Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee walked the red carpet in Belfast this week for the premiere of her new show, How to Get to Belfast from Heaven.
While most people know her from her comedy writing chops in her incredibly successful Derry Girls, she admits that she always saw herself going down a different path.
Speaking to VIP Magazine on the red carpet, she reminisced about where her teenage self saw her.
“All I ever wanted to do was write,” she confesses. “I did think I’d be like Jessica Fletcher writing really successful novels and solving murders on the side.”
She jokes her younger self “might be disappointed” that she isn’t fulfilling that aspect of her dreams.
Of course, she tells us that she’s “so grateful if people think of me as a comedy writer, and they’re not just saying ‘Oh she’s not funny.'”.
“I love comedy, and there’s a lot of comedy in this [show], but I also love mystery, and that’s always been the big ambition for me personally, to write a murder mystery or something like that.”
Teasing as what I can expect from the new series, she says that she is “doing it my way”.
“It’ll be very Irish, very ridiculous, and very female-led,” she says.
She jokes that she feels like she has been working on this show for “both an eternity and five minutes”.
She says: “I started writing it during the prep for Derry Girls season three so I kind of shelved it and came back to it after that was all done.
“I had the idea a long time ago, wrote the pilot a long time ago, then brought it out and wrote the rest of it about maybe two years ago.”
The synopsis for her new Netflix series reads: “Clever, chaotic TV writer Saoirse, glamorous, stressed-out mother of three Robyn, and dependable, inhibited carer Dara have been a tight-knit group since school. Now in their late 30s, but still as close as ever, these three friends are about to embark on the most thrilling adventure of their lives.
“When an email arrives, telling them about the death of the estranged fourth member of their childhood gang, a series of eerie events at her wake set them on a dark, dangerous and hilarious odyssey through Ireland and beyond as each tries to piece together the truth of the past. A show about friendship, memory and what happens when life doesn’t turn out quite like you’d expected.”
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast drops on Netflix on February 12th
