There were many sold-out events at the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival. One of the most anticipated panels was the Conversations with Friends talk, which focused on the latest Salley Rooney fiction adapted to the home screen. Rooney’s first TV adaptation was for her 2018 novel Normal People, the Golden Globe Nominee for Best Limited Television Series, Anthology or Motion Picture Made for Television.  Normal People was a huge success with audiences and one of the biggest star-making miniseries of the pandemic era. Golden Globe Nominee Daisy Edgar-Jones (Marianne) and Paul Mescal (Connell) became in-demand actors after their stirring performances in a story of first love, longing, insecurity, mental illness, betrayal, and awakening.

Much of the creative team behind Normal People, including director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter Alice Birch, were on board for the endeavor. At the Film Festival panel, producers Emma Norton and Catherine Magee, and writer Mark O’Halloran, joined Abrahamson and filmmaker-turned-moderator Lesley McKimm. Abrahamson didn’t seem overly concerned about comparisons to their first project. “It’s hard to avoid the fact that people will make comparisons. People will go into watching Conversations with the other in mind. There are connections, obviously,” he said. “The core team, creatively, is the same. There’s a natural and right connection between them. But there are, also, quite a lot of differences. I think the book is different. It’s less easy to define. Normal People is such a quintessential love story with those two protagonists equally balanced. Conversations is more of a first-person and coming-of-age story. Then, you have these three other characters orbiting the central character. All of Frances’ changes are mapped out through her relationships with them. They’re complex and unresolved. That has to be reflected.”

As Norton noted, “People don’t always know this: we were story lining Conversation with Friends in March 2020. Just as the pandemic hit, we started the writer’s room. That was before Normal People came out.” Abrahamson added: “Mark had a great line earlier which was that, in the same way that Normal People was helped through the first phase of the pandemic, maybe we’ll be releasing Conversations in the first phase of the nuclear winter. We can’t go out because nature is dying. You can sit in and watch this. It’s going to be great.”

Conversations with Friends seems primed to become another international sensation, with or without a global catastrophe. The new series follows Frances (Alison Oliver), a 21-year-old college student testing new emotional waters with her ex-girlfriend, best friend, and fellow spoken-word poet Bobbi (Sasha Lane). There is also an older and married couple, artists Melissa (Jemima Kirke) and Nick (Joe Alwyn) who get thrown into the romantic mix.

According to Abrahamson, fans of the book won’t be disappointed in this adaptation. “Sally’s writing is all about magnifying small things and looking at details. It’s also very patterned — quite often there’s a story that repeats as characters evolve,” he said. “I did chat to the guys about Conversations as a film. It wasn’t something that I could see. But when we had gone through the Normal People process and then talked about Conversations as a series, the pleasure of looking in detail at the rhythms and behaviors of people in short intense episodes seems to really suit Sally’s writing.”

“Sally, she uses little challenges in the book,” Magee added. “There’s a brilliant bit where it says, ‘And then we all went for dinner together for a while,’ at the point where everyone knew that they were sleeping together. There’s no description of what those dinners looked like. We’re all sitting there going, ‘What do they talk about? What does that look like?’ There were some very bleak mentions in the book that we dramatized and had lots of fun with.”

As if this series needed more buzz, it will likely have a built-in, music-fan audience as the project will be Alwyn’s first big job since being recognized as Golden Globe Nominee Taylor Swift’s longtime partner. The panel had nothing but praise for his work and for his refined Irish accent (Alwyn is British). “You need people with that magnetism. Jemima, who plays Melissa, is amazing. Sasha brings vulnerability to Bobbi as well as intensity. Then, Joe Alwyn. In the novel you have this older man and I think it’s very important that, on-screen, it doesn’t suddenly become a questionable power dynamic. Joe is able to bring a vulnerability to it, which fits things we learn about the character.”

Set in Ireland in 2008 and shot in Belfast, Conversations with Friends will air on BBC Three in May and will also stream on Hulu.