How a UTI and “House of the Dragon” star saved Sharon Horgan’s “Youth” ending

Key Points

• Sharon Horgan recalls writing the Youth ending and how a UTI saved it.

• The creator and star talks about casting James Norton for a finale cameo and working with another Game of Thrones star behind the scenes.

• What’s the status of season 2? Horgan shares she’s starting to think about it.

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the Youth finale, “Agent of the Year.”

Here’s one of those rare instances where someone actually welcomed a urinary tract infection.

Sharon Horgan, the creator of Catastrophe and Bad Sisters, arrived early on at the idea to set the majority of the season 1 ending to her latest show, HBO’s Youth, at a literary awards ceremony. Her character, book agent Alex, grapples with a revealing pros-and-cons list she found at her boyfriend’s (Rupert Friend) place and now must sweat it out at an event where her agency and clients are up for big honors.

“I thought it would be fun and a challenge to have a bit of a bottle episode and contain all the chaos within it,” Horgan tells Entertainment Weekly of episode 8, “Agent of the Year.” “Then I just had to find ways for it not to be too chaotic, too much of a mess, too much running around [as a] headless chicken dealing with disasters all over the place. It was a real challenge to write and a real challenge to film because we only had that venue for a couple of days. It was, honestly, a kickball scramble.”

Then came another idea. “The thing that really saved it and the thing that I really wanted to include was her having this terrible UTI,” Horgan shares. “Because nothing makes a broken heart worse than having to deal with cystitis.”

On top of figuring out the status of her relationship, Alex deals with the absence of her client, who thinks she’s being stalked; her son, Ruairí (Aran Murphy), getting more drunk and belligerent as the ceremony goes on; a potential disaster with one of her authors, Charlotte (Anne Reid), and Charlotte’s no-nonsense daughter, Livonia (Harriet Walter); and unsettling remarks from rival lit agent Grayson (Freddie Fox) and writer-with-a-grudge Malcolm (Douglas Hodge).

The UTI fixed all of Horgan’s writing woes trying to juggle everything. “It gave her these terrible, quiet moments where you get away from the chaos of what’s happening at the awards and just be alone and feel that devastation,” she explains. “I’m really glad I did it that way because I like to have as much comedy as possible, but I really like to f— people up, as well.”

Another piece of the chaos? The arrival of James Norton.

The star from House of the Dragon, House of Guinness, and Little Women plays a version of himself who became famous for acting in a play written by Charlotte. Norton emerges at the awards ceremony as the surprise guest to pay tribute to the author. Everyone in the room promptly drools over him.

“James Norton was an absolute win that I still can’t believe,” Horgan says of that casting. The writer and showrunner bumped into Norton at Wimbledon. They exchanged pleasantries, with the actor expressing his admiration for Horgan’s work. Though his casting on Youth “was such a last-minute idea,” she notes. “I had this idea really late in the day that Charlotte had written these terrible plays, as well. So I thought, Who could give her her award? Someone who became famous, rather than someone from the literary world.”

And with Damian Lewis as a premiere cameo, Horgan liked the notion of bookending the show with “another chunky bit of celeb muscle” in the finale. “Luckily, he said yes,” she adds.

Another Game of Thrones alum worked with Horgan behind the scenes on Youth. Lena Headey, the five-time Emmy nominee behind Cersei Lannister, joined the writers’ room and penned episode 6, “Desperate Measures,” with Horgan and Ali Hadji-Heshmati. Horgan and Headey have known each other since acting together in 2005’s Imagine Me & You, and the actress later created the eight-part audio series Intimacy for BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 through Horgan’s production company, Merman.

“I had no idea she was a writer as well,” Horgan says. “Just from talking to her and from the kind of thing that she was writing, I messaged her and said, ‘Would you like to come into the writers’ room and potentially write an episode of the show?’ And she did. I hope we continue working together because she has that thing. You read a lot of scripts and you’re like, ‘That is very technically proficient and you clearly got skill,’ but you are always looking for someone who says things in a way that you’ve never heard before. And she does that.”

It’s unclear if that writing relationship will continue with Youth. HBO hasn’t announced a renewal for the dramedy yet, but Horgan designed it as a series. As she says, “There’s something about the workplace setting of Youth that feels like that could go on, watching those characters continue to f— up.” She’s beginning to think about what that could look like.

Horgan has a folder on her phone that she calls “stupid stuff,” things that could happen to Alex or clips she could be watching in a deep scroll. She had one for season 1, and it was Headey who sent her a video about the labia minora that made it into the premiere episode. “There’s not a lot there [for season 2],” Horgan clarifies, “but if I went through it with you now, you’d probably laugh a few times.”

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.

So for now, the Youth ending exists as her mirror bookend to the opening of the pilot — Alex and Ruairí watching videos on their phone together in bed, similar to Alex’s doom-scroll in the beginning. It’s also the kind of ending Horgan is known for, something that never neatly concludes even if things turn out okay.

In the case of Youth, the future of Alex’s relationship with Patrick feels non-existent, while the one with her son finishes strong. It makes the comedy of errors that precedes it cushioning for the emotional wallop. “If you’re gonna have something emotional like that at the end of a comedy,” Horgan says, “you gotta follow it with an awful bike crash.”

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly