Spoilers ahead for House of Guinness.
Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight's new Netflix show may be centred around male power and inheritance, but the true stars – in GLAMOUR's humble opinion – are the women of the House of Guinness.
The series opens in the aftermath of brewery mogul Sir Benjamin Guinness' death, and his bequeathing of his fortune to two of his four children, causing no end of drama. It has been aptly described as a cross between Peaky Blinders – the deft combination of of period drama scenes and modern music needle drops are just sublime – and Succession, and the series is as much of an autumnal must as the frothy stout it's centred around.
I worked with Whitney Wolfe Herd and the qualities displayed in the Disney+ depiction of her life, chime with the woman I came to know.
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Much like his exquisite casting of Helen McCrory, Knight gives space for female-led stories in the series that would not have been championed or honoured in the 19th century. The Responder star Emily Fairn plays the matriarch of the Guinness family Anne, tasked with the challenge of keeping her brothers in line, but also determined to find her own happiness personally (in an unhappy arranged marriage) and in work (by setting up a philanthropic foundation).
We see break-out star Niamh McCormack portray an Irish nationalist activist Ellen Cochrane who becomes (ahem) intertwined with a male member of the Guinness dynasty, and finally Danielle Galligan is brilliant as Lady Olivia Hedges, who enters into an unconventional marriage with Guinness brother Arthur (Anthony Boyle) to boost her social status.
Emily tells GLAMOUR that her jump from playing a runaway drug addict opposite Martin Freeman in BBC's The Responder to playing the Guinness matriarch was a coming-of-age experience, helping shift her perception of herself from girl to woman. “I think having to take up space and tell my stupid brothers what to do and lead a family infiltrated into my real life,” she added, crediting the support of female director Mounia Akl, who also worked with her on 2022's The Responder.
Danielle also echoed her appreciation for a woman being behind the camera, especially when issues such as abortion and miscarriage are “given the time” on the show. While Niamh's character has something of a romantic tryst with Guinness brother Edward (Enola Holmes' Louis Partridge), she opened up about her character's true mission (and storyline) being the political cause. “I just remember feeling like if I was in the 1800s, I would be doing this,” she says of Ellen's activism. “For the people, for the cause for Ireland, because rebels weren't always celebrated back then.”
GLAMOUR sat down with the women of the House of Guinness to talk why “the women are the smartest people on the show”, the show's navigation of abortion and miscarriage and whether we'll be getting a series two after the finale was left on such a huge cliffhanger.
What attracted you to your roles – what was it about your characters that spoke to you?
Emily: I got sent the original self tape through and my boyfriend was like, "I really want you to do this." And I was like, “All right, it's not for me to decide. I'm going to do the audition and hope for the best.”
Niamh: Because he loves Peaky Blinders.
Emily: Yeah he's got a Peaky Blinders tattoo.
Niamh: First time I met him, he showed me that.
Emily: Yeah it's like a skull with a Peaky Blinder cap on. Very edgy, very cool…
Danielle: I loved Peaky, I loved Taboo, and I used to have a picture of Helen McCrory on my wall… Olivia, I just loved her honestness, her bluntness, her brashness and her tenacity. She's living in a time when women were so restricted, she definitely cut through those restrictions in any way that she could… It was nice to have the opportunity to explore that.
Niamh: You're living vicariously through her! I'm also a massive fan of Stephen Knight, Peaky Blinders was one of my favourite shows, and Guinness in the mix of that. But the first line of Ellen's character description was “she has Irish Republicanism running through her veins”, and it just spoke to me, I think, for Steven to write such a modern character as a woman representing the Irish nationalist fight for freedom, I think she represents hundreds and hundreds of women who've been forgotten in history or written out because they didn't have the status or the money to be remembered.
She's leading the party that she's dedicated her life to. And I think to be a woman during that time, a poor Catholic woman, you were very, very low on that status scale and she would've had to work twice as hard as any other man in that organisation.
Ellen carries herself with this beautiful blend of masculine and feminine energy to be respected in this world. And as the story unravels, you start to see that feminine softness that she felt like she had to hide away to protect herself. And there is such a strength in being vulnerable and as the story progresses, I think you see that a lot more.
Emily: I think a lot of the women in this show are women in a man's world. I think especially with Anne, with the brothers and how her cards have been dealt, and then definitely with Olivia as well, and it's how did they win when the odds are against them, which I think is really interesting. I think the women are the smartest people in the show. The representation of women at that time, and how they navigate stuff, it was all kind of behind closed doors.
Niamh: It's all subterfuge.
Emily: They're pulling all the strings, and they're so in control of everything, but in public they have to pretend that they're not. And they're just these lovely pretty wallflowers who sit there.
Danielle: In history in general, it's really easy to track male influence throughout history, and I think it's so much harder to track a female influence because they have to be so much more subtle. Even if you think of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, she literally changed the whole religion of an entire country. I think that it's really nice that Steven Knight has given the women so much influence and it's being seen on screen.
Niamh: He wrote such detailed modern characters. It is a period piece, but he breathes so much life into the women and I think it accurately represents the history that we're trying to portray in the show.
Marriage is an interesting concept in House of Guinness, arranged marriages seem par for the course and we see Anne in an unhappy marriage and Olivia in an open marriage of sorts – why was this important to bring to the screen?
Danielle: For Olivia, marriage is part of her strategic plan. As a woman who is aristocratic and asset-rich but cash-poor, she doesn't make her way in society through working. Her only option is to marry rich. For her, it's definitely a financial contract. Because of who she is, she has this unshakable sense of what she brings to the table, and of what she's entitled to and her worth in the world that she can make the constraints of marriage work for her as much as possible.
So she doesn't just accept the conventional marriage contract, she makes sure that she is also benefiting from it. And I think that sadly what happens is that the marriage furthers her station in life, it affords her this amazing standard of living and her husband actually does become her best friend. But then I think as she starts to move on, it becomes kind of golden handcuffs.
I think it definitely made me look at marriage in a very new way. Maybe I'll just leave it so long that I marry for money, who knows?
Niamh: You'll make your own money! You know what Cher says? “I am a rich man!” So for Ellen, I don't think she's really concerned with marriage. I think that she's married to the cause and I think the relationship that develops [with Louis Partridge's Edward] is that beautiful Romeo and Juliet kind of saga… But she has so much self-respect and so much dignity for herself and it's the cause that's what she really cares about.
The women of the House of Guinness deal with both miscarriage and abortion in the series – tell me about what that was like to portray within that time, particularly as now in certain parts of the world, laws around these issues are regressing…
Danielle: I think coming from a place where abortion wasn't always legal and it was a very contentious issue and being there for the repeal time and handing out the flyers and marching the streets and doing the vote and getting the vote, I remember so viscerally the emotion when the result was announced and we did change our constitution.
It's still in my body, and I think that having met brave women who are open about talking about their experience with it, I definitely felt a pressure to really take care of all those women by how we told the story. It's a very sensitive topic and I really just wanted those women to feel taken care of and seen. I just hope that we can do that with what we made.
I didn't want Olivia to be punished in any way for her actions, in terms of her being sexually free, and also in terms of her choice to have an abortion. I think they did a great job of empowering her, and taking care of her as much as possible throughout that journey.
Emily: It's really beautifully done in the show. It's not black and white at all, which I think is a really great way of portraying something like that. I think there's the sadness in it, there's the empowerment in it. I think it's really beautifully handled. And then similarly with Anne's miscarriage, I think it was just wanting to make sure it was as sensitively done as possible.
How do you guys feel about the possibility of another season? It was all left on quite a cliffhanger…
Danielle: Yeah, TBC…
Niamh: Yeah, baby! Let's go!
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
House of Guinness is available to watch on Netflix now.
