By Michael Roddy

Danielle Galligan is a familiar Irish face for Netflix fans, having played Lady Olivia Hedges, wife of Irish brewing mogul Arthur Guinness, in the streamer’s hit “House of Guinness” and a major role in the YA sci-fi series “Shadow and Bone”. She also was among the cast of thousands for “Game of Thrones”.

But despite stage and screen creds she’s been honing since the age of 16, Galligan said she’s still in awe when she works on projects with the likes of James Norton, the British actor who played the Guinness family’s rough-and-ready fixer, and Steven Knight, creator of “House of Guinness”, as well as “Peaky Blinders” and “SAS Rogue Heroes”.

“I was very intimidated, I felt a bit of imposter syndrome,” Galligan, 33, told Irish Arts News in Berlin. “But Lady Olivia taught me to kind of, you know, to power through that a little bit.”

“And I think you should be feeling that on every job. You know, you don’t want to ever feel that you were going backwards or you’re becoming lazy or complacent. I think you should feel scared and challenged.”

Galligan was in Berlin for the European Shooting Stars programme for up-and-coming talent. The programme brings together young talent from different countries during the Berlinale and is run by the European Film Promotion organisation of national film promotion institutes.

She said she’d long been a fan of Knight’s characters, especially the female ones, and that Lady Olivia did not disappoint.

“I think he writes great women,” she said. “I’m reluctant to use the term, like, ‘strong woman’ because I think that every woman I’ve ever met is strong in different ways. But he writes really complex (women), and he’s brave in the characteristics he gives them.”

Galligan grew up in the leafy Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham, where her mother Lorraine is a beauty therapist who runs a salon and beauty school.

She made her stage debut in a high-school production of the musical “Oklahoma!” in which, because it was an all-girls school, she played the primary male lead. Her performance was so convincing that her biology teacher didn’t recognise her and said she hadn’t realised it would be a co-production with a boys’ school. “So, I think I peaked too early, to be honest,” she joked.

From there she entered the drama programme at Trinity College Dublin and was graduated from Dublin’s prestigious Lir Academy, a wellspring for some of the country’s most talented actors.

She acknowledged that with Cillian Murphy having won the Oscar for Best Actor and Jessie Buckley nominated for Best Actress, plus worldwide kudos for Irish films including “The Banshees of Inisherin” and the Irish-language film “An Cailín Cúin”, it’s an opportune time to be an actor in Ireland.

“I’ve been very emotional since the day I got here (Berlin), because I think that, firstly, Ireland have to take a gamble on you to submit you as part of the EFP programme, and to feel that they felt strongly enough about me to take that gamble is a very emotional feeling,” she said;.

”And then it’s amazing because I’m so proud of our industry. I’m so proud of our heritage and our storytelling and the work that we’re putting out.

“And I think we’ve always, as a country, we’ve always said of ourselves that we punch well above our weight. And that’s definitely true with this experience as well.”

Another country that punches above its weight in the film world is Greece so it’s no surprise that there’s a strong link between the Irish and Greek film industries, with Screen Ireland having provided backing for Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Lobster”) who — no surprise — is one of Galligan’s heroes.

Galligan said that when she went on holiday for two weeks in Greece she stayed for a month.

“I do feel like I was Greek in a past life, so I’m, like, really hoping, I would love to, like, film something in Athens with Yorgos Lanthimos,” she said.

If their respective agents are reading, a connection is only a phone call away.