It’s not every day that you get offered the leading role in a television series.
Roisin Gallagher knew immediately that she was going to take the “job of a lifetime” when she was offered the lead role of Shiv in The Dry.
But it wasn’t without its challenges as she was forced to leave her two young sons at home in Belfast while she spent Monday to Friday in Dublin filming.
“I had just finished feeding [my youngest son] Elon myself when we started filming,” she tells VIP Magazine ahead of the series airing on RTÉ.
“The other day he told me, ‘You don’t have any babies anymore,’ because he’s three. When we started filming, he had just started walking. This was the job of a lifetime. I had never experienced anything like this. It felt very new. It can be very alarming about everything being new.”
It must have been exhausting, we joke as we chat about the show.
“It wasn’t exhausting. It was exhilarating. Roles like Shiv don’t come along very often. It was very exciting,” she reassures us.
While her on-screen mother Pom Boyd jumps in to tell us: “We had a house in Foxrock and we had one room to be our green room, that was a back bedroom. We were all squashed around a double bed. I remember coming in one day and poor Roisin was curled up in the bed, coats over her absolutely exhausted. I had to make sure that she got her nap.”
Roisin laughs it off and tells us: “That was the day that I really, really felt it. I was coming up from Belfast and I have two little boys who were at home. I had a big coming away from home feeling. But mother Pom was at the door shushing everyone! She wouldn’t let anyone wake me up.”
The Dry airs on Wednesday at 9.35pm on RTE One and the RTE Player.