Eva Birthistle plays the sister whose trouble is at home rather than at the graveside, and she never asks to be noticed. It has made her the steadiest thing in more than one ensemble, and once, for Ken Loach, a lead.
Fi1m perspective
Five sisters stand at a grave on the coast outside Dublin and fail to look sorry. Sharon Horgan's Eva is tired from being in charge; Sarah Greene's Bibi wants the dead man dead and says so; Eve Hewson's Becka is a mess. Eva Birthistle's Ursula is the one whose trouble is elsewhere, in a husband, Donal Flynn (Jonjo O'Neill), who deserves better, and she plays it as something the others know and do not mention. When the four of them are talking over each other in a kitchen, or swimming off the rocks in the cold, we laughed more than at most comedies, and part of the reason is that Birthistle is never the one reaching for the laugh. Somebody has to be the sister the joke lands on.
The career has been long and mostly unshowy. She started with a recurring part in the Irish soap Glenroe (1995–1998), then Ken Loach gave her the lead as Roisin Hanlon in Ae Fond Kiss... (2004), the film that brought her attention beyond Ireland. Loach wants actors who behave rather than perform, and what critics have noticed in her ever since is that she does exactly that. Breakfast on Pluto (2005) and Brooklyn (2015), where she plays Georgina, were supporting parts; The Last Kingdom (2015–2022) gave her Hild, a nun turned warrior, across several seasons; Bad Sisters (2022) gave her the family.
What works is the refusal to underline. She is cast, over and over, as women on the margins of a family or a faith or a marriage, and she plays them as people who have been there a while and have stopped remarking on it. What does not work, if we are honest, is harder to name, because she has rarely been asked to carry anything alone since 2004, and a performer who is always in the ensemble is a performer whose limits are hard to test. In our own review of Bad Sisters she earned a sentence where Horgan and Hewson earned paragraphs. That is partly how the series is built and partly how Birthistle chooses to stand in it.
She has started choosing more. She wrote and directed a short, Kathleen Was Here (2020), and expanded it into a feature, Kathleen Is Here (2024), about life after foster care. Asked what draws her, she has said the stories she wants to tell "generally involve individuals that are on the outside". That is where she has always stood on screen. The difference now is that she is picking the spot herself, and we are curious to see whether the eye behind the camera is as patient as the one in front of it.
Biography
Eva Birthistle is an Irish actress and writer. She was born on 16 April 1974 in Bray, County Wicklow, and trained at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin.
She is known for her role as Roisin in Ae Fond Kiss... (2004), for which she received the London Film Critics Circle British or Irish Actress of the Year award in 2004. Other credits include Breakfast on Pluto (2005), Brooklyn (2015) and the recurring role of Hild in The Last Kingdom (2015–2022). She stars as Ursula Flynn in the series Bad Sisters (2022–). She has twice won the IFTA Best Actress in a Leading Role (Film) award.
Birthistle has also written and directed the short film Kathleen Was Here (2020) and the feature Kathleen Is Here (2024).
