Chris O’Dowd has admitted his latest TV offering Small Town, Big Story was conceived as his toddlers were “bouncing off the walls during lockdown.
Speaking exclusively to and other media at the show launch he recalled: “It was definitely conceived in my head when we were living in Toronto in lockdown during .
“I was shooting a film and we had toddlers and it’s great craic, isn’t – lockdown with toddlers and they were bouncing off the walls,” he said of his sons Art and Valentine who he shares with wife Dawn O’Porter.
“And marijuana is legal there as a side,” he laughed. “And you can see some of the themes I suppose throughout the series, the twin themes of ‘get me home’ and ‘get me off this f****** planet’.”
Chris describes the show as a spiritual successor to his previous hit show Moone Boy and it will be available on Sky Atlantic and NOW this month.
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Chris O’Dowd conceived his new Sky show Small Town, Big Story during lockdown (Image: Getty)
It stars Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks as Wendy Patterson a hotshot producer who returns to a Drumbán, a small town in rural Ireland she had spent time in as a teenager but left under somewhat murky circumstances.
She arrives with a film crew in tow to shoot an adaptation of a local writer’s fantasy novel much to the excitment of the locals.
Paddy Considine plays town doctor Séamus Proctor, the local doctor and a respected pillar of the community, who soon finds himself in the eye of a storm as ex love Wendy’s celluloid circus descends, threatening to reveal a close encounter he’s been keeping secret since the dawn of the Millennium.
It’s Celtic mythology mixed with aliens which Chris said “just seemed obvious”.
“Well there is interesting kind of parallels between some of the space stuff and a lot of Celtic mythology as we’re kind of learning as time goes on,” he said.
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Christina Hendricks stars as a TV producer in Small Town, Big Story (Image: Sky)
“I think when we were in college I remember somebody coming up to me and saying, ‘you know that Boyle has the highest number of UFO sightings in Europe’.
“And then I looked into it and found out it was true and therefore I put it in an episode of Moone Boy kind of based around aliens, but it was told from a slightly different perspective where I went back and started asking people about it. Like people on the town council, and I was like, yeah, ‘what’s the f****** story with all the aliens?’
“People were just calling it (sightings) in to the newspapers. But there was also, I think that they originally started calling in because there was a bunch of hippies from London who had moved over during the recession in the 70s and were smoking and pills and they were seeing all sorts,” he laughed.