To write his best-selling 2018 book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe spent years knocking on doors in Northern Ireland. The Massachusetts native interviewed more than 100 people in Belfast and surrounding communities, reporting on the life of Irish Republican Army soldier Dolours Price and how it intersected with the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, accused of spying for the British army. The book reads like a riveting novel about the Troubles told through the eyes of two complex women, intimate tales of parenthood and adolescence paralleled with harrowing instances of violence and betrayal. The epic, decades-spanning saga felt made for the screen—and sure enough, within a week of its US publication, news broke that FX and the producers behind American Crime Story had optioned the book.

More years of painstaking work followed. “If you were to do a completely loyal, page-by-page adaptation of the book, it would probably not be very good,” Keefe tells me over Zoom. “We’ve spent as much time making this series as I spent writing the book, from beginning to end.” At last, nearly six years since the book’s publication, all nine episodes of FX’s kinetic adaptation of Say Nothing will premiere November 14 on Hulu.

The series moves in its own direction while maintaining the spirit and scope of the book. Helmed by creator Josh Zetumer (Patriots Day), with Keefe on board as an executive producer, Say Nothing opens with a visceral recreation of McConville’s disappearance before we meet an older Dolours (Maxine Peake), sitting for an interview for the Belfast Project and preparing to tell her life story. Scenes of Dolours in the present provide the frame for the meat of the series, which is set during her extraordinary youth as a teenage Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and her younger sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe), are gradually radicalized amid intensifying British rule in Northern Ireland. The tight focus on the Price sisters offers a moving snapshot of their coming of age through pivotal moments in the history of the Troubles, and the series gradually delineates how their specific work in the IRA relates to McConville’s tragic fate.

“The show [is] about both the romance of radical politics and the cost of those politics—about young people who want to change the world and think that violence is the only way to do it,” Zetumer says. “We wanted to capture the energy of what it feels like to be a teenager or in your early 20s and get caught up in a cause.”

The challenge was to balance this relatively broad experience with a rigorous, realistic, and nuanced depiction of Belfast in the 1970s. Keefe’s distance from any identity or allegiance in Northern Ireland—his neutrality—is core to the book, and it’s the reason people comfortably opened up to him about their experiences. Here, a partisan in Dolours is our narrator, and her world is visualized onscreen. So Keefe went back to his sources, getting additional context to further enrich the characters. Zetumer filled out his writers’ room with Irish natives, including The Woman in the Wall creator Joe Murtagh, and undertook an intense research process to accurately realize that perspective. Director Michael Lennox, best known for helming the new Irish classic Derry Girls, further showcases this attention to detail, highlighting Caroline Story’s intricate production design. “It was down to the doorknobs and the light switches and the shades of paint,” Zetumer says.

Perhaps most important in this mission, though, would be authentic casting. “We wanted people who were from the place and felt it and had a deep level of investment,” Keefe says.

They found that and more in Petticrew, who was born and raised in Belfast, and heard a lot about the Price sisters growing up. “This history is my history,” the 28-year-old says. “As a young person whose home is still here, of course there’s always the lingering question of how we deal with our past and heal from it and move on—and build something hopefully that much better for the generation coming up.” (More than 3,500 people were killed during the Troubles, which formally ended in the late 1990s.)

Best known for key supporting roles in indies like Tuesday and Wolf, the actor turns in a star-making performance in a role they felt in their bones: “Lines blurred, and there was a lot of Dolours that felt incredibly close to me,” Petticrew says.

Director Michael Lennox has a history with Petticrew and first suggested them for the project. From there, Petticrew picked up the book for the first time and wound up reading it over the course of three days in a coffee shop. “For about two of those days, I had to leave a couple of times because I was sobbing so hard,” they say. “It was an incredibly hard read, but I thought the book was just beautiful. I’ve read a lot of books about the Troubles, and sometimes, when people who weren’t from here have written about it, they maybe missed the sense of it—but I didn’t get that with Patrick’s book.”

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The story centers on women who were directly involved in the conflict, a perspective that feels original in and of itself. It’s even more revolutionary to see the way it explores Dolours’s moral layers, the passion of her cause, and the brutality of her methods as she takes on more of a leadership role within the IRA. “Some people will see Dolours as a hero—other people won’t at all,” Petticrew says. “But I think it gives us the ability to try to understand why people in this particular time were making the decisions that they made, and how that trauma affected them throughout their lives.” The show does not call out Dolours as right or wrong; indeed, it doesn’t approach a judgment at all. She tells her story, living in its ugliness while fiercely communicating her determination for justice.

“All my life, I thought joining the IRA was the noblest thing a person could do,” she says early in the series. “You were taught that you were fighting in the name of the people—that the whole community was behind you.”

This sentiment comes across even as Dolours begins to question it. “We wanted to make something that, if you showed it to somebody who’s from Belfast, they would say, ‘I recognize the story you’re telling. I recognize the music of the language. I recognize the dark humor. I recognize the history,’” Keefe says. “And so we wanted to make something that was very specific, but also universal as something that could speak to people who’ve never been to Northern Ireland and may never go there.” As an insider, Petticrew took on the role of advocate for their hometown, “a voice for the people at home.” They’d speak up and talk through issues with Keefe and Zetumer. When Petticrew first walked onto the backlot just outside of London where Belfast circa 1972 was built from scratch, they had an out-of-body experience: “I felt like I was looking at photographs my grammy might’ve shown me when I was a kid.”

The show’s gaze gradually expands beyond Dolours and toward her sister, Marian, as she develops her own knack for revolutionary tactics—as well as Brendan Hughes (played by another Belfast native, Anthony Boyle), a former IRA commanding officer who similarly struggles to reconcile his past choices as he ages. And then there was the man they all allegedly worked under—who still denies his involvement in the IRA to this day.

Each episode of Say Nothing ends with a disclaimer that reads: “Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.” For nearly 35 years, the Irish republican politician held office while strenuously denying the claims of Price, Hughes, and others—as well as the exhaustively researched contents of Keefe’s book. Yet here, played by Josh Finan and Michael Colgan between the two timelines, he’s depicted as the architect of major acts of violence committed by the IRA, as well as subtler, more insidious tactics that cut to the heart of Northern Irish life. In the show, he eventually leaves that behind to transition the group’s role toward the mainstream.

“You can see where everything comes from on the page—and the series, particularly where Adams is concerned, is very, very closely based on the book,” Keefe says. “I wanted to show Adams’s humanity as well as everyone else’s. That’s what’s interesting about Adams: In the story, you could see him as lying and betraying people, but at the same time, he’s also the architect of the peace. Were it not for him, the Troubles might still be going on, and from a narrative perspective, that’s one of the great ironies.”

Say Nothing’s portrayal of Adams is perhaps the most clear link between the show’s historical portrait and today’s political climate. But such resonance is woven into the very fabric of the show—a bold examination of extremism and activism that feels as true to then as it does to now. “Certainly the dangers of polarization, I think that’s front and center from the first episode—that inflection point that can happen where a deeply polarized society tips over into violence,” Zetumer says. “Whether you believe in what the IRA is doing, or you think it’s abhorrent, we just felt this question of the efficacy of violence—is it worth it, going down that path?—was only more relevant now in a world where political violence really feels like it’s starting to rear its head.”

As Keefe was writing the book in 2017 and 2018, the events of Say Nothing felt firmly like a period piece. Work on the series adaptation ramped up throughout COVID, and suddenly they were revisiting the Troubles during the time of the Black Lives Matter protests and increasing unrest around the world. “You had clashes between young people who wanted change and a state that could appear, certainly on the TV news, to be in a fairly repressive mode,” Keefe says. “We wouldn’t want to draw any cheap analogies…. [But] the whole time we were working, there were all these references in the news all around us.”

On a personal level, anyway, the work weighed on Petticrew. The shoot lasted 135 days, and they cared deeply about getting it right. “I love Belfast so much, and I love being from here, and I love the people here…so I just really wanted to make sure that I was pitching everything right, and that I was doing with the show what I’d hoped to do with it from the second I got the first email,” they say. Petticrew sounds almost relieved that the series was made outside of Ireland, though: “I think it would be hard to make a show like this with UK money and Irish money…. Having that outsider perspective allowed us to look at things with a longer lens,” Petticrew says. “The show being made with FX and American funding allowed us, in a way, to be braver.”