She shot to fame as the frank and feisty Erin in one of TV’s most-beloved shows. Now Saoirse-Monica Jackson is building on the global success of Derry Girls with a leading role in a new series on Netflix. The Decameron offers a very different but no less lively sense of dramedy.
Set during the height of the Black Plague in 14th-century Florence, the series centres on a group of nobles and their servants, invited to sit out the pestilence with a wine-drenched holiday in a lavish Italian villa. But what promises to be a fun romp in the hills of Tuscany descends into a scramble for survival. The series is inspired by the 14th short-story collection of the same name.
“I think it’s a really special show - I feel like it exists in its own tone. The writer Kathleen Jordan and the entire team have made such an ambitious venture into genre,” says Jackson of the series, in which she plays Misia, handmaiden to Zosia Mamet’s demanding Pampinea. “She’s a really fun, very multi-dimensional character - it’s like she nearly Benjamin Buttons backwards through the show.
She starts like a jaded and put-upon, massively oppressed woman. It’s a nice venture of freedom that we go on with her. “She is obviously lower class, given that she’s a handmaiden, and I just loved the depiction of that character within the script.
Kathleen Jordan had said to me that quite often on television, we see working-class people, or people that are in roles of servitude, being portrayed as this s.