Saoirse-monica jackson swaps convent uniform for corpse clues
She buried a sausage to summon sunshine, walked down the aisle to The Cranberries and still caught a 6 a.m. call sheet—now Saoirse-Monica Jackson is back on the chaotic side of the Irish border, knife in hand, best friend at her side, trying to solve a murder before the craic kills them both.
The erin-to-autopsy pipeline
Lisa McGee never wrote a sequel to Derry Girls; instead she handed Jackson a shovel. How to Get to Heaven From Belfast—Sky’s new binge-drop—keeps the acid wit, replaces the school corridors with corpse-strewn bogs and lets Jackson’s character, a hyper-verbal funeral crasher named Saoirse (yes, meta), weaponise the same frantic energy that once screamed "Je suis une grande girl!"
Four years after Erin Quinn’s last eye-roll, Jackson has quietly become the most over-qualified comic in the UK-Ireland corridor: Chekhov in Dublin, off-Broadway satire in Manhattan, Scouse gangsters in Liverpool, and a prestige-cinema turn opposite Isiah Whitlock Jr. that will hit festivals this autumn. The through-line? A refusal to let anyone decide whether she’s clown or tragedian.
Wedding that broke pinterest, then the algorithm
Last July she married DJ Hector Barbour in a three-day Donegal takeover that trended harder than the show that birthed her. Jamie-Lee O’Donnell in a bridesmaid sash, a sausage buried at dawn, 300 drunk guests belting "Dreams"—the images circled the globe faster than a Netflix trailer. Jackson shrugs: "I just wanted the craic. Turns out the internet wanted it more."
She went straight from vows to set, no honeymoon, no pause. "I meal-prep between takes," she laughs. "Control is my love language."
Why liverpool feels like home now
Season two of This City Is Ours shoots nights along the Mersey. Jackson’s Cheryl Crawford—"part mafia matriarch, part abandoned seagull"—returns with heavier eyeliner and lighter morals. Scripts landed at 2 a.m.; she highlighted every threat before breakfast. "The city adopted me. The accent flattened my vowels and widened my shoulders."
She can clock off, ride the ferry, cook pasta in her own kitchen—luxury for an actor who spent years in Airbnbs that smelled of damp and other people’s heartbreak.
Theater is her stealth weapon
Between camera calls she sneaks into matinees. Watching Denise Gough in People Places & Things rewired her synapses; playing Natasha in Three Sisters taught her that ambition can look like grief in better shoes. "Stage sweat smells different," she says. "It’s fear and permission."
She wants more. "Give me a 90-seat basement, a 200-year-old text and a crowd that coughs when I’m crap—nothing sharpens you faster."
Next up: bodies, water and the american south
The Body Is Water—filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina—drops her into hurricane season with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Stephen Rea. She plays a hospice nurse who knows the exact moment a soul slips out. "We shot in real rain. No trailers. My skin tasted like salt for weeks."
She isn’t chasing Oscars. She’s chasing friction: accents that bruise her tongue, women who scare her, stories that make Irish mothers cross themselves. "If I’m not terrified by page five, I’ve already failed."
Back in Belfast, McGee is already whispering series two ideas. Jackson grins, eyes wide, voice accelerating like a kettle about to blow. "More corpses, more confessionals, more craic. Keep the sausage on standby—weather’s never guaranteed."