Aoife Hinds, who played Helen in the hit tv show Normal People, has opened up about the racial abuse she encountered when filming the show.
Speaking to The Sunday World, Aoife opened up about a “group of preteens” who shouted a racist slur at her while they were trying to film a scene.
She explained that her co-star Paul Mescal went to confront the teens, but her initial response was “not to bother”. “We were all just baffled,” she recounted.
“Paul started to walk towards them as they were running off. I told him not to bother as I wanted to brush it off and get back to the scene, but that was obviously a defence mechanism,” she said.
“I later regretted that and wished Paul had have gone over to them, to tell them it wasn’t OK to say those kind of things. Or better, to calmly go over to them myself. All the crew were extremely supportive, needless to say shocked, but it just goes to show how racism is ingrained in our society when kids are being brought up hearing all these kind of things.”
“It happens everywhere, it has happened to me in Madrid, in Paris, in the south of France,” she continued. “One of my friends was punched by a full-grown man in Oxford Street in London just before lockdown. There was an article in The Guardian about the amount of gun sales in the US since the start of the epidemic [sic] and how a lot are first time Asian-American buyers who fear for their safety and lives – that’s just heartbreaking and says it all.”
Aoife then added that it was “just really lovely spending an extended time in Dublin” filming Normal People “as it’s a place I have visited often since I was young”.