From sourcing horses and training them to pull an electric milk float, to helping prepare Hollywood actors for filming, Sophia Harding and her business partner Daire O’Reilly found themselves at the heart of a movie production, all thanks to a chance audition they never meant to attend in the first place.

The film was the 2026 The Three Urnsstarring Ciarán Hinds, but for Sophia of Higginstown Irish Horses in Kinlough, Co Donegal, daughter of writer, Irish Times columnist and playwright, Michael Harding and celebrated artist Cathy Carman, the story really began long before any film crew arrived.

There have been many chapters along the way for Sophia. Some involve surfing. Some involve riding racehorses. One involved trying to build a horse-and-cart tourism empire. But like many horse people, Sophia’s life with horses hasn’t followed a neat or predictable route.

She learned to ride at her local riding school, jumped ponies as a teenager and narrowly missed the chance to ride for Ireland when her competition pony went lame in the run-up. She wandered briefly away from horses while studying photography in college. But horses, like the Atlantic tide in nearby Bundoran, kept pulling her back.

One summer, while working in a riding school in the surfing town, she met Daire. Together they started buying and producing ponies, gradually building experience in sales, schooling and the occasional breaking job.

“We bought our first pony for €300 and sold it for €1,500, we thought we were amazing,” she says, laughing.

A few years later, still in her 20s, Sophia decided she wanted something more permanent. Taking on the lease on a yard in Donegal was, she admits, slightly terrifying.

“At the start we were thinking of all sorts of mad ideas to fill the place,” she says. “I was thinking maybe we’d rent space for jet skis or get someone with greyhounds in; instead the horses came.

Today, alongside achieving some of the highest-prices at the recent Clifden Connemara Pony Sales, and building a solid reputation for producing and selling sensible, quality horses, Sophia’s willingness to “give anything a go” has also led her into an unexpected side-line: film work.

It started with a production called Robin in the Hood, an offbeat independent film blending shots across Dublin city, directed by Norwegian filmmaker Kristin Vollset. Sophia ended up riding bareback through Dublin city streets in what she describes as “completely wild” filming conditions.

Then came The Three Urns.

Initially, Sophia thought she was answering a call-out for someone with horse experience; perhaps a wrangler or handler for the set.

Unexpected side-line

Instead, she and Daire arrived to discover they had accidentally walked into a full acting audition.

“There were hundreds of people there getting handed lines,” she says. “Daire wanted to bolt,” she added, laughing.

Rather than flee, Sophia simply explained to the producers that they worked with horses in Donegal and could probably help source animals for filming. The producers made them read the lines anyway.

A few weeks later, the phone rang.

The production needed horses, but, most importantly, they needed Molly, a compact but immensely strong little black and white Irish cob, who became one of the film’s stars, acting as Hinds’ character’s horse throughout the production.

“She’s only about 14.2hh,” Sophia says, “but she’s as wide as she is tall and she’s really, really good-natured.”

At first glance, the job sounded manageable enough. Molly would pull a cart in a handful of scenes. Then the cart became a milk float.

Not a horse-drawn cart made to look like a milk float, but an actual electric milk float to be attached behind the horse. That, Sophia explains, changed everything.

“With a normal cart, the horse and cart move together,” she says. “But with the milk float, the float had its own steering and Molly had her own steering, it was a lot,” she says.

It’s just such fun. No matter what part of the crew you’re in, there’s something creative and exciting about it

Preparing for filming became a serious operation. Sophia sourced an old-style working harness, including an 80-year-old leather collar stuffed with straw, designed for pulling heavy loads back in the day. Molly spent weeks learning to manage the strange vehicle behind her, with the help of Sophia and Daire.

Then Ciarán Hinds arrived at the yard. Leading the fun and unfolding adventure of The Three Urns, he plays Mr O’Connor, a widower who travels back to his homeland to scatter his late wife’s ashes.

“He came out to our yard before filming started and got used to Molly and the milk float,” Sophia says. “And to be fair to him, he was brilliant.”

The actor had to steer the horse, steer the milk float and manage the brakes simultaneously, not an easy task, especially on hills where the float threatened to roll forward.

“It was manic,” Sophia says, with a smile. “But he was so calm about it all. You could see he was a proper movie star, but also just very down-to-earth.”

Meanwhile, Molly quietly became the professional everyone relied on.

“She was the best girl,” Sophia says warmly. “Even when it got harder and they wanted her trotting with the milk float; she just kept trying.”

The irony is that Sophia had unknowingly been preparing for this kind of work years earlier. In her early 20s, she was briefly convinced she was going to own a hugely successful horse-and-cart tourism business around Mullaghmore.

“I honestly thought it was going to be a multimillion-euro company,” she says, laughing.

Armed with another steady cob called Blackie, she squeezed tourists onto a cart and drove cliff roads while buses tried to overtake them.

“It was fairly hectic,” she says.

The business never made millions, but the experience taught her invaluable skills about driving horses, pulling weight safely and handling unpredictable situations: all skills that proved unexpectedly useful years later on a film set.

Sophia’s horse education has been equally unconventional elsewhere too. Before COVID, she headed to Australia where she rode racehorses at Caulfield Racecourse in Melbourne, later spending time in Britain with racehorse trainer Ralph Beckett before eventually deciding she wanted to return home and build her own thing in Donegal.

That independent streak still runs through everything she does.

While Higginstown Irish Horses continues successfully, Sophia and Daire remain open to whatever unusual opportunity might arrive next.

Would she do more film work? Absolutely.

“It’s just such fun,” she says. “No matter what part of the crew you’re in, there’s something creative and exciting about it.”

As for Molly, she appears to have taken naturally to celebrity life.

During filming, she stayed in luxury, travelling in a large trailer fitted like a mobile stable. By the end of production, crew members were joking that Molly “was the only one with a trailer of her own”.

And when filming wrapped, the plucky four-legged star received the recognition she deserved.

“They were calling wrap on all the actors,” Sophia says. “Then finally they said, ‘And that’s a wrap on Molly.’”

The crew burst into applause. Not bad for a little Irish cob from Donegal.