Sharon Horgan’s eviscerating self-awareness underlies some of the biggest cult comedy hits of recent years. But now she’s going after mainstream movies and a directorial debut

Sharon Horgan doesn’t especially enjoy watching herself on screen any more. She feels an awkwardness that, she thinks, comes from years of sitting in edit suites scrutinising take after take of television programmes she has created, co-written and starred in. Shows such as Pulling, a black comedy about three female flatmates that first aired in 2006 and was her breakthrough. And Catastrophe, the Channel 4 series (rejected by the BBC) that she made with Rob Delaney about a one-night stand with long-term effects that ran for four seasons and has been broadcast in 133 countries and now means she has to have clocks in her London offices showing the time in New York and Los Angeles. But Horgan, who is 49 and has eviscerating self-awareness, also accepts that “vanity” might be a factor.

“I just don’t love seeing myself as an older person on screen,” she says, with a snorty half-laugh that seems to punctuate her most radically honest statements. “There’s always a weird transitional period where you go from being able to play a girl who doesn’t know where her life is going to playing the mother of an 18-year-old. The adjustment for that just takes a little bit of time.”

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