Some of the Stuff in Youth Actually Happened to Sharon Horgan

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Youth, “Agent of the Year.”]

A lot happens in the last five minutes of the Season 1 finale of HBO’s Youth. Alex (series creator and star Sharon Horgan), the literary agent and divorced mother of a recent university dropout, gets several bombs metaphorically dropped on her. First, she wakes up the day after a literary awards ceremony in the bed of Malcolm Hammond (Douglas Hodge), an unsavory former client who has somehow found success with a book that has an equally unsavory name: Goblin Seed. Did they sleep together? It seems like yes, though that is technically unclear.

Shortly after walk-of-shaming out of his apartment, Alex finds out that Malcolm has signed a contract to rejoin her agency. Which means that, in addition to not knowing whether she just had sex with this creep, she will have to deal with him on a regular basis moving forward. She also finds out from her friend and boss Sam (Sharlene Whyte) that she got the bonus she wanted, which is great, and also nauseating, because it’s possible that it will seem like she hooked up with Malcolm to win him back professionally.

Then she arrives at her apartment to discover that her on-again, off-again boyfriend Patrick (Rupert Friend) is outside and wants to talk about their recent falling out. In the previous episode, Alex finds a pros-and-cons list Patrick wrote about their relationship that contains a particularly hurtful con: that if he stays with her, he won’t be able to have kids since she’s aged out of the fertility stage. (Early in the finale, Alex acknowledges that this turn of events strongly echoes a similar storyline in the Friends episode “The One With the List.” “I’ve always felt an affinity with Rachel from Friends,” Alex confesses. “I thought it was my hair. But now I know.”)

Patrick tries to explain that the list was just an exercise — hey, at least he doesn’t say, “We were on a break” — but Alex ends things with him, convinced that he’ll start to resent her if he never gets to be a father. As she walks away, she nearly gets hit by a biker, who crashes into the sidewalk. He seems to be injured, but Alex is too emotionally injured to help Patrick tend to him.

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Even by modern television standards, this is a lot to process in just a few minutes. Fortunately, Horgan was willing to get on a Zoom call to help us unpack Alex’s baggage, explain the significance of the final moments in the episode, and candidly admit that some of the awful things that happen to Alex have also happened to her.

My first very important question is: Why did she sleep with Malcolm Hammond? I know she was drunk. I understand that. But: Why?
Sharon Horgan: I mean, I don’t think she did sleep with him. 

Oh, interesting. Tell me more.
Horgan: I kind of set it up so that you don’t really know what happened, because, like, is he f—ing with her or not? She’s saying, “Well, did we?” and he doesn’t answer her. He just says, “Well, I’m offended” kind of thing. 

I wanted to leave it up to the viewer to figure out what had happened. I mean, she got supremely hammered because her heart is broken. It’s one of those terrible situations that I’ve found myself in, where you’re trying to drink through the pain and then at a certain point, you make terrible choices. 

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sharon. I’ve never done this.
Horgan: [Laughing] I’m so happy for you! 

Was there something in the original script that was more clear about what happened between them or did you always want to keep it ambiguous?
Horgan: I always wanted it to be ambiguous. When you’re writing stuff like this, you just want to 100 percent take the audience with you. You never want to get to a point where they’re going, “But she wouldn’t have done that.”

I hoped that the sense was, “God. Did she do that?” Or maybe she didn’t, you know? Like, how drunk did she get? Also, did he know how hammered she was when she got back there? I mean, he’s not a good guy. So I wanted, the audience to think that potentially something bad would have gone down. 

When Alex finds out that she got the bonus and the things that she wanted professionally, she also realizes they come with the price of having to work with this guy now.
Horgan: That was a position I knew I wanted her to be in from really early days. I wanted her to do something by accident and get something bad by accident, i.e. end up back at his house, and then to get some sort of benefit from it. That’s such a head f—. Like you said, she got what she wanted, but at what cost? So that was an idea from ages ago. In fact, it was going to happen much earlier in the show. 

Then I saw that for her to put herself in any kind of position where she behaves erratically or makes bad choices — I kind of wanted it to be off the back of heartbreak, you know? It felt like it sat better at the end of the show.

One of the things I appreciate about this show is that this is a woman in her fifties, but it feels like she’s still trying to make it professionally. We tend to think that by that age, you’re supposed to have everything figured out, and I can speak for myself and say that I don’t. I’m wondering if that was something that you were deliberately trying to do.
Horgan: Yeah, very, very. I mean, I didn’t start any semblance of a career until I was in my thirties. I didn’t make my first show until I was 32 or 33. I didn’t end up making something that I had any control over until I was 36. Everything took a while. I’ve been very lucky and worked hard, and so I’m in a good position, but I’m still figuring everything out. I thought it was really, really important to show that people in their fifties can still not know what they want to do, or not have hit that point in their career that they thought they would be at, or just made the wrong choices. Like, with Alex, it wasn’t that she made the wrong choices. It was that life threw something at her. 

She had a bookstore and thought that’s what she wanted to be and ended up having to not go that route. She had a husband that she had to support, because he’s an actor, and a child and a mortgage and all that. Life throws just a ton of challenges at you, and so all those best laid plans don’t always come off. You don’t even have to have her best laid plans, you know? You can end up living a life that you’re like, hang on, this wasn’t what I wanted at all. But you’ve just fallen into it. So, yeah, I wanted to give her a job that was very high-pressure, and had the potential to pay off in a big way

I want to ask about Patrick and all this business with his pros and cons list. Did that come to you? Or did you think of Friends and then say, I should do the Friends thing?
Horgan: It happened to me. 

No, really?
Horgan: Oh, it 100 percent happened to me. I did actually contact the person that it happened with and said, “There’s some stuff in the show that is connected to things that happened with us,” and they were fine about it. They were like, “Well, thanks for telling me.” 

I was beyond the age to have a child, and it wasn’t like a pro/con list but it was something that they’d worked out in therapy with their therapist. This woman said, “You’d better write down the stuff that’s worrying you and weigh it all up.” I literally found it under a fruit basket on his kitchen table. 

Oh my God.
Horgan: I just remember that feeling of, like, sinking to the ground. It was after that, I was like, “Hang on, they f—ing did that in Friends.” I thought, I have to own that because it is such an iconic thing. So I thought, you know, good joke. 

When it happened to you, were you like, “This is just like Ross and Rachel”?
Horgan: No, of course not. 

I think that would have been my first thought. I feel like Alex and Patrick could easily work things out if they would just communicate better and try to hear each other.
Horgan: I mean, it is that. There is a bigger issue, which is that she’s always had a problem with her age. She’s built up her age as being a problem in her head. At the same time, with Patrick, I wanted to talk about how a lot of men have this ticking clock thing as well, like this is what I should have done at this age. This is what I should have achieved. I should have a family.

I’m putting that on someone like Patrick, who’s just, in actual fact, quite a beautiful person. Maybe he’s not as careful with feelings, but not because he’s a bad person, because he’s such a straightforward person, really. 

She loves being a mother, and knowing that she might be taking that from him, that was a big part of it. She cares about him enough to not want him to lose that opportunity. I also wanted it to be one of those things where you’re kind of shouting at the screen and going, “Just f—ing talk to each other!” Like in Episode 6, that whole thing about seeing other people, which is also a verbatim conversation I had. That was with someone else. I wanted to be told, “I don’t want you seeing other people,” but the person I was having the conversation with was thinking, “Does she want to see other people? I don’t want to stop her.” So it was just textbook miscommunication. Then they get over that, which is so lovely, and then the biggest issue of all just gets in the way. 

I love how the last moment of the season serves as a bookend to the beginning. In the first episode, she’s scrolling on her phone, but she’s by herself. Now she’s still doing that, but at least she’s doing it with her son.
Horgan: I had that ending in my head for so long, because you try and snatch these moments with your kid. Especially when they hit that age where they are technically an adult, and quite often don’t want that kind of closeness that you need. That exact thing [that Alex says to her son] I’ve said to my daughter so many times, when I’m watching what she’s watching and being so confused by it, then thinking, “Well, this has got to be someone you know. Otherwise, why would you be watching it?” But yeah, it was exactly that. 

I know there hasn’t been an announcement yet about a Season 2 for Youth, but have you thought about where Season 2 could potentially go, or even written some things?
Horgan: Yeah, because you kind of can’t help it, you know? A lot of what I wrote was open-ended and setting things up, so you think about potentially what happens next. It’s been good to have something to focus on while doing all the press. The press is wonderful, and I love that people are engaging with the show. But you also feel like this is, what, like, eight weeks of talking about this? You want to spend some of your time thinking about what can happen next. So that’s what I’ve been doing. 

Youth Season 1 is now streaming on HBO Max.