Hazel Doupe

In Say Nothing (2024), Hazel Doupe makes Marian Price someone we want to keep watching, even when her certainty makes us uneasy. Alongside Lola Petticrew as Dolours, she gives the sisters a shared commitment that we can understand without accepting. We were unsettled by how readily we warmed to them, because liking their company made the violence harder to watch. Doupe does not need to make Marian agreeable to hold our attention. She is a substantial reason to recommend a good series whose wider story is less assured.

Her breakthrough came in Carmel Winters’ Float Like a Butterfly (2018), playing Frances, an Irish Traveller teenager determined to box. The physical commitment of that performance is worth remembering when so much of her work depends on quiet observation. As Char in Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother (2021), she brought that watchfulness to psychological horror. Eva Birthistle’s Kathleen Is Here (2024) returned her to a role she had played in a short, now following a young woman leaving care. Across her work, stillness and body language often have to communicate feelings that the dialogue leaves unspoken.

The limitation is that a guarded character can remain hard to know. In You Are Not My Mother, the restraint suits the unease, but it can also leave Char too distant. Stillness needs enough from the writing and the other actors to stop it becoming a mannerism. We would welcome a part that lets Doupe be more outspoken, without treating her control as something she needs to discard.

With Petticrew in Say Nothing, she has someone whose performance gives us just as much reason to stay. Joshua Zetumer’s series cannot bring everyone into focus across its nine episodes, and the sisters are more compelling than some of the stories around them. The two actors make that unevenness worth tolerating, though they cannot repair it. Start there, with the caveat that the programme is less consistent than its leads.