Photo: Jackson Bowley for New York Magazine
When Derry Girls, the Channel 4 sitcom turned Netflix comedy juggernaut, ended in 2022 after a rapturously received three-season run, actress Saoirse-Monica Jackson found it hard to fully separate from her character. Jackson was 23 when she was cast as Erin Quinn, the ambitious, face-pulling, somewhat arrogant ringleader of a posse of teenagers in Northern Ireland at the tail end of the Troubles.
“I was growing as a young woman in my early 20s, leading this massive, successful show, and my own personal growth was so woven in and running parallel to the story lines,” Jackson tells me during a late pasta lunch in early June in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood. Her real life then…
