Lola Petticrew was in their parents’ house in Ballymurphy on the May afternoon in 2021 when the word came through. Justice Siobhán Keegan had ruled that the 10 people shot and killed by members of the British parachute regiment on the green in Ballymurphy over two shocking August days some 40 years earlier had been “entirely innocent” of any wrongdoing. The reaction in the estate afterwards was a strange combination of joy and heartbreak released: adrenaline unbottled. The family members returned from the court, hanging out of car windows like a team victorious. Emerging from the houses, people began banging pots and bin lids off the ground. There was cheering and tears.

“I cried my eyes out,” Petticrew says.

“We know a lot of those families. And it has been brutal for them. My granny went out and banged the pot she banged when Bobby Sands died. It was ... a beautiful day.”

By then Petticrew was already ascendant as a young actor building an eclectic, singular CV. They played a closeted teenager in the offbeat romantic comedy Dating Amber, a feral sister in Shadows, and they would soon sign on for a part in She Said, an acclaimed drama chronicling the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal. But the role that announced them (Petticrew uses they/them pronouns) – that steely, ethereal performance as the republican paramilitary Dolours Price in Say Nothing – was still in the future.

Now Channel 4 is set to release Trespasses, a five-part drama of Louise Kennedy’s novel, in which Petticrew plays Cushla Lavery, a bright and fiercely independent young Catholic schoolteacher trying to navigate a forbidden love affair with a Protestant barrister. There’s an age gap, the religious and class divide, and other complications. It’s the 1970s again, when Belfast is adrift in a poisonous fog of mistrust and killings. The show is faithful to the pacing and tone of Kennedy’s novel: slow-burning with a sombre atmosphere lit by vivid flashes of humour and despair and love among people trying to make lives in a society falling asunder. The performances are exceptional, but Petticrew carries the nervous tension of the entire drama. The story revolves around Cushla’s relationships with her alcoholic mother (Gillian Anderson), her lover (Tom Cullen) and the McGeown family, whom she tries to protect from engulfing sectarian hatred.

Dolours Price was one of the more discussed figures of the republican movement, while Cushla Lavery is a fiction. But through both roles, Petticrew has paired two unforgettable portrayals of 1970s young Northern Irish womanhood, barging into a mythology told mainly by and for men. It’s a triumph.

“I think we managed to pull it off. I hope we did,” they say.

Right now, Petticrew is in New York for six months filming a drama series for Hulu loosely based on Black