Dublin actress Victoria Smurfit appeared on the January|February 2025 cover of Irish Country Magazine. Acting Editor Niamh Devereux chats with her for the cover interview.
Back in January 2025, Dalkey-bred, Victoria Smurfit was riding the wave of her Rivals high. The comedy-drama series made a big splash in entertainment after the first season landed in October 2025. Unaware of but hopeful for a second season, Niamh asks Victoria if making the show was as fun as it is to watch?
“It was probably more fun”, she says. “Endless, piss-taking craic — everyone took the work seriously, but nobody took themselves seriously. Sometimes when you’re on a show and it’s really easy and it’s really fun, it might not translate and invariably get cancelled, and you’re like [she wails no].
“So, the fear with this one was that it was too much fun, and you’re waiting for the next shoe to drop…but hopefully it doesn’t drop and it keeps going. The reaction has been extraordinary.”
In season one and two of Rivals, Victoria plays the character of Maud O’Hara, a glamorous and ruthless former actress. In the show, she’s famously described by her peers as being “made of two parts whiskey and one part devilment”. Victoria’s on-screen husband is fellow Irish actor – Aidan Turner – who plays Declan O’Hara. Together, they undertook a big project signing up to Rivals, which Victoria says was daunting in the beginning. “It was the biggest table read of my life. In terms of head count, and pressure: you’ve got Jilly Cooper there, all the heads of Disney and ITV, David Tennant, Katherine Parkinson — that’s when I went, “Wow. Well, here we go!”.
In the time since the first season of Rivals landed, Author and creator of the book the TV show is based on, Jilly Cooper, has sadly passed away. Doing her work justice, Victoria says that she has the most fun playing the character of Maud, after she herself was a fan of Jilly’s book series as a teenager.
She’s “an absolute wagon”, Victoria describes Maud. “She’s the worst mother; a self-obsessed, narcissistic weapon”, Victoria says. “Other than Cruella de Vil (which Victoria was IFTA-nominated for her performance in Once Upon A Time), she is the most selfish character I’ve ever played”.
The role was a full circle moment for Victoria, having binged the book as a teenager. “I’d steal it from my mum, I’d hear laughing her socks off and I’d think, “what is she watching?” And I’d find these books with white covers and red shoes or jodhpurs-covered bottoms and think, “oh this must be what she’s doing” and I’d take them for myself.
“I’d gaslight her then, she’d be going, “I left my book in the kitchen” and I’d tell her I hadn’t seen it before scurrying back to my bedroom to get it and put it back in its place. Then when I admitted it to her that I’d read it, I complained that I wanted to be Taggie but I also wanted to marry Declan and call my kids Taggie and Caitlin”, she laughs.
“When you think about Jilly’s writing, she’s so great at giving you characters that are these people with complexities, obsessions, wants, failures, and kindnesses. They’re all just looking for love, whether from someone else or self-love. If the characters weren’t as complicated or as needy, or as funny or sad as they were, they’d be just caricatures, but she actually held a mirror up to people that was quite fascinating. She was kind of whitewashed as a ‘bonk-buster’ writer, but when you get into it? Jane Austen of her time, thank you very much!”
Rivals is streaming now on Disney+.
