Actress Alison Oliver has opened up about the moment she met Taylor Swift while filming Conversation With Friends.
The Cork native plays the role of Frances in the latest TV instalment of Sally Rooney’s novels, which will air on RTE One on May 18.
Alison stars alongside superstar Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn and gushed how lovely the singer was when they met – but added it was a “surreal” moment.
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She said: “She’s so lovely. So it was just really nice. We didn’t have a night out. I just got to see her when I was meeting Joe.”
Conversation With Friends tells the story of a 21-year-od Frances as a college student in Dublin who navigates a series of relationships that force her to confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.
Alison also has several sex scenes with Swift’s boyfriend, but she said she felt a “sense of security” doing those intimate scenes, which were led by intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien.
“What I found really interesting actually is we would talk a lot about the quality of intimacy and what’s different about the initial intimate scene to the third or the fourth scenes.
“(We were asking) what story are we trying to tell with it, rather than it being a dialogue scene.
“As you saw after Normal People, the way they handled those scenes was so incredibly sensitive and respectful and beautiful that going into this I already felt such a sense of security because I was working with the same people who handled that.”
She admitted she was left “paralysed” when she landed the lead role as Frances in Conversation With Friends.
The next TV instalment from Sally Rooney is set to air on May 18 on Rte One and follows Frances, a 21-year-old college student in Dublin, as she navigates a series of relationships that force her to confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.
But Alison said she was left “paralysed” when her agent called her to tell she landed the role, admitting she sat on her bed and stared at her wall.
Speaking about seeing a missed call from her agent, Alison said: “I was thinking, ‘what is this?’. Because I had only auditioned for one thing at the time and I was like, ‘there’s no other reason why she’d be ringing me’.
“But I still didn’t allow myself to get my hopes up. I rang her back and she just said it straight away.
“I was paralysed for a second. I couldn’t quite take it all in.
“I was completely shocked. I sat on a bed, and I just stared at my wall. I didn’t know what to do with myself at all.
“At the time it was confidential. I couldn’t tell my friends or anyone, so I just rang my family,” she told Sunday Independent’s People and Culture magazine.
She said her mother's phone rang out and when she got through to her father, he burst out laughing thinking it was a joke.
“He burst out laughing and he was saying, ‘you’re messing’. He thought I was having him on. And I was like, ‘no Dad I actually got it’.”
She said her father drove down to Cork’s marina, where her mother had been out for a walk to find her and tell her the good news.
“They were both just so thrilled. It was just this secretive time when only very few people knew.”
She admitted she feels pressure to do the series justice, after the global success of Normal People.
“I guess there is pressure to do it justice and give it the best shot I could.
“Because I’m working with people that I deeply admire and had admired even before I started this job. So, the stakes just felt so high in every respect,” she added.
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