Derry Girls' Ian McElhinney is worried the cast is too old to play schoolgirls.
Ian McElhinney
The 72-year-old actor - who plays Granda Joe in the Irish sitcom - fears the show’s stars Saoirse Monica Jackson, 27, Jamie Lee O'Donnell, 29, Nicola Coughlan, 34, and Louisa Harland, 28, might not look believable as teenagers after delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
He told The Sun newspaper: “That's a long gap and slightly more critical because the girls are ‘Derry Girls’ and because the girls are far from being girls anymore."
However, Ian is not worried about his own role as he joked that getting older isn't really an issue.
He quipped: “That doesn't really matter because if you're accepted as a grandad then you can carry on being a grandad.
“I’m finding whether I like it or not that I've already been a grandad for a few years now, it's my reality.”
'Derry Girls' - which was first broadcast in 2018 - is set in Northern Ireland and follows the set of friends as they combat life during The Troubles of the 90s.
A third series was commissioned for 2020 but filming has been postponed until Autumn 2021 due to the ongoing pandemic restricting the number of people on set.
Ian explained: “We certainly are [intending] to get back to 'Derry Girls' but the only problem is how long it's going to take. We were supposed to film 'Derry Girls' back in May of last year. And at the moment the talk is that we will probably shoot it in the autumn of this year.
“I know with 'Derry Girls' one of [the] stumbling blocks, was the number of extras we might need. The amount of what we have to do with extras.
"While you may be able to control the movement of actors and how to kind of isolate them, when you start bringing in extras on any sort of significant scale then you run into issues. So, that was certainly one of the things that interrupted our working on 'Derry Girls' at the time."