Sharon Horgan Was an 'Incredibly Pretentious' Kid on a 'Turkey Farm' in Ireland. Now She's at the Top of Her Game (Exclusive)

The 'Bad Sisters' creator and star, who hails from County Meath, Ireland, opens up to PEOPLE in this week's issue about achieving the dreams that once felt "fanciful"

Sharon Horgan always had success on her bucket list.

When she was younger, the London-born, Irish-raised star, 54, told her mother she was going to win an Oscar one day. "I think I was incredibly pretentious, which is hilarious for a kid on a turkey farm," the Bad Sisters creator tells PEOPLE in this week's issue.

"I remember my mom being like, 'Yeah, maybe don't aim that high.' She wasn't saying you can't do it, because, I mean, my parents — they would push us to be the best we could be and to work hard. But I think there was always an element of, 'Be practical. How are you going to earn a living?'"

Related: Fiona Shaw Was Told the Plot of Bad Sisters Season 2 in '25 Seconds' Over Breakfast and Was Immediately 'Delighted to Join' (Exclusive)

The three-time Emmy nominee first explored writing through poetry and monologues and she began to dream of going to drama school. That didn't quite pan out, and when she found herself not "getting parts that I thought were interesting and fun and funny," she picked up every odd job from selling bongs to waitressing, which "pushed things a bit further down the line" in terms of her pursing writing.

"I suppose the whole thing seems a bit fanciful, a bit of a dream," she says. "I think when you were brought up in the middle of nowhere, at a certain point, it feels a bit crazy to have aspirations that feel way beyond what you see around you."

Lightning struck when she met Dennis Kelly and started writing with him. Their first joint project became the 2006 BBC Three sitcom Pulling about a trio of single women living in London (played by Horgan, Tanya Franks and Rebekah Staton).

For more on Sharon Horgan, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.

More successful ventures followed, including Catastrophe, which she created and starred in with Rob Delaney, and HBO's Divorce, which starred Thomas Haden Church and Sarah Jessica Parker and marked Parker's first TV series since Sex and the City.

With two BAFTA TV Awards, a Peabody and numerous Emmy nominations under her belt, the mother of two is reaching new heights with season 2 of her Apple TV+ hit comedy series Bad Sisters.

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It's somewhat a full circle moment for Horgan, who stars in the show alongside Eve Hewson, Sarah Greene, Anne-Marie Duff and Eva Birthistle, who play Irish sisters living in Dublin.

"For me, the modern Ireland — how I see the country and how relevant it was to the story — but also how complex and interesting and how beautiful it is, and how it gets under our skin and dominates our personalities and how large families are... All of it, I think, fed into the show," she says of season 2, which picks up two years after the death of the Garvey sisters' abusive brother-in-law.

"And if I hadn't got it right — if I hadn't represented Ireland and the Irish people accurately, or in a way that made them proud — I'd throw in the towel."

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New episodes of Bad Sisters season 2 premiere weekly on Wednesdays on Apple TV+.