Derry Girls actress Siobhan McSweeney appears alongside Will & Grace star Eric McCormack in a new BBC thriller, playing a supporter of US President Donald Trump
Siobhan McSweeney has ditched comedy for “straight” drama in her next role – playing an American supporter of Donald Trump in BBC thriller Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue.
The six-part murder-mystery is written by the creator of Foyle’s War, Anthony Horowitz, and features a cast of nine main characters who survive when their plane crashes in the Mexican jungle.
But in the plot they then begin to die one after another in strange and violent ways and soon realise there is a murderer in their midst. As the story unfolds in flashback, viewers will meet the survivors as they battle to stay alive against the heat, a shortage of supplies – and each other.
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Derry Girls and Amandaland star Siobhan, 45, said the whole project had been a departure from the norm for her. “It’s the first time, apart from theatre, that I’ve played an American, so the accent was a challenge,” she admitted.
“Another challenge would be one that’s the same with every show, where you’re going to spend an awful lot of time with these people and you worry if you are all going to get on. It turned out to be one of the most joyful jobs I’ve ever been on.”
In the series by Horowitz, who has also scripted Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Midsomer Murders, Siobhan plays a Trump-loving Texan woman who runs a chain of motels with her husband, who is also on the plane and a fully signed up member of the Make America Great Again campaign.
She laughed that in real life if she was caught in a similar situation to this group, she’d be a goner. “I’d be dead within two days!” she said. “What really comes across, which is something that you never think about in these survival stories, is that you think they’re on the move but they’re not. They’re stuck in one area. They’re stuck beside the plane, so I guess I’d die of boredom.”
When it hits the screen later this month viewers will also see Will & Grace favourite Eric McCormack, who plays a doctor who has been struck off. He says that if the situation was real, he’d fare even less well. “I’d last 30 to 40 minutes,” he declared. “Actually, I take that back. There’s a full bottle of vodka on the plane, so I’d last six to seven hours, until the vodka ran out.”
Siobhan, who also hosts Channel 4’s Great Pottery Throwdown and is currently fronting the Irish version of The Traitors, said she jumped at the chance to film in “Mexico”, which was actually Gran Canaria. “Then there was the idea of filming in the Canary Islands for the summer, whereas I usually get to film in Northern Ireland. So it was like ‘Let’s have a bit of fun’.”
Writer Horowitz said he hopes that BBC viewers enjoy the series. “I’ve always believed that murder stories are popular because they’re about the search for truth. We live in a world in which it is very hard to be sure of anything anymore – we have 24-hour news, fake news, post-truth. How do you know what’s real any more? But whodunnits lead to absolute truth. It’s revealed at the end of the final episode.”
– Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue will air on BBC1/iPlayer this September
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