Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope: How the story of a girl from Cork became a massive Irish TV hit
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SEÁNA KERSLAKE had her first inkling that her life had changed when a woman stopped her in the street to ask for a selfie. “She’d approached me for directions. Then she said, ‘My boyfriend will be here in five minutes — can we get a photograph’?”
The 25-year-old Tallaght actress’s ticket to overnight fame was Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope — an RTÉ comedy that not only delivered chuckles by the barrel but also offered an unflinching millennial perspective on modern Irish life.
Shortly to return for a second season, the series evoked the Ireland of nose-bleed rents, job stresses — and the pressure to always present the best version of yourself on social media.
As out of control twenty-something Aisling, Kerslake found a way to be both funny and honest. The character was introduced as a stereotypical 24-hour party person — up all night clubbing and then, at work next day, sneaking away from her desk quietly throw up in the toilet.
But this was revealed to be just the first layer of a nuanced portrayal. Aisling wasn’t just grabbing life by the scruff. She was an alcoholic in the making who’d become fixated on her friendship with Danielle, a student artist who, if she enjoyed swigging shots as enthusiastically as her pal, lacked Aisling’s self-destructive tendencies.
The show was an immediate sensation on its release in 2016 and has gone on to have a second life, airing first on BBC Three and then on Netflix (where it has built big word of mouth fanbase).
“It’s very bingeable,” says Kerslake, whose west Dublin accent couldn’t be further removed from the Cork lilt she summons portraying Mallow-born Aisling.
“We’re glad people enjoy the first season so much that was demand for a second. They liked or saw something in the characters — they wanted to see more.”
Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, written by Mallow native Stefanie Preissner, is in many ways quintessentially Irish, and it’s easy to imagine some of the jokes wafting over the heads over an international audience. However, its chronicling of the purgatorial aspects of life before 30 are universal, Kerslake believes.
“The themes of friendship and of the difficulties of growing up — those apply everywhere,” she says. “It’s quite Irish in one sense but everyone has a friend like these characters.”
Kerslake was regarded as a rising star even before Can’t Cope. She gained acclaim for her role in independent dramedy A Date For Mad Mary — surely the first romcom set in Drogheda — and recently appeared at the Old Vic in London in a production of Joe Penhall’s Mood Music, alongside Ben Chaplin and Jemma Redgrave.
Season two of Can’t Cope begins with Danielle attending college in Vancouver while still unemployed Aisling is stuck living at home with her parents in Mallow. And while Kerslake’s character may be slightly older, it’s unclear if she’s any wiser.
“She is still trying to stay very current with social media,” says the actress. “She has a tendency to overshare and to attempt to present an image of herself.
“She’d be out drinking but the next day will put up a picture of protein porridge, which she didn’t even eat. But she wants people to think she has. She is trying to live a very fit and healthy lifestyle in parallel with a drunk, binging lifestyle.”
The Cork accent has not been well served by Irish television. So it was surprising just how accurately Kerslake and her co-star Nika McGuigan, as Danielle, nailed the Leeside lilt.
“It was very important for us to get it right,” says Kerslake. “A lot of people from the crew were from Cork and the actress who plays my sister is from Mallow. We’d record and listen to their voices. We also tried to listen to radio from Cork — but the accents seemed to be quite transatlantic and not very Mallow.”
Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope basked in her instant acclaim when it aired for the first time. Kerslake, however, was too nervous to follow the social media thumbs up in real time.
She will once more be figuratively looking the other way when series two debuts.
“The reaction is so instant now,” she says. “When people watch First Dates, they do so with Twitter in their hands. The producer was watching the live feed and asked me if I wanted to know. I told her I’d rather not.
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One reason Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope chimed a chord, the cast believe, is because it spoke to the universal experience of feeling adrift in your 20s. That is hardly an original theme — Friends riffed on the same subject, as has Lena Dunham’s Girls. Nonetheless, Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope addressed it uncommon frankness.
“It’s a strange age,” says McGuigan, daughter of boxer Barry McGuigan. “You’re meant to be finished college — to have gone to university and started a job. Your friends have sort of become your family. They’re the people most prevalent in your life. And you have all the pluses and minuses that go with that.”
Along with suggesting that a funny RTE comedy isn’t a contradiction in terms, Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope has contributed to the curious cult that has formed around the Dublin nightclub Copper Face Jacks. The venue was famous prior to the series — but Can’t Cope nonetheless underscored its position as emblematic of millennial nightlife and dating rituals.
“I’d been to Coppers before Can’t Cope,” says Kerslake. “And I ended up going along afterwards. I was wearing a jumper and just on a night out. And I remember thinking, ‘what am I doing like?”
There and elsewhere she’s been approached by people who recognise something of themselves in Kerslake’s portrayal of Aisling as a good time girl gone bad. “They’d come up, ‘oh my God — I’m Aisling…’. Or, ‘my best friend is Aisling…I’m Danielle, the nice one’. It’s really nice to see people responding to it.”
Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope season two begins on RTÉ2 next Monday at 9.30pm
