Victoria Smurfit can rival (no pun intended) her onscreen counterpart Maude O’Hara when it comes to being glamorous.
But she’s much nicer than Maude! She’s all smiles as she walks the IFTA red carpet.
And she’s beaming when VIP Magazine catches up with her on the night.
Of course, we have to ask her about Rivals season two and she teases what we can expect.
“Rivals season two starts shooting soon. We should hopefully have some more fun, I have asked if I can ride an elephant or giraffe after riding the camel, but I’m not sure if they’re going to go down that route,” she tells us.
She stars alongside Aidan Turner as Irish characters Maude and Declan O’Hara and while she loves playing an Irish character, she admits it’s “not something you think about” when choosing roles.
“It’s not something you think about, you just get on and do what’s written on the page. Thankfully Dame Jilly Cooper [the author of Rivals] is a huge fan of the Irish and a huge fan of horses and those two things go together incredibly well,” she enthuses.
“She’s also a huge fan of writing incredibly complicated, delicious relationships. So myself and Aidan Turner have the luxurious position of playing the O’Haras and it was a great time. It is lovely to go to work in your own voice.”
Her on-screen mother daughter relationship is definitely not accurate to how close she and her daughters, Evie and Ridley, are in real life. She’s such a doting mother.
“My real life daughter told me that all her friends come up to her and say, ‘Are you telling me that Maude is your mother? I’m so sorry!’ And she has to go, ‘She’s not actually like that!’,” she laughs as she discusses how cruel Maude can be.
“I hugged Bella [Maclean], who played Taggie, at the end of every scene. I was mean!”
But very glamorous, we remind her!
“I’m not sure if it’s okay to mean if you’re glamorous. But it’s slightly better!” she laughs.
We can’t wait to see what Maude and Declan get up to in season two!
