First Look at Dan Levy’s Gay Dramedy ‘Good Grief’

Schitt’s Creek Dan Levy is gearing up to make his feature film directorial debut with Good Grief.

Despite shedding its rom-com label, Dan Levy’s upcoming project is already tugging at our heartstrings. In an exclusive with Entertainment Weekly, Levy said he first thought of the project as a romantic comedy, but the direction has shifted. “I see the movie as a drama or a dramedy,” he told the outlet.

In Good Grief, Levy takes on the role of Marc, a former painter turned children’s book illustrator. He lives in London with his husband Oliver (Luke Evans), a successful author whose novels have spawned a globally renowned movie franchise. However, everything changes when Oliver unexpectedly dies during their annual Christmas celebration.

Finding Family

As the title suggests, Levy said grief was a large theme for the movie.

“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 continued. “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.”

But as Marc grapples with the tragedy, profound revelations surface, prompting him to embark on a transformative journey with his two closest friends – the vivacious Sophie (portrayed by Ruth Negga) and the reserved Thomas (played by Himesh Patel) – as they travel to Paris.

“Having written 80 episodes about an actual family, I felt compelled to tell a story about found family and the importance of it,” he said.

“I feel like the older we get, the more profound our relationships are with our friends and the more complicated they get. 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.”

Good Grief premieres on Netflix on January 5.

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