Derry Girls star Jamie-Lee O’Donnell has revealed that she cut ties with her entire family after an intense period of therapy.

The actress, 39, who played Michelle Mallon in the hit Channel 4 comedy, opened up about a year of big changes in 2025, which saw her sell her home in Ireland and move to Barcelona for a fresh start.

Speaking to Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett on the Dish podcast, she said she had ‘trusted the universe’ when she decided, more or less on a whim, to move to a city where she knew no one.

She explained that she had just finished a course of therapy back home, describing it as a significant step, particularly, she joked, for an Irish woman.

She said she had reached a point in her life and career where she realised there were things she needed to work through.

The actress described the process as intense and genuinely tough, but said that once she had completed it, she felt ready for a fresh start, which is when she sold her house and moved to Spain. She admitted the decision sounded ‘mental’.

O’Donnell said she had always been fiercely independent, researching something thoroughly and then simply going for it, an approach she said had brought both good and bad over the years. This time, she said, it had worked out well.

She went on to reveal that the therapy had led to her decision to go ‘no contact’ with her family at home.

She said it was part of the work she had done, and that the more openly and honestly she spoke about it, the more she realised it was sadly not that unusual an experience for adults.

Raised in Derry, O’Donnell moved to England to study performing arts after school, before splitting her time between auditions in the North and in London.

She had previously spoken about the impact of therapy in an interview with Hot Press, saying she had been trying to unpack a lot from her childhood. She said that after the global success of Derry Girls, things had not been clicking, and that she had been struggling and needed to pause to work out why.

Next for the actress is a lead role in the upcoming BBC One comedy Hopley Hall, written by Daniel Peak, who co-wrote the BBC sitcom Not Going Out.

The six-part series is set in a historic and slightly shabby Grade 1 listed house in the Northern Ireland countryside, following the staff and volunteers who keep it running.