Ready for your next TV obsession? If, like most of the world, you were completely enamoured with BBC Three’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People back in 2020 (Paul Mescal! Daisy Edgar-Jones! Connell’s chain! The yearning!), we have good news for you. The people who brought you that show – including Room and Frank director Lenny Abrahamson – are back with a new instalment in the Rooney-verse: Conversations With Friends. Adapting the Irish author’s debut the series follows Dublin student Frances (played by newcomer Alison Oliver), her best friend Bobbi (Sasha Lane), and married couple Melissa (Jemima Kirke) and Nick (Joe Alwyn), the latter of which Frances starts an illicit affair with.
After the star-making turns of Mescal and Edgar-Jones in Normal People, Abrahamson was aware of the importance of getting the casting of that core quartet right. He discovered Oliver, perfect for protagonist Frances, pretty fast, but needed to be sure he could find a Nick to match her first. “I never like to cast somebody almost until I can cast everybody,” he explains. “It has to balance.” Lucky, then, that he came across Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Souvenir Part II star Joe Alwyn. “He was quite an early read, and I just thought there was so much soulfulness in him,” Abrahamson recalls. “It's very important, because you've got an older man and a younger woman, and in the novel, the power balance can flip the less conventional way. Joe and Alison really found that.”
With the same director, same sense of intimacy, and using source material from the same author, Conversations With Friends has all the ingredients to make Normal People fans very happy – but it’s not a cookie-cutter replica of the record-breaking romance, with its own distinct narrative, characters and visual style. “Conversations is that bit gnarlier as a story,” says Abrahamson. “There’s clearly a family resemblance between the shows, but I feel like they’re cousins rather than siblings.” Whatever the relation, we’ll be joining the conversation in May, when the series arrives on BBC Three.
Read Empire’s full story on Conversations With Friends – plus features on Doctor Strange, The Northman, Everything Everywhere All At Once and more – in the new issue, out on Thursday 17 March. You can order a copy online here.