Máiréad Tyers: meet the star of TV’s best comedy about young people

Máiréad Tyers knows her breakout role in Extraordinary, the high-concept and very sweary superhero series, is really catching on. Not just because people recognise her as Jen, a stressed twenty-something trying to unlock her superpower while working in a costume shop, but also because they keep asking for more. “If I’m out and about and someone’s like, ‘I love the show,'” Tyers says, “the next thing they say is: ‘When is season two coming out?'”

Still, the streaming wars are more competitive than ever, so it helps that season one – which premiered on Disney+ in January 2023 – has just been added to ITVX. “When I was catching up on Love Island during the day,” the actress says, chuckling at what she’s just admitted to, “I went onto ITVX and saw a banner for Extraordinary. I was like, ‘Yes!’ Hopefully all the people who’ve just finished Love Island will see it and watch us next.”

Happily, Tyers can now tell fans old and new that season two is dropping on Disney+ on March 6. When NME meets her in a quiet corner of a west London bar, it’s barely midday so we both order flat whites, but her passion for the show spills forth even before the caffeine hits. “It has the distinct voice of a cult film,” she enthuses. “The costumes, jokes and music are all so distinct.” Fans of season one’s soundtrack, which was packed with indie bangers by Willow Kayne, Goat Girl and Mitski, will be glad to know season two keeps up the good work – the trailer is powered by Wet Leg‘s glorious ‘Chaise Longue’.

Extraordinary is Tyers’ first lead screen role and she likens the vibe on set to a “real family affair”, a comparison actors draw a lot, but the 26-year-old rising star has no hints of thesp-y pretentiousness. When we ask who her acting heroes were when she was growing up near Cork in Ireland, she replies: “Is it silly to say Lizzie McGuire? Obviously I mean, Hilary Duff [the actress who played her] – I adored all her films.”

As a kid, Tyers felt the same way about the late, great Robin Williams – she particularly loved his raucous ’90s comedies Mrs. Doubtfire and Flubber. “I always feel a bit stupid when I say things like that, because I know I should be saying Meryl Streep and the big shots,” she says. “But you know, those were the films that I completely believed in and which made me happy. And in a way, I feel like that’s what’s important.”

Anyway, back to the new season of Extraordinary, which begins with Jen swishing around in her dressing gown to Lizzo‘s giddy pop banger ‘2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)’. Pretty soon her pyjama-clad flatmates Carrie (Sofia Oxenham) and Kash (Bilal Hasna) join in. Picture the start of a glossy Hollywood musical – just set in a cluttered east London flatshare rather than a fancy mansion.

“It all comes crashing down quite quickly in season two”

“I think that [scene] expresses very clearly how in Jen’s eyes, life is really about to start,” Tyers says. Extraordinary is set in a world where everyone gets a unique superpower when they turn 18 – everyone except Jen, who remains frustratingly powerless in her mid-twenties. “But now she’s confident her superpower is gonna come, because she’s starting her ‘power clinic’ journey,” Tyers continues. She now has a life coach, played wryly by The Mighty Boosh‘s Julian Barratt, trying to coax it out of her chaotic psyche.

Jen is also full of beans because she “finally has a boyfriend”, albeit an unusual one. In season one, she discovered that her adopted cat Jizzlord – yes, Jizzlord – is actually a shapeshifter who was stuck in feline form. When he regained his human body, Jen and Jizzlord (Luke Rollason) formed a friendship that gradually turned romantic.

So, Jen is loving life, but because Extraordinary is always a tad more salty than sweet, “it all comes crashing down quite quickly”. In a twist teased at the end of season one, Jen learns that Jizzlord has a wife and son from his pre-feline life as a man named Robert Clutton. Worse still, his ex Nora (Rosa Robson) is back on the scene and wants him back. Because Nora has heightened powers of communication, she can maintain her friendly façade in front of Jizzlord while telling Jen, telepathically, that she’s a “manic pixie dream slut”.

“I don’t know if Jen particularly is that,” Tyers says, “but I think in Nora’s eyes, Jen is just this weird little freak who’s getting in her way and stealing her Robert Clutton.” Nora’s sneaky superpower is classic Extraordinary in the way it takes something fantastical and uses it to reveal something prickly and real about human nature. You’ve probably never received a telepathic put-down, but you almost certainly know how it feels when someone is only pretending to like you.

Tyers believes Extraordinary‘s appeal is predicated on the “almost by-the-bay” way that creator Emma Moran, who previously wrote for Have I Got News For You, uses the characters’ superpowers. “It’s kind of a sitcom, really,” the actress says. “It’s more about navigating life in your twenties – even the fact it’s set in east London feels right because so many young people move there. The superpowers are a great way of getting gags in – like the guy in season one who can make people orgasm just by touching them. That’s hilarious.”

But at the same time, Jen’s lack of a superpower is what makes her a heroine for our times. “That feeling of inadequacy is something we all live with now because of social media and the internet in general,” Tyers says. “We’re always looking at what other people are doing, which can feel so isolating and kind of pressing. Emma’s setup for this show is so clever because it shows us this girl who experiences inadequacy in the greatest form.”

“There’s so much talent in Ireland – it’s just booming right now”

Tyers says she relates to aspects of Jen’s personality – “Procrastination is my middle name,” she admits with an eye roll – but worked out her purpose in life much earlier on. For her, acting is a calling that started quietly in childhood drama classes and grew louder in her teens when she found the Gaiety School Of Acting in Cork. Since it opened in 1986, this Dublin-based drama school with regional outposts has nurtured performers including Colin Farrell and Aidan Turner.

Tyers grew up in Ballinhassig, a village just six miles south of Cork, but Gaiety introduced her to a whole new world. “To go to this place for three hours on a Thursday night where you could feel completely free and liberated was amazing,” she says. “And I met all sorts of people I’d never met before – goths, actors, city people. That’s when I started to think about acting in a serious way.”

When she was 18, Tyers moved to London to study at the ultra-prestigious Royal Academy Of Dramatic Arts (RADA). “There’s so much talent in Ireland – it’s just booming right now,” she says, alluding to the success of peers including Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan, “but London felt like more of a hub than Dublin. Also, I got in.” She lets out a laugh. “I wasn’t going to say no to RADA!”

Still, she says it took her “a long time to adjust” to London life, partly because her course was so “gruelling” and partly because it’s a tough city to find your feet in. “Our classes were on Tottenham Court Road – like, the busiest part of the city,” she says. “And we were in from 8.30am to 7.30pm, so you can’t work a normal job and you’re broke all the time.” Now, around eight years later, Tyers and her friendship group have settled into a quieter north London neighbourhood where they’ve found “our pub, our spots and our walks”.

Though Tyers graduated in 2020, “a very stressful time” to enter an industry hobbled by COVID, she was also grateful for the forced pause. “Often the third year of drama school can feel like a rat race – it’s all about who’s signing with who [to represent them],” she says. “But after three years of training we kind of got to decompress for a while. It didn’t feel competitive. If someone got a job, it was like: ‘Thank god someone is working!'”

Later that year, she breathed a huge sigh of relief when she landed “about six days’ work” on Kenneth Branagh’s coming-of-age film Belfast. Many of her scenes as Auntie Eileen were cut, but the experience proved invaluable because it gave Tyers a “low-stakes environment” to learn about camera angles and set etiquette. “I was around all these movie stars who didn’t seem like movie stars,” she says, referring to a cast led by Jamie Dornan and Judi Dench, “and Kenneth Branagh actually came over to welcome me on my first day.”

Since then, she has appeared opposite Colin Morgan in the 2023 thriller film Dead Shot and picked up TV guest spots in teen series Tell Me Everything and My Lady Jane, an upcoming period drama directed in part by Jamie Babbit (’90s favourite But I’m A Cheerleader). “I play the best friend of Lady Jane (Emily Bader), but there’s a power dynamic and I’m carrying a secret,” Tyers teases. She also starred in Changing The Sheets, a stage romcom that charmed the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022. “I’d love to do theatre again,” she says. “If I was to read a script and be like, ‘God, I’m terrified of doing that’, I think that’s what I should lean towards.”

For now, though, she is hoping that Disney+ will green light a third season of Extraordinary – and that viewers will show their love in more creative ways. “Emma [Moran] has always said she wants to read fan fiction involving these characters, so I’m putting that out there,” Tyer says. “I mean, come on, the clue’s in the name – we have a character called Jizzlord. This show is built for fan fiction.”

‘Extraordinary’ season two is available to stream on Disney+ from March 6

Images:
Photography: Klara Waldberg
Styling: Farrah O’Connor
Hare and make-up: Tamara Mae

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