Normal People director says he would love to do a second series but we will have to wait

Normal People director Lenny Abrahamson said he would love to do a second series of the show, but we will have to wait for five years

Normal People director Lenny Abrahamson has said he would like to revisit the characters of Connell and Marianne in five years.

In an interview with Deadline, the Oscar-nominated director said: “I have a sneaking thing in the back of my head that if everybody was willing, and if the stars aligned, I’d love to revisit them in five years and find out what happened, where they are. Is somebody a father or a mother? What relationships are they in that then get disrupted by their meeting again?”

While no concrete discussions have taken place with author Sally Rooney, Abrahamson did say they have talked about how interesting it would be to “check back in with them.”

He also mused that restarting their story directly from the show’s ending wouldn’t feel right. “It would be really strange to pick that up eight weeks later with him traveling to New York, I think. There needs to be time…You’d do it for real, you’d do it á la Before Sunset.”

And how do Daisy Edgar Jones and Paul Mescal feel about the future of their characters?

Daisy told the website, “A little bit of me imagines that they’ll always be in each other’s lives. I just don’t know if it would be in the romantic sense, but at the same time, I find that quite hard to believe, because they do have this uniquely special connection. And so, I hope that they do end up getting married and have loads of kids.”

While Paul believes Connell would get married to someone else first. “It’ll destroy lots of people’s lives along the way, because ultimately they’re going to be drawn. But they will consciously resist the idea that they’re supposed to be together. It’ll be a long process of discovery until they finally find each other permanently, I think.”

Success

Normal People was a roaring success for both the BBC and RTÉ. The first two episodes alone saw over 300,000 people tune in on RTÉ One, while another 301,000 streams were recorded on RTÉ Player.

For the BBC, Normal People broke records giving BBC Three is best ever performance on the streaming site. There were 16.2 million iPlayer searches for Normal People following its initial release. The record was previously held by Killing Eve the spy thriller starring Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh.

Abrahamson said of the show’s success: “I still can’t quite believe it…The numbers are just absolutely unbelievable.”

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