Real Love

As CATASTROPHE—Amazon’s brilliantly funny and brutally honest take on modern marriage— enters its final season, stars and creators SHARON HORGAN and ROB DELANEY reflect on their art-imitates-life, Emmy-nominated comedy.

- Clarissa Cruz

ROB DELANEY AND SHARON HORGAN have very specific views when it comes to their onscreen coupling. “We never want the sex to be sexy,” says Delaney, 42. “We never want anyone to look at it and say, ‘Yeahhh, that’s what I wanna do.’ I would rather they look at it and see yes, I got a cramp, then I fell over, and then I made that noise.” Horgan, 48, chuckles and turns to Delaney. “Someone put a clip on Twitter,” she tells him. “There’s a really, really brilliant orgasm from you. You couldn’t look worse in the middle of doing it.”

Spoken like a true married couple. When Catastrophe debuted in 2015, the premise was equal parts titillating and terrifying: Irish schoolteacher Sharon (Horgan) and American ad exec Rob (Delaney) meet at a bar in London, have headboard-thumping sex for six days, then go their separate ways. He saves her name in his phone as “Sharon (London Sex)” and flies home to Boston. Then, in short order, she finds out she’s pregnant, he returns to London to give their relationship a shot, and the pair marries. By season 2, the couple has two kids, a house, a dog, and a gaggle of dysfunctional friends and family. They have—in the words of Zorba the Greek that inspired the show’s title—“the full catastrophe.”