Christina Hendricks and Chris O’Dowd on Small Town, Big Story: ‘There has to be extra-terrestrial life out there’

As a new Irish dramedy series comes to Sky Atlantic, Helen Coffey sits down with the show’s creator and leading lady to talk alien encounters, Celtic history and the siren call to return to our roots. Christina Hendricks has seen an alien. Well, a UFO, really – but still. She’s even got a picture on her phone to prove it. I am told this story matter-of-factly by the Mad Men actor when I enquire as to whether she and Chris O’Dowd believe in extra-terrestrial life. “I think there has to be,” she says simply.

It’s a relevant question, given the plot of their new joint venture, Small Town, Big Story. Created by O’Dowd (who also cameos in a few episodes), the six-part Sky Atlantic show follows Hollywood producer Wendy Patterson (Hendricks) as she returns home to the fictional Irish town of Drumbán where she was born in order to shoot a ludicrous “historical” fiction adaptation called I Am Celt. It soon transpires that Wendy and her former flame Seamus (Paddy Considine), now the local doctor, underwent a mystifying, out-of-this-world experience as teenagers – one that forever altered the course of their lives. The tone sits somewhere between comedy and melodrama – O’Dowd was aiming for “opera”, he says – as the cast of misfit characters uncover more about the town’s long history of attracting interstellar visitors.

Yes, alien abduction might seem a somewhat fantastical notion, but, suggests O’Dowd, it’s no more outlandish than the fae and woodland spirits that often typify tales set in Ireland – or, in fact, the idea of God. “Inarguably, it’s not even close that those two things are as likely. It’s very unlikely that we are the only species in the universe. We’re too imperfect for that to be the case. And if we’re so imperfect, how could somebody have bothered creating us?” He's not ruling out Area 51-style conspiracy theories either. “It may be that we’ve had many first encounters that we haven’t treated with violence – and they’re all being held somewhere that you’d never know about.”.

Following in the footsteps of recent dramadies (see Netflix’s excellent Bodkin) that capitalise on our collective fascination with all things Ireland – history, folklore, superstitions – Small Town, Big Story cannily subverts the genre by centring around a different supernatural element altogether. This, says O’Dowd, was intentional. “There is a train of thought that’s going on during this Gaelic Revival period we’re going through now, where a lot of those folk stories are maybe trying to tell us about biodiversity issues and a lot of native knowledge that gets lost when you’re colonised and your language is taken from you,” he muses. “A lot of these stories, particularly in the middle cycle of Irish mythology, could almost be about more cosmic stuff. And we don’t yet know that it’s not.” He cites medieval Irish-language narrative The Voyage of Bran, in which “space and time are interpreted in a very different way than we would interpret them now”.

But back to his cast’s “UFO” sightings. Considine has allegedly seen one too – an object in the sky that shot straight up in the air and then back down – while unpacking the shopping. “He was with his wife, and they were putting away groceries, and he was like, ‘Wait! Stop! Look!’” says O’Dowd. “And she said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s mad. Would you get the last of the things from the car?’”.

Hendricks and her husband George were met with similar ambivalence after their own close encounter, which happened when they were settling into South Dublin prior to filming. “She said, ‘George just saw a UFO from out on the balcony’,” remembers O’Dowd. “I went out real quick to try to see it, and I didn’t see it…”.

“But we showed you a picture!” comes Hendricks’s indignant response. “And it was clear as day,” O’Dowd says placatingly. They make a quirky double-act, one that gives a sense of art mimicking real life when it comes to the show. Wendy is a larger-than-life force of nature, gilded by a lacquer of LA glamour that makes her stand out in saturated technicolour against the soggy backdrop of rural Northern Ireland. “I remember somebody mentioning Christina’s name. And I was like, f***, can you imagine if we got Christina Hendricks?” O’Dowd recalls of casting his lead. His wife, Dawn O’Porter, provided the missing link via a fashion contact. “We thought, ‘God, she’d be great’,” continues O’Dowd. “She's comedically adept, and she’s so strong and so… Hollywood, in a way.”.

“I'm not Hollywood!”. “Yes, you are.”. I’m afraid I have to agree with O’Dowd on this one: Hendricks emanates pure, unadulterated La La Land. In a good way – she cuts a dazzling figure, her perfectly coiffed red hair, demurely high-necked flamingo-pink dress and matching kitten heels about as far away as you can get from O’Dowd’s laid-back style. Sitting beside her and dressed in jeans, a black tee and muted green shirt, he looks indistinguishable from his much-loved IT Crowd character, Roy.