Anne-Marie Duff did not have ‘as much fun’ making Bad Sisters as co-stars

Anne-Marie Duff Opens Up About Grief, Bad Sisters, and the Cost of Playing a Woman Being Erased

Traveloasisspot.com – Eighteen months. That is how long Anne-Marie Duff stepped away from acting entirely after losing both her mother and her brother Eddie within a short span. The 55-year-old performer, whose career spans two decades of British and Irish television and film, described the period in language that strips away every polite euphemism usually reserved for celebrity interviews.

“Grief is a motherf***er. I don’t know where I am with it, but I think that’s probably all right.”

Eddie was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, a condition Duff characterised as “very aggressive.” Watching his cognitive abilities deteriorate was, in her words, “desperately sad,” yet she insisted the final years together carried a quality of extraordinary closeness once she stopped fighting the current of his decline.

“Once I’d learned to go with the flow, there were no distracting factors, just love and connection.”

Duff said she felt immense relief that she and her father were present at the end for both her mother and Eddie. “It was hard as hell, but this is midlife. This is loving people,” she added, framing the experience not as a tragedy to be overcome but as an inevitable phase of adult life.

Grace Williams and the Weight of Playing a Woman Being Unmade

When Duff returned to work, she stepped into one of the most talked-about roles of recent British television: Grace Williams in Bad Sisters, the Irish black-comedy drama created by Sharon Horgan. The series follows four tightly bonded Garvey sisters whose casual wish for their toxic brother-in-law to die is answered with terrifying literalness, sending their lives into freefall.

Duff portrayed the second-eldest sister, married to John Paul Williams — a controlling, emotionally abusive husband played by Claes Bang. The role placed her alongside Sharon Horgan, Eve Hewson, Eva Birthistle, and Sarah Greene in a cast that became a cultural talking point almost overnight.

Yet Duff was candid that the experience on set differed markedly from what her co-stars described. Speaking in an interview published in the October issue of Good Housekeeping UK, she explained that the emotional architecture of Grace demanded a different kind of engagement.

“I didn’t have as much fun as the other actors. You had to be worried for Grace or else the audience wouldn’t have wanted her husband dead. I was playing a sort of ghost of a woman and that was a bit sad for me.”

The distinction matters. While Horgan, Hewson, Birthistle, and Greene have spoken publicly about the joy of collaborating in an ensemble that functions almost like a close family, Duff’s character was written to be slowly hollowed out by a partner who treats her as furniture. Sustaining that erosion for a full series run is, by any measure, a different labour.

Awards Recognition and the Show’s Cultural Footprint

The performance earned Duff the Best Supporting Actress award at the 2023 TV Baftas. Bad Sisters itself took home the Bafta for Best Drama Series the same year, cementing its place as one of the most acclaimed productions to emerge from the Irish-British co-production pipeline.

Duff praised the writing and the company behind the show, singling out Horgan’s singular voice as a screenwriter.

“The sisters were such brilliantly drawn characters – Sharon (Horgan) is a genius who writes like no-one else. And the other actresses were gorgeous as hell. Jeepers!”

She also highlighted what she saw as the show’s broader cultural significance: a depiction of Celtic women who exist beyond the domestic sphere.

“It was ‘great’ that the show portrayed ‘Celtic women not just trapped in the kitchen in sufferance.'”

Some Woman: Returning to the Stage

Duff’s next project marks a return to live theatre. She will appear in Some Woman, a new play staged at the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre, running from 7 October through 21 November. The work examines, in what Duff calls “a very forensic way,” how women are socially pressured to diminish themselves as they age.

“There’s this notion (in society) that it’s better for us to be good than to be happy. What’s the point of art if you shy away from the big issues of the day? Culture is the place where changes are really made. Look at Mr Bates Vs The Post Office.”

She framed the production as deliberately provocative in an era when public discourse around women’s roles has become, in her phrase, “very flammable.”

“Some Woman is a profoundly feminist play in a time when having an opinion around the role of women is very flammable, so let’s do it. Let’s go there.”

A Career in Context

Duff’s body of work stretches well beyond Bad Sisters. She appeared in The Magdalene Sisters (2002), a period drama set in an Irish convent school, and played Fiona Gallagher across multiple seasons of the FX/Channel 4 series Shameless, a role that made her a household name across the Atlantic. She shares a son, Brendan, with Scottish actor James McAvoy, her ex-husband.

In 2025, Duff was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle, in recognition of her services to drama. The honour acknowledged a career that has moved between prestige television, independent film, and the stage without ever settling into a single genre or institution.

Her willingness to speak plainly about grief, about the specific emotional cost of playing a character being psychologically dismantled, and about the political stakes of feminist theatre positions her current work not merely as a return to form but as a continuation of a long, uncompromising engagement with what stories owe their audiences.