‘Your Nose Is Pressed Up Against the Ambiguity of It’

When Patrick Radden Keefe published Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland in 2018, he felt proud of what he’d written, but as with any long-term project, he wasn’t sure how it would be received — or if anyone would like it. He certainly didn’t expect the acclaim that followed, with the best-seller landing on multiple best-of-the-year lists and and winning the Orwell Prize for political writing. “Nobody was more surprised than me that it found the audience it did,” he said.

The nonfiction book’s propulsive look at The Troubles, the decades-long sectarian conflict between Irish republican paramilitary groups and British unionists in Northern Ireland, also made it ripe for adaptation. Through the perspectives of several participants and victims — Dolours and Marian Price, sisters who drew international attention to the cause with their hunger strikes; Brendan Hughes, a frontline leader for the Provisional Irish Republican Army; Gerry Adams, a PIRA strategist who later became the head of the Irish republican political party Sinn Féin and a key player in negotiating an end to the violence; and the McConvilles, a family torn apart by the violence — Keefe brings the sprawling, contentious clash to street level. In Say Nothing, warfare is tangible and specific: gunshots whiz over hedges, and IRA members break themselves out of prison or hollow out their bodies going on hunger strike in protest.

Keefe was wary about bringing Say Nothing to the screen, however. Some of the individuals he reported on are still alive, and the conflict remains a major point of sensitivity for many who live in its wake. He’d had other books and magazine articles optioned in the past, but when interest around adapting Say Nothing started to bubble up, none of those projects were actually made, and the ones that did go through development ended up far afield from his original intent. Yet Keefe has known producer Brad Simpson for years and admired how he and producing partner Nina Jacobson ushered Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life to FX as The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story and their work on Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, which became a 2018 movie for Warner Bros. “It’s a very different kind of thing,” said Keefe, “but the movie successfully distilled the book’s essence.”

Keefe, Simpson, and Jacobson found their distiller-in-chief in showrunner Joshua Zetumer, the screenwriter of 2014’s RoboCop remake and Patriots Day who had developed The Infiltrator, a film script about The Troubles, as one of his earliest jobs in Hollywood. The story was about an individual who actually appears late in Keefe’s book, though his character was one of many scrapped for the FX series. Simpson had been a producer on The Infiltrator, and though that film went nowhere, he brought Keefe and Zetumer together for Say Nothing. Their writers’ room included Joe Murtagh (The Woman in the Wall); Clare Barron, a 2019 Pulitzer finalist for her play Dance Nation; and Kirsten Sheridan (In America), with Keefe routinely dropping by. The process sought to preserve the book’s balance between capturing the draw of political violence and reflecting on its costs, but the team also had to grapple with a sense of history passing in the present. Much of the writers’ room was conducted over Zoom during COVID-19 lockdowns, a period during which they watched the rise of American unrest following the murder of George Floyd. Some attended the marches that emerged in response, where they saw images that wouldn’t have been out of place in Northern Ireland: armored vehicles in the streets, a young person with a bullhorn directing the protest.

“That was the thing that compelled us,” says Zetumer, who, along with Keefe, spoke to Vulture in late October. “What would it be like to be that kid?”

How did you approach the adaptation? What did you want to preserve from the book?
Joshua Zetumer: We wanted to capture how it feels to be someone in their early 20s who wants to change the world, who gets caught up in a cause, and who believes that violence is the only way to do it. That idea informed everything: the scripts, the casting, the sets. The vibrant color is wildly different from what most people see when they think about The Troubles. It was a dark time because there was so much violence, but on the other hand, it was also a moment where many of these young people felt most alive — this is what some people have said in interviews. We also wanted to focus on the cost of that violence for both the perpetrators and the victims.

Patrick Radden Keefe: Which, in its way, is a radical thing to do. It’s a strange aspect of our discourse, and you see this playing out in the context of other conflicts — that it’s become hard to look seriously at a person who makes a different set of calculations than you would, to try to understand how they got from where you are to where they are but in a way that doesn’t varnish away the horror. The sentence I just said would be anathema to some. For some people, the IRA were morally repugnant. They were evil psychopaths.

In the context of these characters, they were also very much still kids. I’m struck by how they were partying the night before the Old Bailey bombing.
JZ: That detail came directly from the book. Dolours went to a play, where she saw Stephen Rea onstage; another member of her team went out and got drunk. Even Dolours was embarrassed about how they comported themselves during the mission and has been public about that. Some of the characters were indeed incredibly young when these things were happening. Marian Price was a teenager. We were interested in the spirit of, Okay, what would it be like if you went out and robbed a bank, then you went home and you were still living with your parents? That, combined with the fierce moralizing they were doing: They robbed banks, but they weren’t keeping the money because they were giving it to the cause.

PRK: At times, I’ve thought about the first half of Say Nothing being the “night out” and the second half of the book being the “hangover.” You needed to look at both because it would be irresponsible to tell one part of the story without the other. When I was writing the book, which is a long time ago now, you had young teenagers in European cities going off to Syria to join ISIS. That was part of what I was trying to understand: Why does somebody go off and engage in this way? What’s the appeal? For that matter, why does an 18-year-old American kid after 9/11 sign up to join the Marines and go to Afghanistan? What is it about that youth and fervor?

What drove the choice to make Dolours Price the center of the adaptation?
JZ: When you consider how much story there is — the 40-year sweep of it — we were trying to cram as much into one season that a typical television show would lay out in three. One of the biggest challenges adapting the book was not what to include but what not to include. For that, we needed a strong gravitational center. Otherwise, the episodes would become so diffuse.

Dolours in particular has her politics and a very steely core where she’s willing to push herself to extremes in service of a deeply felt belief. But she also had this twinkle in her eye. To quote people who knew her, she didn’t come off as an ideologue but someone you’d want to have a beer with. When men met her, they found her captivating. And on a psychological level, the thing that was always compelling about Dolours is that she felt her humanity at odds with her beliefs. By the end of the series, those things collide.

PRK: In her life, Dolours was always the star of her own show. There was a sort of magnetism she had, a dynamism, a charisma. That made her naturally compelling to build a story around.

When I first read her obituary in the New York Times, more than ten years ago now, there were a number of things that struck me. The first was that she was a woman in the IRA. I had thought about The Troubles and the IRA as a very male story. I also had not known there were women hunger strikers before Bobby Sands and the other strikers in the ’80s. The second was that her involvement in the IRA was a thing she’d done with her sister, and the idea that she had misgivings later in life was fascinating to me. All these young radicals in the IRA in the ’70s, they had pictures of Che Guevara on the wall. I have a riff about this in the book: Che died young and beautiful. There’s also all this Catholic iconography with the IRA, again built on this idea of young, beautiful martyrs. To me, the question was: What happens if you don’t die young? How do you make sense of it all as you get older?

What were the trade-offs of streamlining the story around Dolours?PRK: The whole trick of the thing is distillation; adaptation is actually subtraction, right? What can I safely take out to find the story? This medium is character-driven, it’s emotional. The end of the book was very focused on the ticktock of the Belfast Project, which was very interesting to me and coheres in the book, but with the series, where you’re drilling down on the Price Sisters, along with the McConville children, Gerry Adams, and Brendan Hughes, it would’ve be a huge distraction if we suddenly cut away to Boston College, the subpoenas, all the rest of it. You want the thing to come to a finer emotional point at the end.

JZ: Figuring out the balance was one of the trickiest things about the show. As Patrick mentioned, the search for the Boston College tapes was something we ended up cutting. I actually wrote those scenes, and I liked it, but it didn’t belong in the show.

PRK: It’s funny because I actually had this problem when I was writing the book. For one thing, in real life, there were too many prison breaks, and I remember thinking, God, can I just do one more? But there’s some magical number of prison breaks that you can realistically have in a book, beyond which you’re just getting greedy and it starts to feel deadening. There was a similar issue here. Like Dolours, Brendan also went on a hunger strike, and that experience absolutely shaped who he was. In those scenes, where we see Tom Vaughan-Lawlor brilliantly playing the older Brendan, who he is in those scenes is, in part, a function of his hunger strike. Josh and I talked about this to no end, but we ultimately concluded that all it’s gonna do is step on the power of the Price sisters’ hunger strike episode.

Tell me about how you handled that. In many ways, the series hinges on that episode.
JZ: From the beginning, we wanted to avoid having a scene where you see British bureaucrats discussing Dolours and Marian while they were on hunger strike. We wanted to narrow the aperture very tightly on the sisters and get inside that experience — particularly what it felt like to push your beliefs to the absolute limit. By this point, Dolours has already done things for the cause that some people would find morally indefensible, and this was a moment where she was turning violence inside out and using it against herself.

Then we land at this idea, as Patrick said, where you were supposed to die but you didn’t. Now you’re a martyr who lived. That’s why the episode starts with Aunt Bridie because Aunt Bridie lives in a kind of half-life after she loses her hands and eyes to a bomb. That idea resonated for us: that Dolours would be entering a kind of half-life afterwards, which Patrick very rightly described as the hangover of what we’d seen before.

PRK: When these episodes were just bullet points on a whiteboard, we talked about the shape and feel of them, and there was always a sense that episode five, which depicts the Old Bailey bombing, was supposed to be big and expansive. These were parochial kids who grew up in a parochial time in a parochial place, and they get off the plane in London and see that it’s actually this big, dazzling city. It’s this weird paradox: You’ve come to destroy the city, but it’s kind of a good time — which is the reason she goes to the play and they go out.

The idea was that episode five would have this Michael Mann energy to it. It’s like a procedural, a heist. They’re there, they’re going to plant the bombs, and you’re going to get caught up in it. Then you get the devastating moment when the bomb goes off. On some level, there was a kind of naïveté they hadn’t reckoned with: What if we get caught? But also, What are we doing here? Are you really gonna injure 200 people — maim them, blind them? Then, after that expansive episode, the idea was to compress back down with episode six. Suddenly, you’re in a tunnel, a cocoon. In the earliest days, what had been sketched out was driving towards having those two different feelings in those two episodes.

One of the stickier things Say Nothing grapples with is this ambiguity around armed struggle. Patrick, you work through it more in the book but never land on a strong judgment around the efficacy and morality of political violence. How did you approach that tone in the adaptation?
JZ: Patrick’s book tells a very emotional story while maintaining a journalistic neutrality. Obviously, a TV drama is very different than a book. You’re in the characters’ heads from moment to moment. You’re seeing events from their perspective, so one would think you would start to identify with them. Our idea was that sometimes you would identify with the characters and sometimes you wouldn’t. We do hope that people would come away with mixed feelings about the question of whether you can have peace without armed conflict. We wanted to maintain, as best we could, that same sort of neutrality when it came to some of the bigger ethical questions.

PRK: There is obviously a vast literature on The Troubles. When I was writing the book, a lot of what I had read and seen felt a little caricatured — that the Troubles was a subject people disagreed very strongly on and where both sides seemed to be very convinced of their point of view — whereas what I felt was this intense ambivalence. I find it really hard to subscribe to one point of view or another. So the approach in the book was: I want to get so close to these people that your nose is pressed right up against the human ambiguity of it. I would often hear from readers who describe a kind of uncomfortable experience where they find themselves rooting for Brendan Hughes and then they turn a page and he sets off 18 bombs in Belfast. You feel your stomach drop.

I wanted that because I felt there’s an honesty there. You’re not saying, “Brendan Hughes is an evil guy who I would never relate to in any way.” Nor are you saying, “He’s such a charismatic guy that I’ll co-sign anything he does.” To me, that feels very true to life. This series is not a work of political science. It’s not even an argument. What it’s trying to do is explore the lives of these characters, sort through them, look at the underlying issues.

But listen, I suspect people who watch the series will sometimes really strongly disagree about their feelings about the different characters and what to make of the decisions they make at different times. I would welcome that. I’d be horrified if people came out of it with a monochromatic view of any of those characters.

Yet, there are some things both the book and the show are not ambiguous about, like whether Gerry Adams was in the IRA and that Marian Price was the person responsible for Jean McConville’s killing. My understanding is that there’s still some public dispute around both those points, and it’s quite something to see the show make visually concrete what remains somewhat contested.
JZ: The decision to name Marian Price as the shooter of Jean McConville was vetted carefully and fact-checked in the way that, as a journalist, you would fact-check anything you were publishing or make into a show. It had been confirmed by multiple sources. Patrick is someone with an incredible amount of journalistic integrity, so he’s not going to write something like that unless he knows it’s true. And I would not put something of that magnitude in a script or on television without believing it to be true.

PRK: You’re making such a nuanced point here, but I would quibble a tiny bit. From where I sit, there isn’t any ambiguity about whether Gerry Adams was in the IRA. And I also don’t think there’s any ambiguity on whether Marian Price was the person who shot Jean McConville. But what I hear you saying, which is a slightly different point, is, it’s one thing to marshal the evidence and to have me be the journalistic interpolating voice who says, “This is what I think, and here’s why I think it.” But it’s another thing to take me out of the equation.

That’s exactly what I mean. Also, they’re both still very much alive.
PRK: To me, the answer would be different for the two of them. In Marian’s case, when I was working on the book and came to this conclusion, I wrote to her and her lawyer saying, “Hey, I’m gonna publish a book in which I say that you killed Jean McConville. I really want to include a denial from you.” And she didn’t respond. I wrote back repeatedly. I wrote certified mail to the lawyer so I know he got it. There was actually a six-month period when they knew I was gonna say this and they didn’t deny it. They did end up denying it after the book came out, and we included that denial at the end of the show. I have a very high level of certainty about this, and we wouldn’t have done it if we all didn’t collectively feel the same way.

I think it’s actually the most sympathetic portrayal that Marian could possibly hope for. I think we’ll get a critique from the other side saying, “I know who Marian Price is and what she did, and you guys made too human a portrait of this person in light of what she did.” With Adams, I don’t know. In theory, he could take issue with any particular thing in the show. I mean, he takes issue with the whole premise of the project, right, because he still maintains he was “never in the IRA” in the first place.

Did you make any contact with Adams’s people?
PRK: I did when I was working on the book. But we didn’t reach back out while making the series. We’ll see how he responds to the show, but my hunch is that he’ll do what he did with the book — which is to never speak of it. It’s fitting in light of the title.

The show’s coming out during a sensitive time. You’ve been working on this adaptation for five years, and questions around political violence are ever-present, but it’s hard not to feel a strong sense that the context around the show has shifted significantly with the Israel-Gaza conflict. How do you think about that change in the show’s weight?
JZ: We really wanted to ask questions about political violence rather than provide easy answers. People should draw their own conclusions if they feel there are parallels to what’s happening now. But the idea that we could be on the edge of real political violence was ever-present throughout the writing and filming. There has been no shortage of unrest during the five years of putting the show together. When I was writing in Los Angeles, it was after some of the Black Lives Matter protests. Armored personnel car carriers drove down Melrose. There were protesters in the streets. Some of us were going to those protests, and we’d see that the person holding the bullhorn would be 17 years old, and there would be tanks and men with riot shields and iconography that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Northern Ireland. That was the thing that compelled us: What would it be like to be that kid?

PRK: The book came out about five years ago, and as it’s been translated into other languages, I’ve been fascinated by how people in different countries read it through the prism of their own history. I’ve been to Colombia twice now. I was in Catalonia this summer. They all see it in a different way. As Josh is saying, there were all these experiences happening in the United States while the show was being written that refracted through this story in interesting ways. So in terms of Gaza, the student protests, the state of high anxiety — the only certainty for the week after the election, when the show will be coming out, is that we don’t really know what the world is going to look like. But I can tell you there will be a sense of a kind of intractable divide in the country. In all these ways, this series has something to say, but I feel, as we all feel pretty strongly, that we don’t want to reduce it to a bumper sticker or a tweet. There’s no simple message. The hope is for it to be a prism that can give insight into some of these issues by looking at a different conflict in another place, in another time.