'Say Nothing' Seeks to Tell a Nuanced, True Story of the Troubles (2024)

The story of Say Nothing began over a decade ago for author Patrick Radden Keefe. In 2013, he read about a woman named Dolours Price, a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who was arrested and imprisoned for her role in the 1973 bombings of Old Bailey in London.

"There was an obituary in the New York Times," he recalls to T&C, "and in that obituary, it talked about how in her later years, she started to have misgivings about some of the things that, as time wore on, she looked back with a slightly jaundice eye—in light of the Good Friday agreement and all the things that they'd done during the Troubles. That was the thing that drew me to this story in the first place: the idea of a woman being in the IRA, and then also the idea of how does a middle-aged person with a family post-conflict feel about the things she did when she was 22?"

Inspired to learn more about Dolours, Radden Keefe would go on write a bestselling non-fiction book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which follows the story of Dolours and her sister, Marian, how they joined the IRA, and what they did as members. Radden Keefe also focuses on Dolours's decision in her later years to participate in the Belfast Project, an oral history project about the Troubles based out of Boston College. The Price sisters' experiences are told in parallel to the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widowed mother of ten, and her family's search for answers over the decades. Over the course of the Troubles, McConville was one of 17 people who "disappeared," believed to be murdered by republican paramilitaries, often referred to as the Disappeared.

The stories of the Prices and McConville—which intersect in shocking ways—have now been adapted into a nine-episode limited series on FX (streaming now on Hulu). "Our guiding principle was to show the seduction of radical politics and also the cost of those politics, and really making sure that the audience comes away with hopefully a better understanding of both," creator Joshua Zetumer tells T&C. "On the one hand, no matter which character we're talking about, we wanted people to come away knowing why a young person might get caught up in a cause, but also make sure that they were considering the terrible cost of political violence both for the victims and for the perpetrators."

As viewers watch, it's hard not to pause the show and Google: Did that really happen? Is Say Nothing a true story? The answer, broadly, is yes. The events depicted in the show are all rooted in historical fact. "One of the biggest departures is that when you work in nonfiction, everything has to be factual and true, and you have to be able to really show where it is that you got it. Whereas I generally think that in drama, that just doesn't work. If you tried to do that kind of adaptation of the book, the show would be unwatchable," Radden Keefe says.

From the show's initial development, Radden Keefe was extremely involved, and ultimately served as an executive producer on the project. Keeping the plot as "factual as possible" was important to him. "In the places where you need condense characters or you need to imagine what two people would've said in a conversation that we don't have a record of, I thought of it as sort of when you're a kid, you color between the lines. We have the outline in black and white of the facts, and it's okay to embellish—but I felt like you have to embellish inside the lines of what we know to be the case," he says.

He adds, "what that meant was vetting the scenes so it didn't feel as though the characters were saying things that their real life counterparts wouldn't, or doing things in a significant way that they wouldn't."

The Say Nothing creative team kept the lives of real people featured in the series—sisters Dolours and Marian Price, Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, Jean McConville, and one of Jean's daughters, Helen McConville—in the forefront of their minds as they worked on the show. "I thought about these people a lot as we were working on the series," Radden Keefe says. "I went [director] Michael Lennox to Belfast to actually liaise with some of the families of the Disappeared, to keep people posted on what we were doing and say, 'let us inform you. We want to tell you here to answer any questions you have.'"

For Lennox, who grew up in West Belfast and directs four out of the show's nine episodes, leaning on historical research and the lived experiences of his community was critical. "I know a lot of people who can give firsthand access in terms of how we approach something truthfully and visually." The whole Say Nothing team, he adds, "just had an absolute wealth of knowledge and wanted to make it as truthful as possible on screen, especially when it's about real people and some real people here are still alive."

Yet ultimately, Say Nothing isn't intended for the people who it depicts. "Both in the writing of the book and the making of the show, you're not making it for those people specifically," Radden Keefe says, referring to the Prices and the McConvilles, among the other main characters. "In a strange way, the people who are closest to it—and in some cases these are the most traumatic events of their lives—are going to have necessarily a very fraught relationship with any kind of dramatic presentation of their lives." He recalls the moment when the trailer came out, and a friend of Dolours Price texted him asking why it shows her smoking, because she never smoked. "It's exactly that sort of thing where, to me, that feels like a kind of minor transgression in a drama, but for somebody who knows the person, that dissonance is really significant," he says.

The ambition of Say Nothing, Radden Keefe adds, "is to tell a story that's really nuanced, and in the case of the victims in particular, just incredibly compassionate." While working on the show, he notes, he did speak to Helen McConville. "Your hope is that people can see that we really tried to do this story justice and that we were very careful and kind of considered and compassionate in our approach," he says.

Throughout the nine episodes of Say Nothing, it's clear the creative team, cast, and everyone did just that—and were thinking deeply about the real people at the heart of the historical drama. "Given how sensitive the story is, we really tried to approach every element of the story—whether we're talking about the victims or the perpetrators—with the utmost care, which is one of the reasons we spent so long making the show," Zetumer says. "I hope that sensitivity comes across, especially if they watch the entirety of the show."

All nine episodes of Say Nothing are now streaming on Hulu. Watch now