'Male actors do get paid, more than us - that's a fact'

Sarah Greene has reunited with her 'Bad Sisters' for a second series. She tells Ellie Harrison about misogyny, donning an eyepatch, and looks back on the success of 'Normal People'

- Ellie Harrison

"How do you tell a story about domestic abuse and still make it funny?" It's a question Sarah Greene and her co-stars have had to grapple with on the wicked black comedy Bad Sisters, which arrived with a dirty cackle on Apple TV+ in 2022. The first season, in which Greene played Bibi Garvey, a badass, one-eyed lesbian, followed four Dublin sisters as they conspired to despatch the abusive husband of their fifth sibling. They nicknamed their target John Paul “The Prick”, and the show opened at his wake, with him lying in his coffin and his widow pushing down his genitals to banish his perpetual erection. See what I mean about it being darkly comic?

“Abuse is not a laughing matter,” says Greene, who as Bibi was the Garvey sister most determined to see The Prick buried six feet under, “so we had that question at the forefront of our minds for pretty much every scene. Like, yes, let’s have humour, but if these were real women, what would they do in each situation?” Certainly the abuse itself is never funny – it’s chilling – but the sisters’ madcap, clumsy attempts at offing John Paul are often the stuff of black farce, be it shooting him in the head with a frozen paintball or drugging his trusty nasal spray.

Bibi is the coolest Garvey sister. She lost her eye in a car accident caused by John Paul, when a Mother Mary figurine stuck to the dashboard impaled her in the face. So she wears an eyepatch, paired with an umber bob and an inky wardrobe. Think Posh Spice meets pirate chic. When I meet Greene at a members’ club in London, the 40-year-old has a similarly striking look – but her hair has changed colour. This time, it’s red bob, gold hoops, ripped jeans. Only the coffee is black.

Made by and also starring Sharon Horgan – Ireland’s TV darling who brought the world Catastrophe and Motherland –