Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending your day with us. I am grateful you're here. On today's show, the Brooklyn Museum is turning 200 and is celebrating with an exhibition devoted to local artists. We'll speak with some of those Brooklynites who are participating. We'll speak with William Cope Moyers. His new memoir is Broken Open: What Painkillers Taught Me About Life and Recovery. He joins us to discuss and take your calls. That's the plan. Let's get this started with the new series, Say Nothing.

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Alison Stewart: One evening in 1972, Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was kidnapped in front of her children and would never be seen alive again. She was thought to be a British sympathizer during Northern Ireland's troubles. The volunteers of the Irish Republican army staged an armed resistance against British Protestant rule. To some, they were soldiers in a noble war. To others, terrorists. Decades later, Jean's remains would be found and identified by a diaper pin she always wore on her dress. This is the core story of the award-winning 2018 nonfiction book Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe.

The book hones in on a few high-ranking IRA soldiers like Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and one of the most famous female members, Dolours Price. A new series on FX and Hulu based on the book premieres tomorrow and we have some folks here from the creative team to talk about it. Patrick Radden Keefe, the author of the book. Welcome back, Patrick.

Patrick Radden Keefe: It's great to be with you.

Alison Stewart: The show's EP and director, Michael Lennox. Hi, Michael.

Michael Lennox: Hi. How are you doing?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. Actor Maxine Peake is here, who plays the essential character Dolours Price. Hi, Maxine. Nice to meet you as well.

Maxine Peake: Hi, lovely to meet you too.

Alison Stewart: Patrick, what was your reaction to the idea of your book being adapted for television?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I had spent four years working on this book and the material is sensitive. It's a true story about real people, many of whom are still alive. We never really shopped the book to Hollywood or anything like that. I only ever showed it to one production company. I had known a producer named Brad Simpson who works at a company called Color Force. They made The People v. O.J. Simpson, which was also on FX, which I thought was an exemplary limited series about a true story and a very vexed issue in that case, race in America. He asked to read it and did.

What they said to me was he and his producing partner, Nina Jacobson, said, "Listen, if you give us the rights to the book, it won't be a situation where we go off and make a show and then come back with it. You would be a partner. You'd be involved at every step of the way." That was the commitment they made to me. On the strength of that, I optioned them in the book. They carried that forward. They had me involved from start to finish, and I'm really pleased with the results.

Alison Stewart: Yes, Nina's great. A New York Times review of the book noted that it read and it was structured like a novel, but nonfiction. What elements of the novel did you use to your advantage in telling the story?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I love all the tools of fiction. There's a signal rule in the work that I do, which is you can't make anything up. There's 100 pages of endnotes at the end of the book. When you're reading it, I do want you to be absorbed in it. I want you to feel suspense. I want you to identify with the characters. I say characters, they're real people, but I want you to feel as though you come to know them. I'm not shy about withholding information when it suits me and dealing out each card in a way that I hope will feel pleasurable as a literary experience, even though the story is true.

Alison Stewart: Michael, you're most recently known for your work on Derry Girls. How did you get involved with the project?

Michael Lennox: I was given Patrick's book by a friend of mine. My first response was, "Who is this American guy writing a book about Belfast in that time?" To be honest, I read the book over the course of two days, and it knocked me flat, to be honest. Patrick managed to take such a complicated piece of history and make it incredibly accessible, full of humanity, empathy, and compassion. When I found out it was being made into a TV series, I felt compelled to be involved, and very fortuitous that Patrick let me be involved.

Alison Stewart: Maxine, once you got the script, what did you see in the role of Dolours?

Maxine Peake: There's so much in the role of Dolours. It was a complexity in a turmoil, but also somebody who had fought for what she had believed in, in the time, who had followed through with her courage of convictions. Then to pick up the reins and the brilliant Lola Petticrew, then to move forward into her older age. How do you deal with the fallout of an extraordinary-- Whatever your views on it, younger life, you can't get away from that. That most people have never experienced. Yes. For me, it was about this extraordinary woman who was dealing with so many issues and the complexity of that.

Alison Stewart: Patrick, can you give our listeners a little overview into who Dolours Price was, the IRA, and how she fits in with the troubles?

Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes, absolutely. This story started for me with the character that Maxine was describing and so brilliantly plays, Dolours Price. I came to this story in 2013. On the obituary page of the New York Times. I read an obituary of this woman who I had never heard of. She was the first woman to join the IRA as a frontline soldier. Women had been involved in the IRA in the past, but always in an auxiliary function. They would help hide weapons or transfer explosives or bandage the men, but they weren't actually carrying a gun and leading missions.

Dolours Price had grown up in a very Irish Republican family. What I mean by that is a family that believed very strongly that Northern Ireland, the six counties of Northern Ireland, which were still under British rule, should be free of British rule. That you had a duty, if you were Irish, to reunite the island and expel the British by any means necessary. She and her sister joined the IRA when they were really out of their teens in the 1970s. As Maxine said, they had a very dramatic life. They self-identified as feminists at the time. What feminism meant for a young woman joining the IRA in the '70s was, "I want to carry a gun. I want to go and plant bombs."

There's this perverse sense in which she wants to do what all the men are doing. They went to London. They bombed the Old Bailey in London. They went to prison. There was a hunger strike. What was most interesting to me, and this is what Maxime was getting at, is later on, after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 ended the conflict, ended the troubles, Dolours Price was looking back in middle age with some real misgivings on some of the things that she had done as a young woman. I was both interested in her as a woman on the front lines of the IRA because I thought of that as a very male story.

I was also interested in her over time. What happens when you engage in radical politics in a very extreme way in your early 20s? What happens as you get older, and the political circumstances change, and you come to reevaluate some of the things you might have done?

Alison Stewart: Michael, you use that in the series. You use Dolours in her middle age. You use her as a young woman, as a teenager. What creatively were you able to do with this setup, this dual setup?

Michael Lennox: Sorry, sorry, could you clarify--?

Alison Stewart: What were you able to do creatively having these two Dolours's to work with?

Michael Lennox: First of all, it's a real treat to have Maxine Peak and Lola Pettigrew. Some of the best acting talent that Ireland and England have to have to offer. To have nine episodes to explore one character means you can get under the skin and explore the nuances of youth. Especially with Lola playing young Dolours. What's it mean to be 18 and full of Z and idealism?" Then have to make some very morally compromising decisions, which will impact the rest of your life and impact the lives around you. Then, as Patrick said, when you live with a hangover, how do you deal with that later on in life?

Especially when-- Belfast has changed a lot from 1969 to the present. [unintelligible 00:09:35] have to live with these demons and the choices of her past. For me, it was a chance to really get under the skin and explore that.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen to a bit of the show, Say Nothing. This is from later in the series when Dolours is out of jail for the 1973 bombing of London's Old Bailey and she's visiting London with her son. This is Say Nothing.

Female Character: Is this your first time being in London?

Dolours Price: No. It's been a few years. It's a bit of a thrill, isn't it? Laying back. A wee tingle.

Female Character: Aye, something like that.

Dolours Price: The courthouse is only a few streets away.

Son: What's at the courthouse?

Dolours Price: The rot at the core of the whole moldy page.

Female Character: It's the seat of their corrupt British legal system.

Dolours Price: And Mommy blew it up.

Alison Stewart: Maxine, Dolours is, as you said, complex. She's such a complex character. What were some of the challenges in playing somebody with such complexity?

Maxine Peake: I suppose it's the emotional layers and delving into the different elements. There's elements of regret. There's also elements of pride. There's ego. I don't think-- None of us are perfect. We're all flawed. Dolours is definitely flawed. For me as well, I spoke to a lot of people who knew her, and I got lots of different facets of this woman. What a lot of people said was what a lovely woman she was when they'd met her. A lot of people in the theater world had met her through, then, husband Stephen Ray. It was [unintelligible 00:11:27] with Patrick's brilliant book and then Josh's brilliant script on top and then all this information.

It was trying to slot it in and mold it in and then as well, picking up from young Dolours, from Lola's Dolours as well. It was putting the jigsaw together and trying to make a rounded and complex and flawed and likable as well, at the same time. You've got to go with this woman. Whatever you feel about her actions, it's the humanity. There is humanity in there and you've got to try and make an audience at least understand. I'm not saying necessarily empathize, but understand why she might have done what she did.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with author Patrick Radden Keefe, director Michael Lennox, and actor Maxine Peake about the new series Say Nothing, which premieres tomorrow on Hulu. Michael, what was important that this series get right?

Michael Lennox: For me, we wanted to create the most authentic world possible. We had a fantastic creative team behind the scenes in every department who took this story really seriously. The amount of research that was done to make sure every piece of visual storytelling came from a place of truth. Then one of the big things for me was the casting of young Dolours and the casting of young, Brendan Hughes. That it was authentic. We were able to cast local Northern Irish talent and we were able to cast Lola Pettigrew as Dolours and Anthony Boyle as Brendan Hughes. Casting people who grew up in the place understand the DNA of the place. An audience recognizes that and that was so important for me to get right.

Alison Stewart: Patrick, as a journalist, what was important that this series get right?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I had a similar feeling where, on the one hand, a TV drama is different from a book, whether it's a novel or a nonfiction book. It's a different cultural product. Viewers are sophisticated enough when they watch something and it says based on a true story to recognize that they're seeing a drama, that some artistic license has been taken. My role as the author of the book and as a journalist who's working in nonfiction was to make sure that if there are places where we're speculating or we're embroidering a little bit, that we're doing so in a way that feels true both to the history and to the emotions of these characters and who these people were.

Authenticity was super important for me. In part because there is a license and a virtue in being an outsider telling a story. It's funny, a number of our cast members have said that the fact that it was FX that made this show meant that we were free to tell the story in a way that if it was British television or Irish television, it might have been a little bit more difficult. We could really tell, have a pretty objective look at this and not feel beholden to one political agenda or another. At the same time, if you're an outsider, you have a real duty to get it right. What that meant for me was, as Mike said, the casting. You want people who are getting the accents right.

You want people who have a feel for these streets in this world. The production design, really, down to the light switches and the doorknobs. Everything has to look right. The wardrobe, all of it. There was a scholarly approach that a lot of the people in the production took to getting all those little details right. Mike is right that audiences are intuitive that sometimes in the specificity, you can tell a more general story. That was my hope, is that people who wouldn't be able to find Northern Ireland on a map and could tell you very little about its history can engage with this emotionally. People who do know the world and know it well would recognize what we've put on screen.

Alison Stewart: Maxine, what was important for you to get right?

Maxine Peake: To breathe life into Dolours and make her a full-rounded character that people could relate to but follow. Also, because I am not from Northern Ireland. It was a-- It felt like a big task for me to take on the role. Stepping into Lola Petticrew's shoes was an honor and made my job a lot easier. obviously, as well, it was important that try to make that join seamless. The truth of it. That's all you can ask, as an actor is, that you can bring yourself to it but it will present and feel authentic and truthful to an audience.

Alison Stewart: In the book, Gerry Adams is portrayed as a powerful leader in the IRA. Yet at the end of each episode-- I'm only up to episode five. The end of each episode reminded that he has denied being involved. Patrick, can you reconcile that with your research in your book?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I think Gerry Adams is one of the more fascinating historical figures of recent decades. This was a guy who absolutely was a leader in the IRA in the 1970s and who then eventually became this incredible peacemaker. He realized at a certain point. He saw around the corner in a way that others couldn't, that we're not going to be able to fight the British into the sea. This is going to end in some political settlement. I need to steer the IRA to peace. As he became more political, he started to deny that he'd ever been in the IRA in the first place.

As I said, the show is very carefully based on my book. The book is very heavily end-noted and documented at this point. The only person who would tell you with a straight face that Gerry Adams wasn't in the IRA is Gerry Adams. I feel very comfortable with the way in which the series has depicted Adams as a significant figure in the IRA during these years, as the man who was giving orders to Dolours Price. She was following his orders in many cases. A lot of lawyers have looked at the series very closely before we released it, and a decision was made to include his denial at the end of every episode.

On some level, for the viewer, it only brings into greater relief the irony of the fact that Gerry Adams continues to deny this history. You will have watched what happens in each episode, all of it based on the book. Then you see at the end of every episode that Gerry Adams continues to insist that none of this could have happened. This is all a fantasy because he was never in the IRA, you see.

Alison Stewart: Michael, Dolours remained faithful to the cause until her death, in 2013. Yet there was a bitterness that she and other IRA soldiers felt about the peace treaty. Why did she feel bitter?

Michael Lennox: I think that Dolours has suffered so much in her life. She went to prison. She was on hunger strike. She felt betrayed a lot of her youth. She maybe didn't get to live in the way she wanted. She had other aspirations in her life. When you get older-- As I say, Belfast became a changed place. When you have someone Gerry Adams, who denies being involved. every time he denies it puts the weight and burden of responsibility onto people like Dolours. Living with that every day and also living with the haunting memories of certain choices that she made, of youth, led to this feeling of bitterness and demons. She was very, very traumatized as well.

Alison Stewart: Maxine, how did you want that bitterness to play out as an actor?

Maxine Peake: I suppose working very closely with Michael and the other directors. There's a lot that-- A girl who is in he later life, was a functioning alcoholic. I didn't-- I wanted to see somebody was still functioning within her life, but you could see where the cracks were starting to form. Again, there was a bitterness. She felt betrayed. As well, I still felt there was a sense of ego. That was my decision within the character that played, that there was an ego there as well. It was very wrapped up in so much- I keep saying this word, complexity.

As well, when you've been part of something in youth that you've put your life, and took life, but put your life on the line and maybe never envisioned what your future may be because you might not have had a future, you might not have survived that far. Then to have your elder life slightly denied you because somebody is saying that they were not part of it. It diminishes your memory and your existence I feel. I wanted to make her real and understandable. That she did function through it. There was still life and that spark that she had in youth but it was slowly destroying her.

Alison Stewart: Times change and people change. The lens of history changes the way people think about things. Maybe the people involved in the IRA were thought of as terrorists or murderers. Some people thought of them as heroes. Patrick, can you weigh in on how they're thought of now?

Patrick Radden Keefe: When I came into this project, part of what was so interesting to me is that a lot of this history had been written from one perspective or another. All I saw is complexity. I do think that part of what's so intriguing to me about this story now is that it has all kinds of resonances with this present moment. On the one hand, it's a story about the 1970s in this very specific place, Northern Ireland. On the other hand, there are all kinds of ways in which it speaks to other places in the world today, other things that are going on. In the case of Dolours Price, the one thing I would add to what Mike and Maxine said is, this is someone who in her youth did terrible things.

She did them not because she was a psychopath, she did them as a means to an end. It was a political choice. She thought, "If I do these things, then we will finally get the British out of Ireland." Then decades later, the conflict ends and it ends in a negotiated settlement. They don't get a united Ireland. Part of what this story is about is her looking back and saying, "Well, wait a second, then how do I justify those things I was doing?" I had a political justification for it, but if I didn't have that, then maybe it's murder. If we weren't going to ever get to that destination, then how do I make sense morally of these terrible things that I did?

This is a story about a divided society. It's a story about protracted conflict. It's a story about paramilitary groups and government overreaction. It's a story about imperialism in some ways. To me, there's a great deal that it says that is both specific and true when it comes to the tale of the Troubles but also has deeper resonances for other parts of the world, including this country today.

Alison Stewart: Michael, what would you like people to take away from this story?

Michael Lennox: We mentioned at the start, or one of the things all of us in the team had talked about was the romance and cost of radical politics. It was that violence as a means of protest has consequences. Whether you feel justified or not. That was one of the things. The second thing is, speaking as a Northern Irishman, there's been a culture of silence around this subject matter. That's worthy of discussion. I hope that a story like this is brought not to a Northern Irish audience, but to an international audience who may know very little about this time period in history, but also possibly maybe a very one-sided perspective as well.

Alison Stewart: Say Nothing premieres tomorrow on Hulu. It's great, might I say. We've been speaking with author Patrick Radden Keefe, director Michael Lennox, and actor Maxine Peake. Thank you so much for your time.

Patrick Radden Keefe: Thank you.

Maxine Peake: Thank you.

Michael Lennox: Thank you.