How to Get to Heaven From Belfast has a perfect Derry Girls Easter egg

Derry Girls writer and creator Lisa McGee has a brand new series out, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, but don’t even think for a second she’s left the crew from Our Lady Immaculate College behind.

The Netflix mystery comedy drama boasts a perfect Easter egg honouring the five leads of Derry Girls, but you’ll have to watch all the way to the final episode to spot it.

Without spoiling anything about the plot of How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, in the eighth and final episode of the series, the characters end up in Derry for a moment. On a city wall, you can see an enormous mural of Derry Girls protagonists Erin Quinn (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Clare Devlin (Nicola Coughlan), Michelle Mallon (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), Orla McCool (Louisa Harland), and James “The Wee English Fella” Maguire (Dylan Llewellyn) all in their school uniforms. It’s class.

Plus, it’s a real mural. Commissioned in 2019 by Channel 4 as part of its marketing campaign for Derry Girls Season 2, the mural is the work of Derry not-for-profit social enterprise group UV Arts. And it’s still there.

The ‘Derry Girls’ mural in Derry.
Credit: Channel 4

In a bit of a mind-bender, Jackson actually appears as a character in How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, which has my multiverse brain turning inside out.

Channel 4’s Derry Girls finished up in 2022, after three seasons of ’90s music nostalgia, brilliant representations of Northern Irish women, and importantly, a reflection on personal experiences of the Troubles, the sectarian conflict between nationalists and unionists.

‘Derry Girls’ 4eva.
Credit: Netflix

If you’re a Derry Girls fan, check out How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, a series I called in my review “hilarious, haunting, and heavenly in every way.”

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast and Derry Girls are now streaming on Netflix.