‘Say Nothing’ Trailer: Powerful FX Production Tackles Rise of IRA and The Troubles

FX may just have another massive hit on its hands. The first trailer for “Say Nothing,” based on the acclaimed non-fiction bestseller by Patrick Radden Keefe, has just dropped. It tells the true story of The Troubles,” the decades-long conflict between the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, including the rise of the Irish Republican Army. As part of that, the story delves into “the Disappeared,” centering, like the book, on the mystery of a missing mother of 10.

Adapted by creator Joshua Zetumer, the primarily Irish cast includes Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe as Dolours and Marian Price, respectively, sisters who played vital roles in the IRA; as well as Anthony Boyle as a young Brendan Hughes and Josh Finan as leader Gerry Adams.

“They’re complicated,” Keefe said earlier this month at a screening of the show in NYC. “How you feel about them should shift. And I think that the challenge for us, this was true for me with the book, very, very true with the series, is: How do you capture the romance of those politics without romanticizing them yourself? And I think part of the answer is that you show the costs not just in the final episodes, which, there is all kinds of stuff that comes out in the later episodes, but from the very first scene. The first person you meet is Jean McConville [one of the Disappeared]. And the hope is that the sense of those costs kind of hangs over the whole series, even when it’s kind of lark-y bank heists and so forth, that you have a sense that there is this kind of Tell-Tale Heart beating in the background.”

“I think one of the things we were trying to do from the beginning was capture the energy of what it feels like to be in your twenties or a teenager and really get caught up in a cause,” Zetumer said at the same screening. “That was the sort of guiding principle that was driving us forward.”

“The rise of the limited series on TV definitely was a blessing for us in being able to adapt something like this, because it has to be one season from start to finish,” Zetumer continued. “And the challenge, of course, was not sort of what to include. The challenge is like, what not to include, because it’s 40 years of history. It’s this vast swirl that’s around the characters. You’re getting the whole history of the Troubles in the course of the book. And so the question was: ‘Okay, what do you cut out?'”

Watch the trailer for “Say Nothing” below.

“Say Nothing” will premiere all nine episodes on Hulu on November 14.