Meet Isobel Moloney, the 25-year-old talent agent with clients in Wednesday, Bad Sisters and Star Wars

Isobel Moloney is a talent manager and owner of talent agency take2 in Dublin. She has an eclectic career to date and pulls experience from young scientist competitions, debate teams, acting opportunities, tech startup exposure and talent management. She is two years into acquiring a company she never even knew she wanted. But it seems with so many interests on the table, knowing exactly what she wanted was a challenge. When opportunities arise, she’s conditioned to take a chance.

“I think it’s a curse and a blessing when you have a lot of interests, and you are able to apply yourself to a lot of different interests, because you get to try it all, but then eventually you do have to make a decision,” says Moloney.

While studying political science, international relations and social justice in college, Moloney worked as an extra in the Netflix show Fate: The Winx Saga. Fitting really, as this fate is what brought her to the agency.

This was not Moloney’s first foray into the acting world; she had been a child actor and, at the age of 15, was given the opportunity to go to LA to a talent conference. The big break was offered but the commitment was not there; she felt she still had too many other interests to pass up for a life of acting Stateside. The extra work during her studies reminded her just how much she enjoyed being on set and the people from the industry.

She got an admin job for a talent agency. Within two years, the owner wanted to leave the business to become a casting director, so up Moloney stepped to take over the business.

“I got so attached to all the clients. I’m kind of a people person in that sense; I care deeply about everyone I work with, and I didn’t want to just watch it all go away. I acquired the agency and all the books in August 2023.”

So it’s my agency now, which is still crazy for me to say – I’m very much a ‘just do it’ sort of person. I was raised by a hoard of women who ‘just do it’ – they just said, why not? What’s the worst that happens?”

“I manage people who are aspiring actors. My agency focuses on developmental talent, much more than already busy and working actors. We have a lot of kids. I work with a lot of families. So we have kids from the age of three and four all the way up to around 30, but I do have a few who are older too.”

“My job is mostly just finding opportunities for them, and then in between them auditioning, working on their career as an actor, but also as a person. I’m very interested in the holistic experience as a working actor – I think the better the actor is supported, the better they are at their job, and then the more jobs they start to book,” she says.

Moloney knows a lot about the pressure of auditions and competition as a child. Alongside her acting career back then, she was also an annual participant in the young scientist competitions and other science-based events, at times thinking this would be her career path.

One particular project resulted in her making her own brand of make-up brush cleanser. “I loved bacteria, and growing and analysing it – a very strange thing I enjoyed doing,” she says. “My mum was very supportive – she supported me in a lot of very strange endeavours that I had as a teenager, but this was one of the more intense ones with lots of packaging and buying. I turned our basement into a science lab and made loads and loads of make-up brush cleanser and sold it for a while. But I was young, and I had other things to do.”

The entrepreneurial spirit Moloney exhibits has been handed down through generations of women. Her grandmother set up the first women’s health clinic outside of Dublin in Wexford.

“We’re very strong-headed women, and I think it comes down a lot to watching my granny always be so busy and an entrepreneur herself. Watching her jump from being a doctor before the internet existed, to being an online GP and not really being phased by it, not thinking that it was a big deal, is definitely where a lot of that trickled down into all the generations of my family,” explains Moloney.

Upon moving from Wexford to Dublin, Moloney’s mother, Emily Maher, opened her shop, Lost Weekend, where she sells international furniture, textiles, and decorative lighting, and works as an interior designer.

“I grew up in that shop, her whole staff are like family – we’ve never known life without being in mum’s shop,” says Moloney.

With great role models, it’s no wonder she was confident enough to take the leap of acquiring a business and client list at 23 years of age. It has all been worth it lately as Moloney shares that her clients can be seen in shows like Wednesday and Bad Sisters, and in the latest news, young actor Flynn Gray will star in the new Star Wars film alongside Ryan Gosling. This talent manager seems to have plenty of talent of her own.

“In a very full circle moment, I was recently in Florida as a talent manager. I was brought over to be one of the people on the other side of the desk at one of those talent conferences, and they had no idea that I’d been to one as a teenager. It was a very strange experience to be sitting on the other side of that table and realise that the people aren’t that scary, because I’m not that scary,” she says.