Aoife Hinds has revealed she was subject to racial abuse while filming Normal People on the streets of Dublin.
The actress, who played Helen in the hit series, said a “group of preteens” shouted a racist slur at her while they were trying to film a scene.
Aoife admitted her co-star Paul Mescal went to confront the teenagers – but she told him “not to bother”.
Speaking to the Sunday World, Aoife said: “We were all just baffled.”
“Paul started to walk towards them as they were running off. I told him not to bother as I wanted to brush if off and get back to the scene, but that was obviously a defence mechanism,” she said.
“I later regretted that and wished Paul had have gone over to them, to tell them it wasn’t OK to say those kind of things. Or better, to calmly go over to them myself.”
“All the crew were extremely supportive, needless to say shocked, but it just goes to show how racism is ingrained in our society when kids are being brought up hearing all these kind of things.”
“It happens everywhere, it has happened to me in Madrid, in Paris, in the south of France,” she continued.
“One of my friends was punched by a full-grown man in Oxford Street in London just before lockdown.”
“There was an article in The Guardian about the amount of gun sales in the US since the start of the epidemic [sic] and how a lot are first time Asian-American buyers who fear for their safety and lives – that’s just heartbreaking and says it all.”
Aoife is the daughter of Irish actor Ciarán Hinds and French actress Hélène Patarot, who is originally from Vietnam.
