She’s in too good a mood, just back from holidays with friends in the Dominican Republic, enthusiastically tucking into some duty-free chocolate picked up on the journey home, “a reward after the physio”.
“It is such a clever idea and so clever of Disney to pick it up,” says McSweeney. The show is set in the near future in London, a parallel universe that’s deeply relatable except for the bit where when people turn 18 they are given a superpower. Made by the company behind Killing Eve, Extraordinary’s premise allows for madcap comic moments as characters fly, shoot flames from their fingers, become invisible, shapeshift or time travel.
When I ask what her own superpower would be if she could choose one, she doesn’t say, more interested in what power she would definitely not like to have. “Being invisible would be the most horrendous thing in the world, I can’t think of anything worse,” she says. “I think that’s literally why I am an actor. So I can scream ‘look at me!’ As a woman, as an Irish woman who isn’t Angelina Jolie, the big fear always is invisibility. So you become loud and obnoxious, which I am.
She’s no Pollyanna, she is at pains to point out. Growing up in Cork “I was a sulky teenager, into grunge and writing bad poetry, I wasn’t exactly a fan of optimism.” Still, she has an interesting take on the transformative nature of difficult life events. Take her flat burning down in 2019, for example.Mercifully it occurred while she was elsewhere and didn’t cause damage to any other properties, people or pets in the building.
The conversation turns to diversity. Extraordinary, along with most programmes being made today, features a cast from many different backgrounds. She mentioned being a woman who “isn’t Angelina Jolie” earlier. I talk to her, as a fellow large-bellied woman, about how she perceives this move towards diversity. It’s clearly something she has thought deeply about. “I think I am lucky in that I am yielding an authentic benefit to a superficial fashion,” she says.
Having said all that, she does seem to think things are changing. Eventually, she believes this kind of narrow, reductive, lazy thinking will seem ridiculous. “It’s going to seem ridiculous the same way 20 years ago I got feedback from a casting director that even though I was the funniest girl in the audition room, they were going to give it to a prettier, younger, less funny woman.
Cringe.