Eileen Walsh on Small Things Like These: ‘In any religion, it’s the women who’ll be controlled’

When Eileen Walsh was a young girl in 1980s Cork, her family had very little money but “an awful lot of love”. Her mother raised the six children and her father delivered coal in the city, which was also home to Bessborough, a church-run institution for mothers and babies. It was one of the largest of its kind in Ireland; more than 900 infants died there.

“Growing up, life was all very education focused and very religious,” she says over video call from Dublin. “We did the rosary every night. It sounds so old-fashioned now.” Walsh could just as well be describing the family from her new film, Small Things Like These, based on the tiny but powerful 2021 Claire Keegan novel and set in County Wexford in 1985. At once so quiet and blazing with rage, it stars Cillian Murphy as a coal merchant, Bill Furlong, and Walsh as his stay-at-home wife, Eileen. The couple and their daughters are trying to keep their heads down and get by, living just streets away from an imposing mother and baby home run by nuns. “I know the story of Small Things deep down in my bones,” says Walsh.

These mother and baby homes, also known as Magdalene laundries, were the setting for two centuries of systematic abuse in Ireland. As a punishment for having children outside of marriage (or being orphaned, disabled, or rape victims), “fallen” women and their babies were sent to these workhouses, locked away and enslaved by nuns. The system went unchallenged until the Nineties, when the first mass graves were discovered at institutions across the country. The last laundry didn’t close until 1996. And the deep wound in Irish society is only just starting to scab over. It’s a subject matter Walsh has returned to again and again over the past two decades. In 2002, she played an unmarried mother with learning difficulties who was beaten by nuns and abused by a priest in Peter Mullan’s howl-of-a-film The Magdalene Sisters. It was met with rage and condemnation by the Vatican at the time – but has since become a staple of the Irish history curriculum.

She came back to the topic in 2022 for Ann, a film about the life of schoolgirl Ann Lovett who, in 1984 at the age of 15, hid her pregnancy in a small town in the backwaters of Ireland. She ended up giving birth in front of a grotto of the Virgin Mary, next to a church, in the middle of winter. She and the baby both died. “The town was flooded with journalists, but everyone just locked down,” says Walsh. “Nobody said anything. And the nuns who taught her said nobody ever knew.” She scoffs. “I mean, she was nine months pregnant going to school.”

And this won’t necessarily be the last time Walsh revisits the nation’s collective trauma, because there are always more stories coming up through the cracks. “They’re always about suppression and that furious anger around it,” the 47-year-old says. “And people are feeling emboldened to speak.” Last year, Ruth Wilson starred in The Woman in the Wall, a primetime BBC drama about the laundries; numerous survivors were consulted on the script. And Walsh cites the case of Noelle Brown, a woman who was born at the Bessborough laundry in Cork, and later adopted, who’s had to fight to see her personal health records, after being denied access to her files for decades.

“There has also been talk of a lot of the babies being used for vaccine trials,” says Walsh. “It’s so scary what power they had. So, for me, it just feels vital to keep visiting it. There have been so many cases about the mistreatment of young mothers – in New Zealand, there was a whole mass grave of babies discovered. It is a universal story of power and the mistreatment of women. In any religion, it tends to be the women that will be controlled.” In February 2025, exhumation will begin on a mass grave at a former mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway, where the bodies of 796 babies and children were discovered in disused sewage tanks in 2017.

Even though the Irish are great storytellers, they are not, Walsh says, “great talkers”. Talking “opens up possibilities of truth and secrets coming out”. For this reason, in Small Things Like These, so much is left unsaid between Bill and Eileen Furlong. They silently carry their shame and Catholic guilt. “The fear of the church was tremendous,” says Walsh. “The sexual control that the church had over everybody meant that there was an embarrassment about even being pregnant because that meant” – she drops her voice to a whisper – “you’d had sex. Even if you were married and it was your duty to God and to Ireland to have as many babies as possible, still, when you did your duty, you were a bit dirty.”

Perhaps one of the most powerful scenes in Small Things Like These is one where Bill and Eileen are sitting in the warm glow of their bedroom. They finally talk, and really see each other. Bill is traumatised from getting a glimpse into the atrocities happening at the nearby mother and baby home, and Eileen tells him, in order to protect their family: “To get on in life, there are some things you have to ignore.” It’s a tender, intimate scene. In one moment, Walsh takes her bra off underneath her night clothes, pulling it through her sleeve. “Women of a certain age have such a fear of being seen naked that they will undress underneath clothes,” says Walsh. “I remember thinking, I hope that makes it to the edit, because for me, it’s hugely important that idea that you don’t want to be seen as flaunting.”

Walsh felt safe to improvise that moment because there was an open dialogue on set between her, Murphy and director Tim Mielants. But that’s not always been the case. “I’ve had experiences where my opposite lead will talk to the director instead of coming to me, and they’ll be like, ‘We can try and do this to get this out of her.’” A famous example of this is Dustin Hoffman smashing a glass against a wall in Kramer vs Kramer without warning, to get a raw reaction out of Meryl Streep. She ended up with glass in her hair. “I find that very frustrating,” says Walsh. “You need to trust that I can get there. Otherwise, it feels like there’s an unfair sense of, ‘Oh, watch what I can do to her.’ So then I’m not partaking. I’m being the victim within that scene.” How has she reacted in the past when it’s happened? “I am a demon for humour in the rehearsal room, and so if I feel uncomfortable, I’ll probably make a joke about it. I mean, come on. Let’s just call the bear out. I definitely bring something of value – so why don’t you include me in it?”

Murphy and Walsh have what she describes as a “no chemistry kind of chemistry”. The sort of closeness and familiarity you’d have if, like the two actors, there were 30 years of friendship behind you. They first met in 1996 when they were teenagers, and starred in Enda Walsh’s play Disco Pigs together. The intense two-hander, about Irish misfits Runt and Pig, started its life at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. It was, she says, “the perfect summer”. And then the whole world wanted a piece of it – and it ended up touring internationally for two years. There was something in the air during the tour: Walsh met her husband Stuart McCaffer, a barber who cut her hair when the show went to Edinburgh, and Murphy met his wife, Yvonne McGuinness. The play’s writer and director both met their partners during the run too. “Then, like anything of mad intensity, it kind of broke up badly,” she says. “It could have done more touring, but Cill and I had both said we would never do it without each other, and we both got film jobs around the same time. So we called time on it.”

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That wasn’t the end of the story for Disco Pigs, though. In 2001, Kirsten Sheridan adapted the play into a film. Murphy reprised his role as Pig, but Walsh wasn’t even asked to audition for Runt. She only found out the film was happening when someone in the street told her they’d heard about the auditions. “It was a real burn for me,” she says, playing with her fringe. “I was very young, and I had thought that it was two of us, me and Cill, do or die. And that we would, of course, play it. I didn’t really know the business.” The actors shared the same agent then, and Walsh was “so hurt on so many levels”. “Like, why didn’t somebody tell me? At least tell me that they weren’t going to go for me? But I couldn’t even get in the room, you know? There’s something about carrying a baby for that long and then not getting to actually deliver it, it felt incredibly emotional. But at the same time, it’s a good lesson early on that this business is hard.”

An actor called Elaine Cassidy was cast in the film instead, and Walsh ended up working with her on a play a few years ago. “It was about two weeks until the end of the run before we had the bravery to mention it to each other,” she says, her smiling eyes peeping out through oversized glasses. “Isn’t that funny?”

Small Things Like These felt like a full-circle moment for the actor, not only because Murphy was her co-star, but because it was adapted for the screen by Enda Walsh, the same writer as Disco Pigs. As she approached filming certain scenes, Walsh remembers thinking, “I hope I can f***ing act!” In fairness, it is a change of gear from some of the work she’s done in recent years, from comedy-drama Women on the Verge to the romantic anthology series Modern Love.

Walsh suits comedy very, very well. She gave the most hilarious performance in the funniest show of 2015: Catastrophe. Walsh staggered, literally, onto Sharon Horgan’s Hackney-set comedy as Kate, a mum-on-the-run with a maniacal laugh who, in her own words, “follows her fanny”. “We are gonna have a legendary week,” she announces on arrival from Dublin. “First time away from the kids in five years. I don’t miss them! I f***ing love London!!!”

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As a mother to two girls – Tippy is 18, Ethel 15 – did Walsh find Kate’s relief at being away from the children relatable? “Um, yes! Have you spoken to any mother who hasn’t?” she laughs. “But there is such a caveat – I adore my girls.” She remembers the first time she ever left the children to work away. “Stuart is an amazing dad and husband – he can do it all single-handedly and is always preparing for my imminent death – but I remember meeting somebody and having this moment of going, ‘Wow, you don’t know that I am a mother. You’re just meeting me as me, the actor who’s in the room.’ I had a weird mind explosion about that at the time.”

Another time, when she was working away, her daughters constructed a fake mum, stuffing duvets into Walsh’s clothes. “They sent me a picture of fake me sitting on the couch, with a balloon for a head and a wig on top, with them going, ‘It’s fine. We’re OK!’ I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus, this is f***ing hellish!’” She shakes her head. “They’re, erm, very creative.”

Walsh is certainly a long way from 1980s Cork now, but she’s still got stories to tell, and a growing family with an awful lot of love.

‘Small Things Like These’ is released in cinemas on 1 November