Dan Levy goes on a new journey in Good Grief trailer
The Schitt's Creek alum's feature-length directorial debut premieres January 5 on Netflix
Ever since 2020, the amount of unprocessed grief we’ve all had to carry within us is almost hard to comprehend. Still, Dan Levy is giving it his best shot in his feature-length directorial debut, Good Grief.
“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,” the Schitt’s Creek alum told Entertainment Weekly of the genesis of his upcoming Netflix film. “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.”
The film, which Levy describes as a “drama or a dramedy,” sees the director and writer also starring as Marc, a children’s book illustrator living in London. Marc is content with his life, even if he’s often overshadowed by his charismatic husband Oliver (Luke Evans), whose novels have brought him worldwide success. But everything changes when Oliver suddenly dies on the night of the couple’s annual Christmas party, which inspires Marc and his two closest friends Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel) to travel to Paris while dealing with the tragedy.
In addition to exploring how we process grief, Levy also wanted the film to highlight the power of friendship and found family. “I feel like the older we get, the more profound our relationships are with our friends and the more complicated they get,” he said. “Sometimes the people that are closest to us, we excuse the most… It’s an uncomfortable conversation to have, and yet that intimacy exists within these friendships.”
Despite its subject matter, the film is far from melancholy. “I had to access the most vulnerable parts of my own self and my relationships in the hopes that they were universal,” Levy said. “I think the level of honesty is still there and a desire to remind people that things are going to be okay.”
Good Grief premieres January 5 on Netflix