We are living in the golden age of media inspired by and reckoning with the Conflict or The Troubles of Northern Ireland. Trespasses is the latest offering in the genre. Speaking exclusively to Gillian Anderson about her role in the series, it becomes clear that Trespasses is less about the spectacle of conflict and more about how it quietly seeped into the fabric of everyday life.
“I appreciated how the Troubles were not the main character but that they affected every single person every minute of every day,” Gillian says of the impact that period had on the people of the time and the people in the story. “As Claire Keegan once said, ‘the private consequences of public events’.”
My parents were born in the North of Ireland, legal name Northern Ireland. I spent most of my Easter and summer holidays in my Granny’s and Granddad’s house outside Larne in County Antrim. I remember driving past the invisible border from the south to the north. The signposts would change in colour, town names written in Irish would disappear, and as we got older, our mobile phones would send an alert that we had changed carrier to one from the UK. Although the soldiers went away with the Good Friday Agreement, the memories and prejudices remained.
Pictured: Gina Lavery (Gillian Anderson)
While I was growing up, my mother didn’t share too much about her childhood. But some stories slipped through. She lived in a Protestant area. She attended a boarding school in Ballycastle, a town of two sides, strongly Protestant and Catholic. When she took a bus home on a Friday, she and her classmates were berated and teased for their religion. The church, beside my mother’s home, was bombed. While at a house party during her college years in Belfast, Mum noticed bullet holes in the walls. She also nonchalantly mentioned how she and her friends accepted roads being closed because there was some kind of incident.
But the Conflict was never black and white. Many families, including my own, have both Protestants and Catholics; many convert for love and marriage. Likewise, Trespasses investigates how politics and personal life cannot be kept apart.
“The novel shows how impossible it is to keep the personal and political separate,” says Gillian. “And that love can be a form of resistance by refusing to let conflict dictate every aspect of life.”
As Gillian says, it’s impossible to live in a place without being imbued by it. The people, artists, writers, and creatives who lived through The Troubles, and their children, were influenced by it. Now, we are living in a golden age of television and film about that era.
Lisa Magee’s Derry Girls is a semi-autobiographical series inspired by her childhood growing up in Derry in the 1990s. One my mother calls “fantastic” and uncannily accurate to her own life’s experience. Kenneth Branagh’s Academy Award-winning film Belfast (2021) is likewise inspired by his youth. He’s described it as his “most personal” film.
Pictured: Gerry Harkin (Oisin Thompson) and Cushla Lavery (Lola Petticrew)
Apple TV+’s Say Nothing portrays the true story of one of the “disappeared”, people who were taken and presumably killed by the Irish Republican Army, specifically Jean McConville, a mother of ten taken from her Belfast home by the IRA in 1972. It depicted real-life people, including IRA militants Dolours Price and her sister Marian Price, as well as IRA member Brendan Hughes and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, who was in court in 2026 for his involvement in the IRA, something he continues to deny.
The latest media in this genre is Trespasses, available now to stream on SBS On Demand and starring Gillian Anderson and Lola Petticrew (who also starred in Say Nothing).
Trespasses centres on Cushla (Lola Petticrew), a teacher in 1970s Northern Ireland who lives with her mother, Gina, played by Gillian Anderson. It follows Cushla as she embarks on an illicit affair with a married man, who is a Protestant lawyer who sometimes defends “some of our lot”, says Gillian’s character in the premiere episode – meaning Catholics.
Trespasses is based on the debut novel (of the same name) by Louise Kennedy. It is Louise’s first novel at the age of 55.
“I met Louise well before it was published,” says Gillian.
Gillian Anderson as Gina. Credit Wildgaze Film and All3media International.
“Louise refers to Gina as a ‘glorious wreck’,” Gillian says of her character in the show. “There are similarities between her and Blanche Dubois, whom I had the pleasure of playing, but her flavour of self-pity, resentment and grief is the same but different, and I was curious to explore that with the Troubles as a backdrop.”
She also admits that she read the book long before it was adapted, and it shaped how she approached the role.
“I guess because I had been a fan of the book and Gina before I knew I might be offered the role, so she had already formed a strong character in my mind, and so my work felt like it was, as much as anything, figuring out how to bring to life what was already in my system.”
Beyond the Conflict, Gina is dealing with a personal battle: alcoholism. It’s a battle which Gillian took on with gusto.
“Gina’s attempt to quit drinking and how it reveals all the best and noble aspects of her personality that have been obscured by the drink, not least what a good mother she can be.”
In revisiting this era, Trespasses doesn’t attempt to retell history in sweeping terms. Instead, it focuses on the small, deeply human moments, the relationships, compromises, and contradictions that defined life during the Troubles.
Watch Trespasses for free on SBS On Demand now.
Orlaith Costello
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