Alicia Silverstone doesn’t watch a lot of cozy crime dramas — but she knows a good one when it comes along.
“Being a mom and working this hard, your time is so limited, so TV and movies are not really a huge part of my life unless I’m watching something with my son,” says the Clueless alum, whose son Bear is 14.
But even before there was a script, she knew Acorn TV’s Irish Blood was something she wanted to be a part of.
“When I got involved, it was just an idea — maybe a few blurbs on a piece of paper. It was obviously very early stages of development,” Silverstone tells Entertainment Weekly. “And so they invited me to be a producer on it, and that gave me the opportunity to be involved with key creative decisions: hires, casting, and I worked on all of the scripts really, really extensively.”
On the new series (the first two episodes are out now), Silverstone plays Fiona, a successful lawyer whose life has been shaped by the fact her father left the family when she was 10 years old.
“She has a chip on her shoulder about this, and it has really been haunting her for years,” says Silverstone, who is the cover star of EW’s ’90s Issue. “I think what makes it so hard is that she and her dad were so close, and then he’s just gone one day so it doesn’t make any sense. It really, really disrupts her life.”
Irish Blood finds Fiona 30 years later, “and she’s a big lawyer,” Silverstone continues. “She has a strange relationship with men and is focused on her career — really she just doesn’t want to get hurt.”
After she receives a “strange” package from her father, “she goes to Ireland to try and figure it all out.”
The six-part series is most certainly a mystery, but “it’s quirky and funny and there’s a lot of heart,” explains Silverstone, who loved shooting in the rolling, oceanside hills of Dublin and Wicklow, Ireland.
“Making it a very grounded, real story that’s emotionally rich was important to me,” she adds. “It ultimately is a dynamic, layered role. There’s a lot for me to sink my teeth into, and that’s, as an artist, what you want.”
It’s also, apparently, what her son wanted as a viewer.
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“My son watched this with me while I was [reviewing edits] and he loved it,” says Silverstone. “I was like, ‘I think it’s okay for a 14-year-old kid to watch this.’ There’s one moment where I kiss someone and I was like, ‘Okay, close your eyes,’ because he didn’t want to see that. He was like, ‘Ew.'”
It’s probably safe to say other viewers won’t have that reaction.
New episodes of Irish Blood hit Acorn TV each Monday.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
