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The First Look at Dan Levy's New Film Good Grief Is Emotional AF
After exploring a family dynamic in Schitt's Creek, Levy wanted to explore found family in his directorial debut film.
Get ready to sob at Dan Levy’s directorial debut.
The Emmy-winning actor and writer, known mostly for Schitt’s Creek, is getting ready to premiere his directorial debut film, a drama called Good Grief. And we're finally getting a first look via Entertainment Weekly.
Good Grief stars Levy as Marc, a former painter and current children’s book illustrator married to Oliver (Luke Evans), a celebrity author whose novels have been adapted into a popular global movie franchise.
Everything changes for Marc when Oliver suddenly dies the night before the couple’s annual Christmas party and he’s forced to deal with life on his own. With his two best friends (Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel) in tow, he travels to Paris to find life after tragedy.
Levy told EWthat he originally conceived of the idea as a rom-com, but it ultimately became something different. He says that after writing a show about a family (Schitt’s Creek) he wanted to write something about a found family.'Schitt's Creek' creator Dan Levy is back with 'Good Grief,' a movie he says was shaped by a personal loss in his own life. EW has an exclusive first look at the movie, which also stars Luke Evans, Ruth Negga, and Himesh Patel. https://t.co/ZCJddkzMAr
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) December 5, 2023
"In the early days when that idea was coming to fruition, it was originally conceived potentially as a romantic comedy, and then whatever press got out set what is now a very strange description of the movie," he said. "I see the movie as a drama or a dramedy."
"I lost my grandmother toward the tail end of the pandemic, and I was in a very strange headspace in terms of feeling the weight and the profound sense of tragedy of what the COVID pandemic had done for all of us, while at the same time trying to honor the passing of someone who meant so much to me," he added. "It was hard for me to feel the specificity of loss when all I was feeling was grief for so long. It was that conversation that really expedited the concept of the movie."
"I feel like the older we get, the more profound our relationships are with our friends and the more complicated they get," he explains. "Sometimes the people that are closest to us, we excuse the most in terms of having those hard conversations about life and bad habits and patterns of behavior that could be slightly course corrected. It's an uncomfortable conversation to have, and yet that intimacy exists within these friendships."
"When I went into it, I was still processing a lot," Levy said of the movie’s themes of grief and healing. "Not that we ever fully process grief, but that question of, am I grieving properly? Have I done enough? I do feel like, in making this movie, I have honored the grief that I felt at the time, that this is all I could do to celebrate the feelings that I had when my grandmother and my dog passed away. Sometimes if you have the ability to write, it's the greatest outlet for pain and catharsis."
While this new project is in some ways very different from Schitt’s Creek, Levy said it keeps the same spirit.
"In so many ways, I feel like they both share a level of uncomfortable honesty," he said. "I had to access the most vulnerable parts of my own self and my relationships in the hopes that they were universal. While Good Grief is tonally very different, I think the level of honesty is still there and a desire to remind people that things are going to be okay."
Good Grief was written and directed by Levy and also stars Celia Imrie and Arnaud Valois. It premieres on Netflix this January 5.
Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.
Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.
