Sharon Horgan’s connection to Best Interests: ‘I didn’t know if my baby would die

She’s given us Coupling, Catastrophe and Motherland – now Sharon Horgan is about to show us her serious side in new BBC show Best Interests.

The brand-new thought-provoking drama written by BAFTA winning writer, Jack Thorne sees Sharon draw on her own traumatic real life experiences.

Four-parter Best Interests, follows an ordinary family driven apart by having to make choices no parent would ever want to make. Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen star as Nicci and Andrew who have two daughters Katie and Marnie.

Marnie has a life-threatening condition which takes a devastating turn. The doctors believe it is in her best interests to be allowed to die, but her loving family disagree. And so begins a fight that will take them through every stage of a legal process, as they struggle to contemplate this huge decision.

“I felt really connected to Nicci,” explains Sharon. “My daughter was very ill when she was about 16 months old, and we were in a position where we didn’t know if she would live or die. She’s 19 now, and ever since she came along I’ve been an emotional wreck.

“I specifically remember the feeling of ‘whatever you have to do, I don’t care, just keep her alive’. That feeling is in my bones and my DNA, that’s why I had this connection with Nicci.”

While the show poses tough questions with very emotional content, Sharon says both cast and crew had a lot of fun on set.

“The weird thing is I laughed more doing this show than I have on a lot of things,” she says. “We constantly laughed, the material was so tough and what was happening was so tough, we went through the ringer on it. But we just laughed constantly. I hope all the actors say the same thing, it was a really happy work environment and you needed that relief from the heaviness of the material.”

Everyone knows Sharon for her comedy, and at the time of getting the Best Interests script, she was working on her Apple TV+ series, Bad Sisters. So did the thought of playing someone in a hard-hitting drama worry her?

“I didn’t want the part!” confesses Sharon. “But of course I read it because of Jack, and it just destroyed me. I felt really nervous to tell you the truth. I felt really connected to Nicci’s point of view, I really felt it deeply and the thought of someone else playing her I didn’t like."

“The script filled me with emotion. So it was more about, how do you hold that back? There were loads of points where I would come to Niamh (Moriarty, who plays Marnie) and go ‘are we crying too much?’ We hugged each other a lot as well, probably too much.”

Best Interests begins on Monday 12th June, 9pm, BBC One

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