Team Laura or Team Cherry?
For fan of Prime Video’s limited series The Girlfriend, perspectives were constantly shifting in the ongoing battle of wills between mother Laura (Robin Wright) and girlfriend Cherry (Olivia Cooke) over the affections of Daniel (Laurie Davidson). And as Laura and Cherry went to extremes in the tug-of-war over Daniel with their lies and manipulation, viewers got to watch scenes play out from both sides, letting them decide who was in the right… and wrong. Spoiler alert: It all ends in tragedy.
Here, Wright — who also directed and executive produced the project — and Davidson unpack for Gold Derby their complicated, “perverse” mother-and-son dynamic, and what they would imagine for Season 2.
Gold Derby: Was there ever any version of this that could have had a happy ending?
Laurie Davidson: No, it’s Greek tragedy. They were always doomed from the get-go.
Robin Wright: Yes, otherwise nobody would have watched it, if it was too PC.
Davidson: People like to see people who seemingly have everything watch their lives fall apart. We love to salivate over that.
Is that what drew you to the story in the first place?
Davidson: Oh, a bunch of things drew me to it in the first place, Robin being one of them.
Wright: It’s interesting that you bring that up because it is the underbelly metaphor of the dynamic between these women. He’s in the middle, and it’s this tug of war. People do get off on dismantling people’s lives in the world, and it’s a play on that in a way. But it’s based on reality, because what these women do to one another, it’s totally feasible. It’s not venal. What [Laura] does later on is, but the happenings are expected. Of course, the mother is going to be overly protective. Of course, Cherry is going to lie because she doesn’t want to lose all the perks that come with him. There’s nothing wrong with that.
How much fun was it for you as actors to dive into these characters?
Davidson: It was a lot of fun. They’re such rich characters. There’s so much to play with. At times, you can’t believe that this would happen to these people’s lives, but it’s all rooted in truth. It’s all rooted in lived experience and past experience. This family dynamic is the way it is because of a past trauma where they’ve lost Laura’s first child, Rose. That’s why we are the way we are. That’s why Daniel is still in that mode ,where when you have little toddlers and they run away and then they come back to Mommy — that’s how they explore and how they grow in confidence. Daniel is still doing that. He likes to go and do these daring things — go climb rocks, go take risks — but then he wants to crawl back into bed into the arms of Mommy. It’s only when Cherry comes along that he can slowly wean himself off. It felt so real, even though we get to stretch the boundaries of what is happening to these characters.
Wright: But you’re being weaned away from Mommy…
Davidson: Off the teat.
Wright: …to become a man. Finally. So they’re both in the right, Laura and Cherry. Their intentions are good. I’m going to protect him from peril. And she is going to wake him up and say, “Don’t you want to be your own person and not be so dependent and codependent with mom?” Laura, she would never in a million years imagined that she would lose him and the closeness that they have. It’s funny, we talked a lot about if there ever was a Season 2, wouldn’t it be cool to go back in time and shoot scenes between Laura and Daniel, pre-Girlfriend Season 1 before Cherry came into his life and see how sycophantic and perverse, icky, just wrong — then you have a backstory to look on Season 1.
Davidson: It’s so easy to, and audiences do, vilify these women and go, what are they doing to each other? It’s barbaric. But if it wasn’t for these two seemingly weak men in your life — Howard doesn’t stick up for what he wants, Daniel doesn’t stick up for what he wants. And that’s being passive. We seem to have escaped scot-free in terms of…
Wright: …being pigeonholed in.
Davidson: And the witch hunt that happens, it shouldn’t be overlooked. They need to actually voice what they want.
Wright: Well, that’s why it would be called The Boyfriend.
How do you get into character? Is it important that you identify with her and sympathize with her?
Wright: It’s kind of an intrinsic thing, being a mom. You understand this is exaggerated and for dramatic sake, it’s blown out of proportion because of Laura’s trauma and loss. But I completely understand that position as a mother. I have two kids. There’s always a red flag. I probably could guess that most parents would say the same. It’s your baby, so is anybody going to be good enough? There wasn’t much extensive homework I had to do. I mean, I was playing myself basically with a little bit of exaggeration, the clinginess, the control.
How much did you take from the book in terms of developing each of your characters, and how much did you develop when you were working on the scripts yourselves?
Wright: It was very descriptive, the characters in the book, and what was so nice about Michelle Frances, the novelist, is the way she would describe characters for two, four, six pages is so great for us as actors. It’s our homework. And then you have to translate that in a short scene of dialogue between mom and son. So you’re extrapolating right from those six pages that describe what he’s feeling. He’s feeling trapped, which is why he’s a thrill junkie. He does all these things behind mom’s back.
Before we started shooting, I just said, “Let’s put it on its feet.” We were in a room like this in Spain. We finally had all of the actors together. I had spoken to them separately, director to actor and mom to son character. When we all got in the room, we would improvise and we’d sit down at a table and have therapy sessions and talk about the dysfunction and the beauty of parent to child, child to parent, where you can destruct that thread so easily. We really went deep, didn’t we? It was therapeutic. It was cathartic. And it was a rehearsal like what I would imagine you do in theater.
Davidson: But even if it’s just a few days or a week, having that shared lived experience allows you to have a history that is the same as also the other actors. So you all have that in your mind. You’ve all lived it together, which puts you in the same place and then you have to let that go. The scripts were very fluid. We would do a take of something, and then Robin would rip it up and be like, “OK, let’s play around and throw things out there.” That was a lovely, fluid workspace to be able to play in.
Wright: It also gave us a foundation together as actors, because you need to understand the intention of the other actors’ moves. Now I totally get who Cherry is from his lens and from Laura’s lens and from Howard’s lens. We all perceive her differently and so does everybody else. It’s a fun board game. Then you’re not just by yourself in your trailer as an actor, memorizing your lines and talking to yourself about your character and how your character is going to respond to that character. We did it together.
One of the things I love about the show is how it plays with perspective, because you’re always looking at scenes from multiple perspectives. What was it like as actors to play those scenes from different points of views?
Wright: We would do them back to back. It’s like a light switch. You just go, “Oh, OK — now we’re in this perspective and Mom’s going to be a bitch to Cherry because that’s the way she perceived Laura.” And then we’d move on to Cherry’s perspective and how everybody else reacted in her perspective. It was very much like a math class with the script supervisor, a little bit of a Rubik’s Cube.
Davidson: It serves to destabilize an audience because you’re stretching a character one way to serve one perspective, and then you’re stretching them the other for the other perspective. And so that just helps us even more that the audience doesn’t really know where the actual truth lies. And only these people do or maybe Daniel knows the truth. What is the truth? You know, I say that didn’t happen.
Wright: It’s subjective. That’s the whole point of the show. And it was enticing for that reason because it’s the human condition.
Did you have a single “truth” in your minds as you played the scenes?
Wright: If you were going to give a one sentence answer, I, as the actor, have to believe in her. She’s doing it for the right reasons. And he’s trying to balance. I don’t want to upset mom. I don’t upset my girlfriend. I’m in love. He’s torn.
Davidson: And in any given moment or situation, it changes. One moment he believes Cherry. One moment he believes Laura. He’s flip-flopping as often as the audience are. He loves both of these women, and he doesn’t really know which way to turn.
And what does he believe at the end?
Davidson: Well, at the very end, he’s in a state of complete…
Wright: You’ve got a lot on your plate, buddy!
Davidson: Yeah, it’s almost like you wish I didn’t hear that. Far easier to just get on with it. That never happened. Press delete, put the phone back. Get on with my life.
Wright: Again. The Boyfriend. New show. He gets on with his life.
Robin, what did it mean for you to be able to direct and give your imprint to the show from that perspective?
Wright: Incredible. I’ve never had the opportunity to develop from the inception and build with the creative team. We got to just keep putting more icing on the cake to engage the viewers. I’ve never been able to work like that. It’s a long, hard process wearing three hats. But God, I love it. I love it. I need a little bit of a break right now.
Laurie, what was it like to work with Robin as a director?
Davidson: The unique thing about working with Robin was that she gets it. She’s an actor. There’s a shorthand there. Sometimes with directors, I think they think that there’s a lot of mystery about the work of an actor. Robin knew exactly what to do and how to talk because she’s been there a million times. When she was in a scene with me, she might just subtly alter her performance whilst also being a fantastic scene partner. Almost like a conductor conducting the violinist, she can do it in real time. Usually you have to wait till the end of the take before the director comes in and very politely says, that wasn’t quite what I wanted or give you a note. But Robin was able to do it in real time, which, when we had no time, was an absolute godsend.
Wright: I was so lucky as the director to have those two. They’re like sponges. I would give them a different line reading so that I could get what I wanted out of a performance, he’d pick up on it like that. And Olivia, the same, just real pros. That’s a gift when you’re constantly racing the clock and I have to cut my shot list. In those moments. It was gold to see these magical things come out of Laurie and Olivia and Waleed. It was a real professional team of craftsmen. So I feel like I had a little angel over my head.
What was the most challenging scene for each of you?
Wright: Emotionally, none of them. But the pool scene at the end was physiologically really tough. That pool was really cold. We shot in England and they called that temperature warm! It was freezing. That was the roughest day. Being held underwater and being drowned, it’s hard on the nasal passages. And I had a sinus infection that wouldn’t go away.
Davidson: I can’t think of any.
Wright: You told me the hardest scene for you was when you’re in the hospital.
Davidson: That’s probably true. It was the first thing I shot. And I was like, let me at it. I just want to start. Give me some dialogue.
Wright: You were in that bed for five straight days with tubes coming in and out of you.
And a scene you’re proudest of?
Wright: All of Daniel is revealed in that one scene where we’re in Laura’s office and you are yelling at her and saying, you basically stolen my life. You’ve done nothing but smother me and I’m begging you to listen. It was a great scene. We got to work with the writers to write that scene, and then we’d play with it and move lines around. You take my line, I’ll take your line. That’s the fun of what we do I think as actors.
Davidson: For Robin, look, she’s an absolute master. So you know all of it. But I think the moment probably that I was most impressed was when I was in the hospital and Laura is willing her son to live, to survive. And it’s just heart-wrenching. I’m sitting there and I’m listening. But when it was on her coverage, I’m watching because obviously I’m not going to miss this. She’s bawling our eyes out and I’m just like, wow. And then she’d just be like “Cut!” and it’s gone. She just has to put the director’s hat straight on again. And I was like, wow, I need a second. And she didn’t. Because of the time, she had to just get straight on to directing and figuring out the whole map of what she was going to cut and edit. I was like, wow, that is an absolute master at work.
Wright: It’s interesting just being an actor and you are still feeling that emotion when cut is called. And sometimes the director will say, do you need a minute before we do a take two? I kind of dig doing both at the same time because it is like a light switch. You’re in that emotion. You’re completely engaged and wrenching your heart. And it’s great to be able to turn the light off like that. It frees you because it’s intense emoting like that and where you have to go to bring that to the surface. It’s a lot. It’s a lot because you dredge up old memories, trauma, the thought of losing the love of your life. You use harrowing things. I think of my children getting in a car accident and the car flipping. That brings something to me.
Davidson: Even if the mind knows it’s not real, the body doesn’t. So when you film a scene like that, you are wrecked because your brain’s like, “OK, cool, I had a day at work,” but the body’s like, “What the f–k, we’re in shock.” We’ve had a really traumatic experience and it is in that danger, survival mode. So you have to shake that off because then you’re back in the civilian world. It sounds silly, but it has a physiological effect for sure.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
