When Sharon Horgan walked into HBO to pitch her new series, Youth, she basically just said “sandwich generation” to them. Alex, the protagonist, is squished between a teenage son and two elderly parents. That’s the classic; the rest of it – the recent divorce, the dating hell, the busy, creative professional life full of pricks – is the icing on the sandwich (if you like).
Horgan had been incubating some of the characters for five years, but “honestly”, she tells me, “I said about three sentences and a week later, they said yes. I’ve never had that experience before.” You might think you can imagine it, but Youth is unlike any portrait you’ve ever seen in the gallery of (for brevity) menopausal women doing everything for everyone. There’s an urgency and valour to it that is very much drawn from Horgan’s own experience.
I caught some of the shooting on a blowy day in April this year, in east London. Horgan and her co-star Rupert Friend were filming a crux scene. Friend plays Patrick, slightly younger than Horgan’s Alex, a little indecisive and shambling.
I don’t think I’m the answer to all her ills,” he says, walking around a little park in between takes. Patrick wants to be with Alex, but he also thinks he wants children and there’s no way she’s going back there again, even if she could. He’s never considered that it’s not his clock.” Nothing passes between Alex and Patrick that’s overstated or even out of the ordinary, unless you count the fact that she gets hit by a cyclist as she walks away.
But when it slots into the finished show, it is, like every other scene, hilarious. I just do not know how Horgan does what she does – which is what every one of her co-stars says about her. She’s able to do that dance between jokes and pathos in a way that I don’t know anyone else can do.” But it’s Horgan herself who, in an absolutely unboastful way, explains it best: “I’m allergic to sentimentality.
I can’t abide anything that is sweet or schmaltzy. But I love genuine emotion. I love to make people feel things.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
