The ‘Blue Lights’ Season 3 Cast on Belfast, Bolder Storylines, and Finding Their Own Beat

Devlin, one of the cast’s emerging stars, grew up some 50 miles from Belfast, in County Tyrone. Blue Lights was Devlin’s first major screen role after drama school; she had only just moved to London when she was called to Belfast to join the cast of Season 1.

Season 3 pushes her character, Annie, into darker emotional territory as she becomes unmoored over her mother’s death. “Northern Ireland has this potent relationship with grief—generational trauma people were told to brush off or armor themselves against. I thought a lot about that.” More people have died by suicide in this part of Ireland since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement than were killed during the 30-year Troubles.

“This season I wanted to find Annie’s softer colors, the quieter beats,” Devlin continues. “And I still question her motivations. Why would someone from her background choose policing, and keep choosing it?”

In the new episodes, the women characters drive Blue Lights’s most potent moments, whether that’s Annie, her colleagues Grace Ellis (Siân Brooke) and Aisling Byrne (Dearbháile McKinney), or their serious-minded boss, Sergeant Helen McNally (Joanne Crawford). Devlin acknowledges the power of female-driven narratives in a region where much of politics and pop culture has been fronted by men.

The cast’s intimacy after three seasons also deepens everything: “We’ve gone so much further—and I get all the gossip from our drivers,” Devlin says. “Every day has an energy. Great scenes, even better wee chats.” (Blue Lights has already been renewed for a fourth season, but Devlin would love to take on arthouse work, too—A24 films, Andrea Arnold, and Robert Eggers are all favorites.)

As we drive past Belfast’s infamous peace walls—by day a tourist photo-op, by night a flashpoint for clashing youths—Devlin’s costar Braniff, a native of Belfast, reflects on what the show has opened up for him. “I’ve lived five minutes from some of these places and didn’t truly know them. The show cracks open conversations about the past and how it shapes the present. That’s still so important.”