Máiréad Tyers got her start in Disney+’s comedy superhero series, Extraordinary before moving onto Prime Video’s My Lady Jane.
And now she’s ready to become a household name in Ireland by playing Helen in The Walsh Sisters. The RTÉ series is an adaptation of Marian Keyes beloved books which follow the women of the Walsh family.
And Máiréad is aware of the books “cult following”.
“The thing with Marian’s books is they span over multiple generations. I remember the books being in my house growing up and associating them with my mum and my aunties and now obviously they’ve taken on a whole new meaning.
“It was helpful in the early stages to read the books and get a sense of the world and the family, but then I think as we got into rehearsals and Marian was there giving her input, which was fantastic, but ultimately we had to focus on the scripts we had in hand and the story that we were creating onset each day, as opposed to kind of constantly needing to check back or reference the books.
“And there is, I guess, a pressure in that we hope people like it, I hope that they’re satisfied with the world that we’ve created. But I think they will be from what I’ve seen. I think it’s very exciting.”
However, Máiréad warns that if fans of the books want a word for word recreation they will be disappointed.
“The Helen that we’ve created in the series does feel like a different Helen from the books. I think that was a conversation early on how we were going to update her to make it more modern and contemporary, because the Helen we know at this stage in her life in the books is kind of in college but isn’t really going to college but is like seeing loads of lads and you know that’s not I think the version that Stefanie wanted to make of Helen.
“She wanted to update her in a way. I didn’t have as much of a foundation that came from the books maybe as the others did even though it did feel like the scripts were our bible while we were on set, I still felt sometimes that we were all figuring Helen out together.
“So that sometimes felt like a challenge because every day I was going well ‘ Is that Helen or is that not?’, which is good because you’re still exploring the character. But sometimes I had to make blind choices and hope that they were the right ones.”
With five sisters in the Walsh family, the cast is fairly stacked Danielle Galligan plays Claire, Louisa Harland is Anna, Caroline Menton plays Rachel, Stefanie Preissner stars as Maggie and of course, Máiréad is Helen.
So how exactly did they make those strong familial and most importantly, sisterly, bonds in such a short space of time?
“A lot of the scenes in the first episode of the Walsh family lunch, we didn’t shoot that until the very end,” Máiréad explains.
“Because we just did one whole block of filming. It wasn’t split into two blocks, which is what I’ve been used to in the past. It was great because then the relationships developed that we were almost like a family after eight weeks of filming that we were nearly killing each other.”
And before we part ways with Máiréad we have to ask if the proud Cork women ever considered making Helen a Cork woman as well. Maybe she was adopted!
She laughs and shakes her head, saying: “I was buzzing to do the accent, to be fair. It’s so good. It was hard. It’s subtle. It’s a subtle difference. I don’t think I sound very Cork, even though lots of people think I do.
“It was something I was aware of and I was excited to do a Dublin accent. Being around the girls was very helpful.”
The Walsh Sisters starts on RTÉ One on Sunday night at 9:35pm