Bad Bridgets podcast about crime among Irish women in the US inspires the film | Podcast

It began as a web of dusty archives for an academic project on Irish women immigrants to Canada and the United States by two history professors, a worthy but perhaps niche topic.

After all, these subjects were human detritus from the Irish diaspora whose existence was often not recorded, let alone remembered.

They were poor girls and women who ended up on the wrong side of the law and lived and died in abject poverty, footnotes in the mass migrations to New York, Boston, and Toronto in the 19th century.

But the two academics who mined police, court and prison archives for this hidden world of female crime, coined the term, Bad Bridgets, which has evolved into a successful podcast, a book, and now a Hollywood movie.

Margot Robbie’s production company announced this week that it will adapt the stories into a feature film starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, which will be directed by Rich Peppiatt, who directed Kneecap.

“This is a new world for us,” said Eileen Farrell, who lectures at Queen’s University Belfast. “We have received a number of messages and emails from people saying this is amazing, fantastic news – it has been fantastic.”

Her collaborator Leanne McCormick, from Ulster University, welcomed the move to screen. “It’s hard to hand over your child, and it’s something we’ve been working on for a very long time, but at the same time it’s really exciting to see how people who have experience that we don’t have take what we’ve created and make it something else and something different.”

The film stars Edgar Jones, who made her name in Normal People, and Emilia Jones, who starred in Coda, as sisters who leave famine-stricken Ireland to escape their abusive father, poverty and hunger. In New York, they enter the shadow world of the “Bad Bridgets” – sex workers, thieves, drunks and murderers.

Peppiatt and Kneecap producer Trevor Burney have optioned the historians’ book, Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Immigrant Women, and will collaborate with Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap.

Academy Award-winning production designer James Price and costume designer Kate Hawley will work on the film, which is scheduled to begin filming in Ireland and Northern Ireland next year.

“I’d like to think we’d have a lot of influence on the film, but I don’t think so,” Farrell said. “It’s a little scary because you have your own specific ideas as historians, and we think about things in certain ways. So there’s a little bit of abandon.”

McCormick said they trusted Peppiatt, a former tabloid reporter who earned plaudits for his semi-autobiographical film Kneecap, about the rap trio of that name. “We’ll leave the film up to Rich. He’s the expert and has amazing ideas, so we’re really looking forward to seeing how it turns out.”

The original academic project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, debunked the traditional narrative that Irish immigrant women were domestics, cooks, wives and mothers with reputations for industriousness and integrity.

In the 1860s, Irish people made up about a quarter of New York’s population, but Irish men made up half of the male prison population and Irish women 86% of the female prison population. A survey of 1,238 foreign-born sex workers in the city found that 706 of them, just over half, were Irish.

The research revealed individual stories, such as that of Ellen Price, who was described as appearing in a Toronto court in 1865 “drunk as usual, with a flaming red feather in her hat.” She was taken to prison, and joined the “Rocky’s Road to Dublin” choir.

Margaret Brown, a pickpocket known as Old Mother Hubbard, attempted to escape from a Chicago prison in 1877 by tying bedsheets together but fell and was severely injured. Lizzie Halliday, originally from County Antrim, was convicted of multiple murders and became the first woman to be sentenced to death in the electric chair in New York, but her sentence was commuted on the grounds of insanity.

Farrell said fans of the book and podcast, which just launched its second season, will appreciate learning about this side of the Irish immigrant experience. “Not all wives, mothers, nuns or teachers were good. There was a little bit of a dark side. I don’t want to meet these women but I love that we can see their strong attitudes and challenge them.”

Historians hope that aspects of their “favorite bridge” will end up on screen, but in the meantime they will continue researching and teaching. “Talking about premieres and all that is really exciting but we still have to do our day jobs,” McCormick said. Farrell joked, though, that they could have dreamed of shining. “That’s our main concern, you know, what we’re going to wear on the red carpet.”