Growing up is hard when you’re in your 20s. Just ask Cooper Raiff.
The writer/director, still in his 20s, has made a name for himself off of this premise throughout his early career. His two features and new TV show all revolve around young adults who are either in college, on the way out or freshly sent into the real world. These projects, all of which he stars in, highlight the unique growing pains felt by people in this period of life, new to love and not fully prepared for hard, grown-up truths.
“Hal was the only character that I’ve ever wanted to play,” Raiff said in an interview with TheWrap. “I would’ve loved for someone else to play Alex (from “Sh*thouse”), and I really wanted someone else to play Andrew (from “Cha Cha Real Smooth”). For Hal, it was disturbingly second nature. It was very easy to tap into his hopping over pain to be with his sister.”
His latest, “Hal & Harper,” follows kids who grew up too fast and became adults who grow up too slow. The show began its eight-episode run on Mubi on Sunday, Oct. 19, with its finale airing this Sunday. Raiff plays the series’ titular Hal opposite Lili Reinhart as Harper, a brother-sister duo who faced tragedy when they lost their mother at a young age. The show follows these characters in two time periods: one where Hal and Harper are in their 20s, and another where they’re 7 and 9 years old, respectively.
Raiff and Reinhart play their characters in both time periods.
In past films, Raiff has acted opposite such movie stars as Dakota Johnson, Dylan Gelula, Leslie Mann and Raúl Castillo. As he anchors his first TV series, the series creator/writer/director is joined by the likes of Reinhart, Mark Ruffalo and Betty Gilpin, among others.
When Raiff learned that his agent also had Ruffalo as a client, he quickly became taken with the idea of casting the four-time Oscar nominee as his father in the series. His agent insisted that they should “play this right,” sending “Cha Cha Real Smooth” Ruffalo’s way to see if he would be interested in a general meeting with the young filmmaker. When Ruffalo was, Raiff’s agent insisted that he not mention his upcoming project.
“Five minutes into the conversation I was like, ‘I want you to play my dad in ‘Hal & Harper,’’’ and he’s like, ‘What’s ‘Hal & Harper?’” Raiff laughed. “I sent it to him and he just, like, responded to it. He would text me as he was reading it and say like, ‘Oh, this scene just crushed my heart,’ or ‘Oh, this needle drop was awesome,’ and I was texting (my agent) like, ‘I think he’s liking it.’ At some point, he said he wanted to do it, and it was … when he said he wanted to do it, it felt really huge.”
Raiff had similar praise for Reinhart, who attached to the series a year before it started shooting. The actress playing Harper would undertake a tough role, carrying some of the series’ heaviest moments both as an adult and as a young, suffering child. Raiff knew Reinhart had the depth necessary to pull it off after watching the actress speak in a handful of interviews.
“She’s the light that you want to follow through the dark tunnel, and watching her walk through the dark tunnel teaches you a lot about yourself,” he said. “I think I had an instinct about what a gift her performance would be, but I never knew the gravity of that gift.”
With his two central co-stars cast, Raiff was ready to embark on a project that had been nearly a decade in the making. The writer/director said the family of Hal, Harper and “Dad,” as he’s known in the show, had existed in his head before he helmed his first feature, “Sh*thouse.” For a while, he envisioned it would be in the same format as his future endeavors: a movie.
Eventually, however, he thought to memorable televised dramas he’d seen in his time — notably, Catherine Magee’s “Normal People” starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. He began to wonder if the family in his head would benefit from room to breathe.
“I love movies to death. I’m in love with movies. But that’s just not what this is,” Raiff said. “You’re going to learn about everyone, and you’re going to go on the ride with them, but you’re going to need to take some breaks. It’s not something where you’re supposed to consume all four and a half hours in four and a half hours. You need some space away from them.”
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It was in this television format that “Hal & Harper’s” editors, Raiff and McKinley Carlin, really had the space to shine. The series unfolds nonlinearly, jumping between various moments between Hal and Haper’s pasts and their present to give a more complete look at their family strife.
“I really wanted you to feel immersed in their journeys, and with the editing and the flashes and kind of confusing, ‘What was that?’ That’s how the characters feel, and how confusing and frustrating it is to watch. It’s the same frustrating thing for them,” Raiff said. “It’s OK to feel a bit confused because the show is so deeply about confusion. What I learned about the show as I was making it was, ‘Oh, as a kid, I was confused.’”
As these stories and timelines slowly march toward a sense of resolution, the finale of “Hal & Harper” brings viewers to a series of boiling points. The brunt of the emotional weight in these moments is carried by Reinhart — particularly one scene where the often-contained Harper releases herself in devastating fashion.
“What she does in the finale is such a gift to people watching. It’s such a door that she opens for you,” he said. “I like to think that the show is gently working its way up to that in a way that doesn’t feel like ‘Oh my god, you’re being pushed into this dark room.’ It’s gently opening up, and that moment in the finale is just this invitation of ‘Here it is. It’s time.’ It was so miraculous.”
As Raiff’s most ambitious endeavor yet winds down, it feels like he’s opened a door of his own, with his intimate coming-of-age style gradually evolving from project to project. Wherever the creative’s path takes him next, it’s clear he poured a lot of himself into this latest venture.
“If I have kids one day and something traumatic happens, I know that the most important thing is not that they understand and grieve it in the way that an adult does. The most important thing is to say, ‘Everything’s going to be OK. And I know that I’m acting different, and your mom’s acting different, and people around us are acting different, but everything is going to be OK, and you can trust that,’” Raiff said. “I think that’s what Hal and Harper needed and didn’t get, and I think that’s what I as a kid didn’t get.”
All episodes of “Hal & Harper” are streaming on Mubi now.
