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Irish Mirror
Irish Mirror
Entertainment
Sandra Mallon

Hollywood actor Ben Stiller congratulates Irish director on winning major IFTA award

Hollywood A-lister Ben Stiller was among the well wishers congratulating director Aoife McArdle after she won IFTAs Rising Star award.

The Belfast director won the award at the ceremony on Sunday night at a star-studded ceremony at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Dublin.

Ben and Aoife worked together as directors on the series Severance on Apple TV – and Ben was among the first to tweet his congratulations to Aoife on Sunday night.

He wrote: “Congrats Aoife!!”

READ MORE: Ben Stiller's wife reveals how she 'found her way back to him' after secretly separating

Severance explores the idea of severing your work and personal personas, so that one has no memory of the other and the complications and dilemmas that come with that.

Irish director Aoife McArdle (IFTAs)

In January, Aoife told Belfast Live: "As soon as I read the script, I was really into it, I felt it was very me in a way that very few things are.

"I loved that it was so idiosyncratic, that it was an underdog story, that it was about people who were escaping trauma but ultimately the parallel reality of people wanting to sever their everyday lives from their working lives.

"The tragicomedy of that is very appealing to me because it's probably what a lot of us want to do sometimes, to not have one traumatise the other.

"The themes of what it means to be a work drone, working for this faceless machine, I think a lot of us feel like that way a lot of the time, especially any one of us who has done a job we don't like.

"There's so many moral questions that the show explores with that idea too."

The show has been a runaway success, garnering 14 Emmy nominations for its first season and the Directors Guild of America (voted for by other directors), nominating Aoife in the Dramatic Series category for her directorial work.

"I would never have dreamt that I would ever be anywhere near Hollywood, its funny, but it's just getting the opportunity to work with such incredible actors," she said.

"Christopher Walken, Patricia Arquette, they're just actors I've admired for so long, but you don't have time to be starstruck, it's such an intense way of working.

"Good TV drama takes every second of your time, so you don't really have time to think about how it is to be working with these big names until after it's all done.

"I want to work with people I respect and I've said yes when those opportunities come up and sometimes you say no when opportunities come up.

"You curate your own career in a way and you realise you have to do that."

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