaking in it as much as possible. Listen and repeat, listen and repeat,” she shares.

Speaking about her character, she says: “Dara is afraid a lot of the time, but also very loyal. She is one of those people who wants the best, she’s an unreal optimist. She’s kind of childlike as well in her desire for goodness. She’s conflicted as well as a religious gay woman.

“I love her, I fell more and more in love with her the more time I spent with her. She only wants good for people but she’s so stuck and so trapped. She’s the perfect mix of just being so irritatingly desperate to make everyone happy.”