‘Bad Sisters’ Creator Sharon Horgan on Why That Season 2 Death Had to Happen

[This story contains major spoilers from the second and third episodes of Bad Sisters season two.]

The Bad Sisters fate of Grace, the eldest Garvey sister, in season two wasn’t an easy choice for creator and star Sharon Horgan. 

The idea for her — spoiler alert! — death originated in the writers room, but was initially rejected for being too grim. Ultimately, her fate played out first in fragments at the end of episode two, when Grace gets into a car crash, and then expanded on in episode three, released on Wednesday, with Grace’s funeral.

“We had the idea about what would happen but then we dropped it, because we thought, ‘I don’t know if we can continue the tone of Bad Sisters with Grace dying.’ It felt too dark,” Horgan tells The Hollywood Reporter of the back and forth around Grace’s fate. “Then we ended up going back to it because we couldn’t really see a world where all five sisters would just be on this kind of paper — the whole first season was about protecting her. Then to lose her and to want to get to the bottom of what happened, and for there to be so much to be unveiled and revealed along the way felt like there was so much to play with.” 

Horgan continues, “It felt real. It felt true to the situation that she was in. And, how do you get back from that if you’re a character like Grace, so raw and exposed? It felt like a brutal thing to do, but it felt right for the story.”

Leading up to the fatal car crash – which happens as Grace reaches around her car trying to find her lost earring and then swerves off the road – Grace had been growing increasingly frantic. After marrying newcomer Ian Reilly (Owen McDonnell) in the first episode, the police come to her home on an unrelated matter, and she confesses to Reilly that she killed her ex-husband, JP (Claes Bang). Ian disappears and her sisters begin to question whether Grace was involved in that. There’s extra pressure on Grace as more people begin to find out that she was involved in JP’s death and as Grace’s daughter Blanaid (Saise Quinn) lashes out at her mother for Ian’s disappearance. Before the crash, Grace calls Eva (played by Horgan) and pleads for her help.

Anne-Marie Duff, who plays Grace, said she found out that her character would die ahead of receiving scripts  — “I jokingly say it wasn’t like I was in a soap opera, and I was like, ‘Oh God,’” Duff tells THR. She saw the move as a “brilliant idea,” and one that made sense for her character. 

“I felt like there was such an inevitability about it for Grace, because she is such a tragic heroine, isn’t she? She is like a character in a novel. She can’t see her way out of it, and we can’t see it for her, because she’s sort of to her own detriment,” Duff says. “She just keeps doing things that will stop her from being rescued, even to the point where she pushes her sisters away and then starts having more secrets and building this fresh wall of secrets,” Duff says. “She’s so used to it. It’s become such a habit for her that she can’t not.” 

The third episode, which shows the funeral and the four remaining sisters grieving for Grace, was also an important step in the series’ storyline. 

“We met five orphans in season one. We never really go into the loss of their [parents], but death is all around them. So it really feels that you get to explore that again through Grace,” Dearbhla Walsh, director and executive producer of Bad Sisters, tells THR.

The funeral allows a moment for grief, but pressures soon remount as Ian returns and Ursula (Eva Birthistle) confesses to Angelica (Fiona Shaw) that she gave Grace drugs to help calm her down, which she fears may have led to the car crash. This leads to Angelica successfully blackmailing Ursula for €200 to fix a broken window in the community center, setting up Angelica as a new possible villain, as Ursula suggests she may have also blackmailed Grace. The episode also depicts a stressful arc for Ursula as she awaits Grace’s toxicology report and eventually finds that she did not take the pills. 

“To find Ursula at this stage where she’s left her husband and she’s trying to keep up this facade that she’s coping. She’s moved back to the family home. She’s spinning kids and work and life. The reality of it is she’s in a very, very lonely, isolated place, where she’s actually sort of pushed her sisters away at the beginning, because she can’t be honest. She’d become sort of addicted to the medication, and I think there’s a bit of shame around that, but fear as well,” Eva Birthistle, who plays Ursula, tells THR.

“It was crafted and written so well that it just felt like that was absolutely where Ursula would be following all the events that took place in series one. She’s really struggling to live with that guilt, because that’s the kind of character that she is,” she adds.

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Bad Sisters season two releases new episodes Wednesdays on Apple TV+. Read THR‘s premiere interview with Sharon Horgan and Anne-Marie Duff.