Season 2 starts filming soon and Michelle has some great ideas.
After being treated to six brilliant episodes which featured our favourite Derry girls – and the wee English fella – there’s no denying that Lisa McGee’s comedy has become one of the most beloved shows in recent memory.
Aside from the brilliant one-liners, superb characters and excellent performances, there’s one thing that’s often overlooked; its heart.
To her immense credit, Lisa McGee took a chance by writing about what she knew best – life in Derry during the ’90s – and like all great writing, her work has travelled far beyond the Foyle because it’s universal and truthful.
After smashing records, dominating pop-culture chat and touching our hearts, the expectations are high for Season 2 of the show and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell (Michelle) gave us a brief insight into what she would love to see happen in the next season.
Season 2 is set to start filming in October but the cast haven’t seen the scripts yet, something that’s causing a slight bit of disruption in their WhatsApp group chat.
“We haven’t got scripts and it’s killing all of us! We’re starting to make things up and we’re guessing what’s going to happen. We’ve got a group chat and because we don’t know, we’re all like ‘maybe this will happen’. We can’t help ourselves, we need to calm down,” O’Donnell tells JOE jokingly.
The talented actress is teaming up with Lisa McGee again in Girls and Dolls, an award-winning play opening in The Gaiety Theatre very soon. More about that here.
Despite the fact that she’s incredibly busy with that new project, it appears that Michelle is never far from O’Donnell’s thoughts and she does have a few ideas about what she’d love to see happening in the new episodes.
One of the highlights from Season One was Michelle’s withering putdowns of her English cousin James, but the actress would like to see a small rapprochement between the two characters.
“We’ll never be cool. We’re sort of the losers,” O’Donnell says.
“I like to think of my character as the cool one – but it’s the best of a bad bunch. I think we need to get a love interest for Clare and to see Michelle stand up for James a wee bit more. They have all got his back and they’re there for him but they’re just doing it in that really weird Irish way where your best friends are the ones you take the mickey out of the most. We’re just trying to toughen him up a bit.”
In terms of specific episodes and storylines, McGee has previously said that she might do something around the ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement. On this note, O’Donnell thinks that there’s even more that could be explored during an extremely interesting period in the history of Derry.
“I know Lisa wants to do quite a lot because a lot of stuff has happened in Derry Bill Clinton came to Derry and she even said ‘imagine doing something like the turn of the century.’ There’s loads of things you could do, you could take the show anywhere. Derry Halloween is massive too, it’s the best place in the world to go for Halloween apparently, so you could do an episode about that. The possibilities are endless because the show really could go anywhere.”
As for the next ’90s anthem that Derry Girls should be using, O’Donnell has two bangers in mind.
“‘Informer’ by Snow because I absolutely love that tune. N-Trance – ‘Set You Free’ and Baby D – ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’. They need to pop up at some point too,” she says.
We fully agree.
After all, who are we to argue with Michelle?
Clip via Hat Trick
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