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Vogue

Say Nothing Has No Easy Answers

By: Chloe Schama

November 15, 2024

To call a book “cinematic” has become cliché, but every so often, one comes along that you can so clearly see projected onto the screen, you are almost casting characters and setting up locations in your head while you’re reading. Patrick Raden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory is one example. When I read it for the first time, soon after it came out in 2018, I knew little of the so-called Troubles—the period of Irish history characterized by a guerilla war between the IRA and the British government that played out on the streets of Belfast—apart from what I mistily recalled from a college history class. And yet I was transported to the churches and chip shops of Northern Ireland, the housing estates and smoky pubs. It is a remarkably brilliant and evocative book—narrative storytelling at its best.

And so it was no surprise that FX planned to adapt the book for a series that is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. The series tells parallel stories: On the one hand, there are the protagonists of Dolours and Marian Price, sisters who were raised by their republican nationalist parents. (Their aunt Bridie even lost her hands and eyes in an earlier bombing incident and floats ineptly through their house, not as an object of pity but of worthy sacrifice.) Upset at the mistreatment of their family and friends and frankly a bit bored by their lackluster prospects, the girls—and they are in their teens when the story begins—fall in with the IRA, taking on increasingly prominent roles within the organization.

Though the series is driven forward by the sisters’ exploits, they are juxtaposed with the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widowed mother of 10 who disappeared one evening in 1972, leaving her children left to wonder for more than two decades what had happened to their ma. She was abducted by a gang of men and women from the apartment they all shared in a housing estate known as Divis Flats, a vast, bleak building (Keefe calls it “a nightmare from an Escher drawing”) where the neighbors were always watching each other, and not always kindly. Someone had not liked what they thought McConville was doing, and so she was tagged a “tout”—that is, someone who was passing information to the British. The series toggles back and forth between the sisters’ crimes and adventures and the plight of McConville’s children, left in an unwelcoming environment with no one to help them. The two stories work in tandem to depict the impossible calculations of this kind of war, in which there are often no good choices and people make decisions they may regret for the rest of their lives. Yet the almost miraculous feat of both the book and the series is that while terrible things occur in almost every episode, there is also no real bad guy.

The nine episodes move from the 1970s to the early 2000s, when a narrative-history endeavor called The Belfast Project began to gather testimonials from many of the people who had central roles in the guerilla struggles. Many writers take a hands-off approach to the adaptation of their work, but Keefe felt, as he told me, that he had to play a “sort of custodial role with the book and these stories” in the adaptation process. He took a role as an executive producer and embarked on an experience he describes as essentially “going to producing school” to make the series.

“I was always interested in the radicalism of youth and the kinds of decisions you make in your teens and early 20s when you’re really on the vanguard of radical politics, and you see injustice in the world and you’re thinking, What is the best way to change it?” says Keefe. “And then I was always interested in, what does that look like as you get older? What happens if you become middle-aged, circumstances on the ground change, and you look back?”

Keefe sat down with me and Hazel Doupe, the 22-year-old actor who, along with Lola Petticrew, is one of the stars of the show, playing Marian (Doupe) and Dolours (Petticrew). Petticrew is currently filming the adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s novel Trespasses; they spoke to me later from Belfast.

For the actors, both of whom are Irish, Say Nothing was intensely personal. “I remember being in the car and listening on the radio to something happening in Belfast,” says Doupe, who grew up in Dublin, “and asking my parents, ‘What is happening in the north?’ And they weren’t really able to tell me because I was too young, or whatever it was. But it was kind of like this alien place. It’s mind-boggling to me now, looking back on it, that I had so little information and that we were taught so little.”

For Petticrew, who grew up and lives in Belfast, the sense of obligation to tell the stories that haven’t been fully told before was even more acute. “I remember Free Marian Price being written on the Black Mountain, near where I grew up,” they say. Though Petticrew was a “ceasefire baby,” born just after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, the Troubles were the backdrop to everything their parents told them about their lives and experiences: “Going out to the shop to get milk or bread or going to school in the morning or going to work, you were being stopped and searched or you were being shot at,” Petticrew explains. Bomb scares continued to be “incredibly normal” even into the actor’s childhood. “If there was a bomb scare, I wasn’t like, oh my gosh, this is really scary,” they say. “I was like, oh, the buses are going to be off.”

The show is a drama—and of the most compelling variety—but like the careful reporting that inspired it, it was made with a devotion to honoring the nuanced experiences it depicts. “We wanted to make something as authentic as possible,” says Keefe. “We did not want this to seem like a bunch of Shakespearean actors from England were coming in and putting on bad accents. And so it was important to have—it didn’t have to be everybody in the cast—but a kind of critical mass of people who were from there.” Keefe says that the camera operator spoke Irish, and so he was their first quality-control check when it came to any snippets of the language that made it onscreen. Anthony Boyle, the extremely compelling and charismatic actor who plays the young Brendan Hughes, a commanding officer of the IRA who was known as the Dark, is also from Belfast. He showed a scene to his parents in which a house is raided and, as Keefe tells it, had to pause because it painfully touched upon their own memories of that era.

Perhaps the most affecting part of the series takes place when the Price sisters, having been convicted of planting a bomb outside the Old Bailey in London that wounded 200 people, are sent to an all-male prison in England. They ask to be transported to a women’s prison in Ireland, and when their request is denied they go on hunger strike. It’s a brutal episode, laying bare complicated ethical calculations in which there is no good answer and depicting, in what feels like a very realistic way, just what force-feeding entails. “Sometimes your body doesn’t quite catch up with your brain,” says Petticrew of the days after the filming of those challenging scenes, “and it holds onto stuff in a way. Going through that was really hard, but I felt like it was really necessary. I feel like it really hammers home not only the age of these young women, but that they were vulnerable and young and lost and brave.”

Yet there is a lot of joy in the show, as well—not just in the vivacious figures cut by the young sisters and the camaraderie and love that emanates from the characters, but also in the fact of it being made at all. Petticrew grew up with Boyle, performing in the same theater troupe when they were children, and so it’s been a lark for them to be involved in this project together. But more importantly, Petticrew recognizes both the burden and the honor of making the show. “I felt a massive responsibility on my shoulders, as somebody who’s from here and who loves West Belfast and loves the people in West Belfast and really wanted to do right by them,” they say. “In a way, the whole making of the thing was really joyful because I felt like this perspective was not something that has been seen before.”