The Northern Irish actor Lola Petticrew, whose profile is on the rise with the success of the Hulu thriller “Furious,” is a performer who seems largely incapable of falseness. Every emotion and expression Petticrew offers feels true. It said something about the methods of “Furious” — which uses erotic-thriller and horror conventions to tell a story about women’s fury and righteous vengeance — that there were moments when that believableness wavered; when the actor’s mindful approach was defeated by the contradictions of Catherine Grace, the damaged serial killer Petticrew was playing.
There were no such moments in two other recent series starring Petticrew: “Say Nothing,” which premiered on Hulu in 2024 to general acclaim, and “Trespasses,” which had its U.S. premiere on Sunday on PBS. (It’s also available to stream at pbs.org.) Both were close to home for Petticrew, who was born and raised in West Belfast; both were set in or near Belfast and partly (“Say Nothing”) or wholly (“Trespasses”) filmed in Northern Ireland.
And they were close to home in another way: Both were stories of the Troubles, the three decades of bombing and bloodshed that wracked Northern Ireland beginning in the 1960s. In them, Petticrew played Roman Catholic women whose lives were torn apart by the conflict, and who were forced into agonizing reckonings with their actions and their loyalties. Speaking of “Say Nothing” in an interview with The New York Times, Petticrew said, “It felt like a lot of the questions that were raised were questions that I, as a young adult, have about how we heal and move on from a traumatic recent past.”
In the nine-episode “Say Nothing,” based on a nonfiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe, Petticrew plays Dolours Price, a Belfast woman who joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army and served seven years in prison for her role in its 1973 car bombings in London. Price remained fiercely loyal to the republican cause, but the series shows her in later life struggling with her memories of the part she played in the deaths of colleagues and neighbors who were judged to be informants.
The hard-edged historical drama of “Say Nothing” and the sensational serial-killer story of “Furious” are poles apart, but the characters Petticrew plays in them have a lot in common. Both are shaped by physical and emotional trauma; both take violent action in response; both are angry, defiant and impetuous; and both exhibit a sharp, sardonic disdain for their tormentors.
The conviction of these women is palpable and human; Petticrew does not come across as just a mouthpiece or, in the case of “Furious,” as an action-thriller puppet. And Petticrew is alive behind the eyes — both Dolours Price and (for the most part) Catherine Grace have a perspective on their own extremes, an ability to see the absurdities and inconsistencies of their situations. (In “Say Nothing,” the older Price, who is caught up in controversies that sometimes pit her against former allies, is played by Maxine Peake.)
“Trespasses,” which was shown on Britain’s Channel 4 in November, is yet another kind of show, one that many viewers may find more appealing than either “Say Nothing” or “Furious”: It’s a star-crossed wartime romance. (It’s based on a novel by Louise Kennedy.) Petticrew plays Cushla Lavery, a young schoolteacher who works part time in her family’s pub, where the clientele in 1975 includes the British soldiers on occupation duty in the town.
When Cushla falls hard for one of the pub’s patrons — Michael Agnew (Tom Cullen), a barrister who is older and married and, most dangerous of all, Protestant — the fault lines are not just religious or sectarian. He and his Protestant friends open up for her a new world of culture and peaceful, comfortable daily existence. Forced to keep the relationship on the down low because of Michael’s religion and marital status, Cushla begins to lead a strict double life, and the show carefully delineates her two environments.
The stronger portrait is of her everyday Catholic world: the stifling atmosphere of her school, where the children are terrorized by the priests and administrators; the frothing violence and abuse dispensed by the Protestant majority; and the tension of her home life with her mother (eloquently played by Gillian Anderson), a depressed alcoholic who has moments of grace and courage.
While thoroughly serious, “Trespasses” is a lush, well-made melodrama at heart, and its handling of the ironies of Cushla’s situation can be a little too neat; in the end, its grip on our emotions is more ephemeral than that of the weightier, more complex story in “Say Nothing.” But Petticrew’s task in it is, if anything, more difficult: Cushla is pulled in different directions by complicated, overlapping forces, and the consequences of her actions take on an even more tragic dimension because she is a well-meaning civilian rather than a combatant.
Petticrew communicates the joy — and sexual exhilaration — of Cushla’s time with Michael, and the blossoming of her confidence around his artistic (and sometimes naïvely pretentious) friends. And Petticrew conveys, just as adeptly, the frustration and sometimes rash determination that drive Cushla’s efforts on behalf of a mixed Catholic-Protestant family at her school that is subjected to constant attacks. These are two sides of the same life force, one that Petticrew is apparently able to tap into directly.
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