The eldest of four children, she and her family lived in Raheny. “It was a very normal Irish childhood – school and road trips and going to visit relatives on my holidays” – until her parents decided to escape recession-hit Ireland. “They were very young with a young family and at the time in Ireland, in the 1980s, it was tough for them and they were so full of life and full of adventure,” she explains. They started a new life, near the beach in Adelaide – and that’s where they still are. “Looking back at them making that move, I’m deeply proud of them, they were so brave.” A young O’Reilly adjusted to life in Australia, enjoying a happy childhood alongside her brother and two sisters. She was, she says, always interested in acting. “Maybe I was just desperate for attention,” she admits, “but I seemed to be interested in performance of some sort from the beginning.” After school, she moved to Sydney, a 15-hour drive away, and attended drama school. “It was three years of getting to play. I loved it,” she says. She spent her 20s in Sydney, working with some of the most high-profile and respected theatre companies. She met and married her husband, an Australian chiropractor – “we’ve been together since Jesus was a baby,” she laughs – and took on small TV roles, although she never turned up in Neighbours or Home and Away. “I was never attractive enough for those shows,” she jests. “I used to have friends in Australia who would joke
“I knew that up until that point I had been really lucky. I was always aware that there are no rules, no rhyme in this career. It’s not a meritocracy” when I would go onto the beach, that they’d have to put sunglasses because I was so white. Oh, here comes the fluorescent one.” She may be pale but to pretend that she’s not telegenic is ridiculous – her cheekbones are probably visible from space. You get the sense though that O’Reilly’s modesty isn’t put-on. Instead, it’s borne out of the reality of being an actor – a player in someone else’s vision; a performer who could, one day, find there are no more parts. After almost a decade in Sydney, O’Reilly, along with her husband, moved to London. She bagged a role in a Trevor Nunn production of Richard II impressively quickly, but after that, things went quiet. “I was 29 or 30 and I had seen lots of friends go through it,” she reflects. “I knew that up until that point I had been really lucky. I was always aware that there are no rules, no rhyme in this career. It’s not a meritocracy.” She got a parttime job and tried to “keep cool and focused, reading a lot, keeping myself inspired”. It paid off and less than two years later, she was on stage at The Gate in