Grace’s death explained by creator Sharon Horgan

(This story contains major spoilers from the second and third episodes Bad sisters season two.)

The Bad sisters fate of Grace, the eldest Garvey sister, in season two was not an easy choice for creator and star Sharon Horgan.

The idea for her – spoiler alert! – death originated in the writers’ room, but was initially rejected for being too cruel. In the end, her fate first unfolded in fragments at the end of episode two, when Grace gets into a car accident, and then expanded in episode three, released Wednesday, with Grace’s funeral.

“We had an idea of ​​what was going to happen, but then we scrapped it because we thought, ‘I don’t know if we can continue with the tone of Bad sisters with Grace dying.’ It felt too dark,” says Horgan The Hollywood Reporter of back and forth about Grace’s fate. “Then we ended up going back to that because we couldn’t really see a world where all five sisters just wanted to be on this kind of paper — the whole first season was about protecting her. So losing her and wanting to at the bottom of what was happening, and that there was so much to be revealed and revealed along the way, it felt like there was so much to play with.”

Horgan continues, “It felt real. It felt true to the situation she was in. And how do you come back from that if you’re a character like Grace, so raw and exposed? It felt like a brutal thing to do, but it felt right for the story.”

Before the fatal car accident – which occurs when Grace reaches around her car trying to find her lost earring and then swerves off the road – Grace had become increasingly frantic. After marrying newcomer Ian Reilly (Owen McDonnell) in the first episode, the police come to her home on an unrelated case and she confesses to Reilly that she killed her ex-husband, JP (Claes Bang). Ian disappears and her sisters begin to question whether Grace was involved. There is added pressure on Grace as more people begin to find out that she was involved in JP’s death and as Grace’s daughter Blanaid (Saise Quinn) lashes out at her mother for Ian’s disappearance. Before the crash, Grace calls Eva (played by Horgan) and asks for her help.

Anne-Marie Duff, who plays Grace, said she found out her character was going to die before she received scripts – “I say, funnily enough, it wasn’t like I was in a soap opera and I thought : ‘Oh God’.” Duff tells THR. She saw the move as a “brilliant idea” and one that made sense for her character.

“I felt like there was such an inevitability to it for Grace because she’s such a tragic heroine, right? She’s like a character in a novel. She can’t see her way out of it and we can’t for her, because she’s kind of to her own detriment,” says Duff. “She just keeps doing things that will keep her from being saved, even to the point where she pushes her sisters away and then starts to have more secrets and build this new wall of secrets,” says Duff. “She’s so used to it. It has become such a habit for her that she cannot help it.”

The third episode, which shows the funeral and the four remaining sisters mourning Grace, was also an important step in the series’ history.

“We met five orphans in Season 1. We never really go into the loss of their (parents), but death is all around them. So it really feels like you get to explore that again through Grace,” Dearbhla Walsh, director and executive producer for Bad sistersnarrator THR.

The funeral provides a moment for mourning, but the pressure soon mounts when Ian returns and Ursula (Eva Birthistle) admits to Angelica (Fiona Shaw) that she gave Grace medicine to help calm her down, which she fears may have led to the car accident. This leads to Angelica successfully blackmailing Ursula for €200 to fix a broken window in the community hall, setting Angelica up as a new possible villain as Ursula hints that she may have blackmailed Grace as well. The episode also depicts a stressful arc for Ursula as she awaits Grace’s toxicology report and eventually learns that she didn’t take the pills.

“Finding Ursula at this point where she’s left her husband and she’s trying to put up with this facade that she’s dealing with. She’s moved back into the family home. She’s juggling kids and work and life. The reality is that she is in a very, very lonely, isolated place where she’s actually kind of pushed her sisters away in the beginning because she can’t be honest. She’d become kind of addicted to the medication, and I think there’s a bit of shame around that that, but also fear,” says Eva Birthistle, who plays Ursula. THR.

“It was done and written so well that it just felt like that was absolutely where Ursula wanted to follow all the events that happened in series one. She really struggles to live with that guilt because that’s the kind of character , she is,” she adds.

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Bad sisters season two releases new episodes on Wednesdays on Apple TV+. Read THR‘s premiere interview with Sharon Horgan and Anne-Marie Duff.