If there’s one thing you can count on with “The Girlfriend,” it’s that you’re never going to know exactly how pieces of the story went down. You’ll have some options to choose from though, and creating those options was quite a challenge for the series’ stars.
Now streaming on Prime Video, the story centers on Laura and Cherry, played by Robin Wright and Olivia Cooke respectively. Laura is the mother to Daniel (Laurie Davidson), who is now dating Cherry. He quickly makes it clear that he’s serious about the girl, which is destabilizing for Laura for several reasons.
First, she has a preternatural closeness with her son, having lost another baby before he was born. And, on some level, Cherry seems to remind Laura of herself, but Cherry can have romance with Daniel. It gets very Oedipal, very fast (Wright outright describes the story as a Greek tragedy).
Laura quickly grows skeptical of Cherry, suspecting her to actually be dangerous. Now, in fairness, Cherry definitely isn’t all that she leads herself to be. According to Wright, Cooke picked up on that, as well as exactly how the two women needed to butt heads, in “maybe 60 seconds.” And thus, their on-screen rivalry was born.
Viewers get to experience that rivalry even more acutely as the series unfolds through two different perspectives. Each episode is split in half and labeled with who’s side of the story you’re getting: Cherry’s or Laura’s.
That often meant shooting the same scene in two slightly different ways, changing the entire tone of what happens in it based on whose perspective it’s being seen through. For Wright, who also executive produced the series and directed several episodes, it was key to make each point of view distinct.
“She didn’t want the audience to have to watch the same scene twice,” Cooke explained to TheWrap. “So it’s all these different versions, or there’s an element of the scene that you didn’t see in someone else’s perspective that makes you think, ‘Oh, wait. So that person actually feels more in the right.’”
“And you feel more empathy for them, because now you’re understanding why they acted like that, and this person’s just being unhinged. So it was really fun to try and work out this like jigsaw puzzle of perspective.”
Working out that jigsaw puzzle often included visual aids, according to Wright. She and her castmates had the gift of several hours of rehearsal, where they approached the scenes like a play and literally used tape on the carpet to block out the scenes.
“It’s a therapy session! We got to talk about it. We never get that freedom and gift to do that, and I think that helped tremendously,” Wright said. “Because everybody could go home and sit on it, mull it over and be like, ‘Oh yeah, now I know what so-and-so would do.’”
Knowing their characters so surely meant that, every now and then, the two women would actually trade pieces of the story.
“Sometimes we would get the script and we’d be rehearsing it and doing it, and then Robin and I would be like, ‘This actually feels better for Cherry’s perspective, rather than Laura’s,’ how it was written,” Cooke said.
“Just because sometimes the alchemy of the of the snippet that we’re filming, in terms of tension, or the sort of drama of the scene, just feels better to be from a different character’s perspective,” she continued. “So it felt really kinetic on the day, because we were sometimes having to sort of reconfigure these points of perspective.”
Wright, along with her script supervisor and crew, would also make charts, plotting out Laura and Cherry’s perspectives side by side to ensure that they got enough shots that would allow Wright to “play in the editing room.”
“Watching how she works, and her just whip smart intelligence, and her command of a set, and knowledge of the camera, but also just being so glued and connected in the scene, it was frankly, a bizarre feat,” Cooke recalled. “Like, I’ve just never seen anyone do it with such ease and grace. It was amazing.”
“The Girlfriend” is now streaming on Prime Video.
