Mairéad Tyers plays young women who are selfish, frightened and easy to like, and she shows the fright only in the half-second after the joke. On the strength of Extraordinary, she is better than most of what she has so far been given.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Jen in Extraordinary (2023) get away with something, a lie to her mother, say, and then watch the half-second after the laugh. That is where Tyers keeps the performance. Jen is vain, broke and unkind to the people who put up with her, and Tyers never once asks us to forgive her; she lets the fright show, briefly and often, then takes it away again before anyone can make a fuss. We watched a woman treat her best friend as a free counselling service and found we were on her side anyway, and we were slightly annoyed with ourselves about it.
The career is short. Her first screen credit was Auntie Eileen in Kenneth Branagh's Belfast (2021), taken while she was still at RADA, and most of it was cut. There was a small part in Tell Me Everything (2022) and some fringe theatre. Then Emma Moran cast her as the only person in London without a superpower, and sixteen episodes over two series (2023 to 2024) did what a dozen supporting roles would not have. Since then she has appeared in the thriller Dead Shot (2023), the period comedy My Lady Jane (2024), as a newspaper editor in the Irish dark comedy Obituary (2025) and in The Walsh Sisters (2025), with the lead in The Rachel Incident to come. We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to a view on them.
What she does, as far as one performance lets us judge, is play the messy twentysomething without the usual safety net. Most actors in that position tell us early that the character is nicer than she behaves. Tyers does not. She keeps her own Irish accent, from Cork, and lets Jen be Irish without the script ever being about it, which gives the character a particularity the show's gags do not always match. Moran's writing is at its best when it gives Tyers someone to bounce off, chiefly Sofia Oxenham's Carrie and Siobhán McSweeney, and at its thinnest when it leaves her holding a plot up alone. Our complaint about Extraordinary was never with her. It was that the stories underneath her were thinner than she deserved, and two series did not fix it.
She has told interviewers she knows how many actresses before her were handed parts not written as well, and does not want to take that for granted. Fair enough. The question now is whether anyone will write her another part built around what she can do, or whether the superhero sitcom turns out to be the one time it happened. The Rachel Incident is a lead, and that is where we will find out.
Biography
Máiréad Tyers is an Irish actress. She was born on 5 January 1998 in Ballinhassig, County Cork, and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, graduating with a BA in acting in 2020.
Tyers is best known for playing Jen in the Disney+ series Extraordinary (2023–2024). She appeared as Auntie Eileen in the film Belfast (2021), Carol in Dead Shot (2023) and Susannah in My Lady Jane (2024). For her performance in Extraordinary, she received a nomination for the British Academy Television Award for Best Female Comedy Performance.
