Note: The following story contains spoilers from “Shrinking” Season 2, Episode 3.
“Shrinking” star Lukita Maxwell opened up to TheWrap about how back-to-back lightning strikes delayed, but ultimately helped, her emotionally explosive scene with Brett Goldstein’s controversial character.
Grab your tissues because Season 2, Episode 3, titled “Psychological Something-ism” was quite the doozy, as it was the first time Maxwell’s character Alice confronts the drunk driver who was involved in her mother Tia’s (Lilan Bowden) fatal car accident. Goldstein joined the cast this season for that role, named Louis. In the scene, Alice walks into Louis’ place of work — a cafe — where she sits down and is pleasantly greeted and offered service.
However, after telling Louis that she’s the daughter of the woman he mistakenly killed and he tries to console her, Alice bursts into a fury-driven emotional breakdown and tells him to “shut up.” The scene ends with her giving him a big “f—k you” and leaving the establishment with all the customers now glaring at Louis. She mistakenly leaves her wallet behind, setting the stage for another reunion later on.
Maxwell says she and Goldstein prepared for the scene together by doing positive affirmations.
“Brett and I just having a quick conversation and a check in: ‘I trust you. You trust me. I feel safe with you. You feel safe with me. Let’s f—g do this,’ and then jumped into it,” Maxwell said, adding that that’s when mother nature decided to make a cameo.
“We started shooting the coverage wide, and after we got the wide shots, there was a lightning strike that happened in a five-mile radius of where we were shooting,” Maxwell explained. “Per regulation, whenever there’s a lightning strike within a five-mile radius of a set, you have to halt production and wait it out for an hour. So we started the clock, waited an hour, and at like 53 minutes there was another lightning strike, and we had to restart the clock.”
She continued: “That first hour, I think we were all trying to hold the tension, to keep the energy of the scene alive. By that second hour, it almost broke us down to a point where we had to revisit the scene again, when we eventually came [back to it] several hours later, we had to revisit the scene with fresh eyes and fresh energy. And for me personally, I think that really serves my performance, because I didn’t get stuck in a certain rope performing it, which is always what I’m trying to avoid. But yeah, it was a very energetically palpable day.”
Just as electrifying was that shocking kiss that left fans hanging off a cliff until Episode 4. At the end of the episode, Alice is seen fighting her frustrations over her encounter with Louis just before her neighbors’ son, Connor (Gavin Lewis), just so happens to be walking nearby. When he approaches her and notices her tears, he tries to comfort her. That’s when she goes in for a kiss. A confused Connor initially pulls back away from Alice, but once she gave him the go ahead to keep kissing her, it turns into a full-blown make-out session. For those who don’t remember, Connor and Alice’s bestie Summer (Rachel Stubington) are dating.
While Maxwell said every “Shrinking” plot she discovers in scripts is a “fun shock,” her scene with Lewis took her aback because, well, she’s known him since they were young kids.
“Any sort of romantic scene, on that basis, [is] not shocking to me. I was excited that Alice had some romantic things popping up in Season 2,” Maxwell explained. “What was shocking was the fact that [writers] had developed that relationship between Alice and Connor, specifically because the writers know that me and Gavin … have been childhood best friends since we were maybe, like 8 and 10 years old, and I’m two years older than him. He’s like my little sister’s best friend from childhood. So it was a shock to get the script. Gavin and I called each other just being like, ‘Wow.’ Obviously we’re both actors, and it’s fine.”
She continued, saying the moment reminded her of the behind the scenes footage of “Harry Potter” stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint sharing their first on-screen kiss in the film franchise’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.”
“I thought about … the BTS of Emma Watson and Rupert Grint kissing in the ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, or whichever one it was, and them talking about how it was like, ‘I love this person so much. But it’s just odd.’ It’s just odd kissing them,”
“Shrinking” releases new episodes Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
Leave a Reply