Christina Hendricks and Chris O’Dowd on Small Town, Big Story: ‘There has to be extra-terrestrial life out there’
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Christina Hendricks has seen an alien. Well, a UFO, really – but still. She’s even got a picture on her phone to prove it. I am told this story matter-of-factly by the Mad Men actor when I enquire as to whether she and Chris O’Dowd believe in extra-terrestrial life. “I think there has to be,” she says simply.
It’s a relevant question, given the plot of their new joint venture, Small Town, Big Story. Created by O’Dowd (who also cameos in a few episodes), the six-part Sky Atlantic show follows Hollywood producer Wendy Patterson (Hendricks) as she returns home to the fictional Irish town of Drumbán where she was born in order to shoot a ludicrous “historical” fiction adaptation called I Am Celt. It soon transpires that Wendy and her former flame Seamus (Paddy Considine), now the local doctor, underwent a mystifying, out-of-this-world experience as teenagers – one that forever altered the course of their lives. The tone sits somewhere between comedy and melodrama – O’Dowd was aiming for “opera”, he says – as the cast of misfit characters uncover more about the town’s long history of attracting interstellar visitors.
Yes, alien abduction might seem a somewhat fantastical notion, but, suggests O’Dowd, it’s no more outlandish than the fae and woodland spirits that often typify tales set in Ireland – or, in fact, the idea of God. “Inarguably, it’s not even close that those two things are as likely. It’s very unlikely that we are the only species in the universe. We’re too imperfect for that to be the case. And if we’re so imperfect, how could somebody have bothered creating us?” He’s not ruling out Area 51-style conspiracy theories either. “It may be that we’ve had many first encounters that we haven’t treated with violence – and they’re all being held somewhere that you’d never know about.”
Following in the footsteps of recent dramadies (see Netflix’s excellent Bodkin) that capitalise on our collective fascination with all things Ireland – history, folklore, superstitions – Small Town, Big Story cannily subverts the genre by centring around a different supernatural element altogether. This, says O’Dowd, was intentional. “There is a train of thought that’s going on during this Gaelic Revival period we’re going through now, where a lot of those folk stories are maybe trying to tell us about biodiversity issues and a lot of native knowledge that gets lost when you’re colonised and your language is taken from you,” he muses. “A lot of these stories, particularly in the middle cycle of Irish mythology, could almost be about more cosmic stuff. And we don’t yet know that it’s not.” He cites medieval Irish-language narrative The Voyage of Bran, in which “space and time are interpreted in a very different way than we would interpret them now”.
But back to his cast’s “UFO” sightings. Considine has allegedly seen one too – an object in the sky that shot straight up in the air and then back down – while unpacking the shopping. “He was with his wife, and they were putting away groceries, and he was like, ‘Wait! Stop! Look!’” says O’Dowd. “And she said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s mad. Would you get the last of the things from the car?’”
Hendricks and her husband George were met with similar ambivalence after their own close encounter, which happened when they were settling into South Dublin prior to filming. “She said, ‘George just saw a UFO from out on the balcony’,” remembers O’Dowd. “I went out real quick to try to see it, and I didn’t see it…”
“But we showed you a picture!” comes Hendricks’s indignant response.
“And it was clear as day,” O’Dowd says placatingly.
They make a quirky double-act, one that gives a sense of art mimicking real life when it comes to the show. Wendy is a larger-than-life force of nature, gilded by a lacquer of LA glamour that makes her stand out in saturated technicolour against the soggy backdrop of rural Northern Ireland. “I remember somebody mentioning Christina’s name. And I was like, f***, can you imagine if we got Christina Hendricks?” O’Dowd recalls of casting his lead. His wife, Dawn O’Porter, provided the missing link via a fashion contact. “We thought, ‘God, she’d be great’,” continues O’Dowd. “She’s comedically adept, and she’s so strong and so… Hollywood, in a way.”
“I’m not Hollywood!”
“Yes, you are.”
I’m afraid I have to agree with O’Dowd on this one: Hendricks emanates pure, unadulterated La La Land. In a good way – she cuts a dazzling figure, her perfectly coiffed red hair, demurely high-necked flamingo-pink dress and matching kitten heels about as far away as you can get from O’Dowd’s laid-back style. Sitting beside her and dressed in jeans, a black tee and muted green shirt, he looks indistinguishable from his much-loved IT Crowd character, Roy.
It’s very unlikely that we are the only species in the universe. We’re too imperfect for that to be the case
“The shorthand of that is there’s a powerful glamour to Hollywood, and then Wendy comes into the middle of this town…” he says. “It seemed to make sense to make her American, and that she had moved away. She was trying to discover and reinvent herself.”
This speaks to another big theme of the show: that of homecoming, and the pull our roots inevitably end up exerting. O’Dowd wrote it partly in response to spending lockdown in Toronto, Canada. “I was walking through a ravine that was filled with fir trees, and it just reminded me of being home in the northwest of Ireland. I felt very far away, and everybody felt very disconnected and untethered.” Even when you’ve been away longer than you lived in a place – in O’Dowd’s case, 25 years – home still acts “like a magnet”.
For Hendricks, the question of home comes with its own complications. “I moved around quite a bit as a kid, and anytime anyone’s asked me, ‘Where’s home?’, I don’t really have an answer,” she explains. “So I chose the one that I felt was a very happy time in my life.” That was Twin Falls, Idaho. There are very few people still there who she knows; “When I go back, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she admits. “But also there’s this draw to go back, and the memories and the feeling that I had when I was there…”
The UK also serves as a strong point of connection – though Hendricks’s dad moved to the States as a child, he was born in Birmingham. “As I got older, I realised we had these Britishisms in our house that maybe other kids didn’t have,” she says. “We were a tea-drinking family, and my dad put butter and marmalade on his sandwiches.” Hendricks lived in London for a spell while working as a model in the Nineties and “absolutely fell in love”, surrounded by Britpop, art, fashion and, of course, the Spice Girls. “I was living here at a spectacular time,” she remembers excitedly of her Cool Britannia days. “And I just became a crazy Anglophile, and now I come back all the time.”
I am such a blabbermouth, I don’t think I could keep something that massive to myself
Is the notion that all Americans are obsessed with their heritage and ancestry really true? “We want roots so badly,” she says. “But there’s also this thing, because I colour my hair red – I’m not even a natural redhead – people go, ‘Oh, you must be Irish.’ And I go, ‘No, actually, I’m not.’ And they go, ‘There’s some Irish in there.’ Basically, everyone in the United States thinks they’re Irish.”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising. There are an estimated 60 million people in America with Irish heritage; that’s “a vast wave of people who have very, very short roots,” says O’Dowd. And roots aren’t so much of a problem for native Irish people. “Especially if you’ve stayed where you are your whole life – there’s an O’Dowd castle from the 10th century 10 miles from Boyle,” he adds. “So we haven’t moved far.”
Boyle, O’Dowd’s hometown, gets a nod in Small Town, Big Story, as the rival potential filming location for I Am Celt. It’s not the first time he’s taken a camera crew home with him: O’Dowd set all three seasons of sitcom Moone Boy there over a decade ago. His new series is, in part, a TV show about making a TV show, and highlights the inevitable overwhelm that occurs when the circus of Hollywood descends upon a tiny community. Was he conscious of not upsetting the locals with his production?
“I know how people react when you come back and come back and come back, and the novelty wears off fairly quickly for them,” he says. It’s “an awful lot of pressure” filming when you have skin in the game: “If you’re in a random town somewhere, and somebody’s complaining that their driveway is blocked for a bit, you’re like, ‘Oh, I hope somebody sorts that out.’ But if it’s your hometown, it’s like, ‘I better go and sort that out…’”
In a small town, it’s hard not to care what other people think – a fact that’s crucial to Small Town, Big Story’s driving narrative. After their mind-bending abduction experience, Seamus keeps schtum, too scared of being judged to admit the truth. Wendy, meanwhile, speaks out – and pays the price, becoming an instant laughing stock. Again, art imitates life, says Hendricks. “I am such a blabbermouth, I don’t think I could keep something that massive to myself. Case in point – I did blab to everyone. I literally stopped someone on the street and said, ‘My husband saw a UFO!’ And pretty much no one believed me.”
And O’Dowd? “I don’t know if I would tell anybody, because I don’t think anybody would believe you,” he says. “Maybe I’d just write about it?”
‘Small Town, Big Story’ is available on Sky Atlantic and Now
