Elizabeth Olsen, Lesli Linka Glatter Talk ‘Love & Death’ – Interview – Deadline

When Lesli Linka Glatter and Elizabeth Olsen first dug into journalistic material charting the tale of Candy Montgomery, the infamous axe-murdering housewife of Wylie, Texas, in preparation for their work on the miniseries Love & Death, neither could believe what they were reading.

Olsen admitted during a recent Deadline FYC House + HBO Max panel that she at first thought she was reading a short story out of a literary magazine, rather than a real account, with director-EP Glatter noting, “It is certainly a case where real life…is much stranger than fiction. If the story wasn’t true, I don’t think you could tell this story….And we tried to stay very true to the facts of the story.”

Premiering on HBO Max on April 27th — the same day our DGA Theater panel moderated by Glamour‘s Senior West Coast Editor Jessica Radloff was recorded — Love & Death examines Candy’s crumbling marriage to Pat Montgomery (Patrick Fugit), the affair she subsequently has with her churchgoing friend Betty Gore’s (Lily Rabe) husband Allan (Jesse Plemons), and how it leads to a murder that turns the lives of each upside down.

What was fascinating about Love & Death to Glatter, who on this project got her long-awaited first chance to collaborate with TV icon David E. Kelley, was that in this story, “things were not what they appeared to be, and that what’s really going on is so much deeper than that. It’s 1978, this is small-town America, and it’s very bucolic on the surface. It’s so much about the crack in the American dream.”

The characters she was examining seemed to have the idyllic life, getting married young and settling down with children in the suburbs. So “why do you feel so empty inside?” Glatter wondered. “Why is there a hole in your heart and psyche and soul that’s a mile wide?”

For Olsen, the draw to playing Candy — whose insatiably “aspirational” nature was her undoing, per Glatter —was her “gripping of a veneer, this obsessiveness of needing validation.” The story, as she saw it, was one where “there’s a lot of decision-making that doesn’t make any kind of logical sense, and so I found it interesting to try and figure out what that tension or that grip is that makes all these weird choices make sense.”

The actress’s hope, in boarding the project, was that creator Kelley and Glatter would be interested in playing with tone, so “that yes, the dialogue feels authentic, but it wasn’t just about making the most grounded or super subtle [version of this]. There was something playful about the writing, and I was hungry to do something like that, but in a real world that’s authentic.”

A core piece of the tone the team wound up pursuing was humor that was true to the history of the Montgomerys and the Gores — as in the case of scenes where Candy and Allan plotted their affair, laying out ground rules over lasagna at a diner. “It was all based on what actually happened, so we didn’t create that. It comes out of circumstance, hopefully never laughing at these characters,” said Glatter. “That, to me, [reflects the fact that] we humans are so complicated…As a director, I would never put [the characters] in that circumstance if it wasn’t true.”

One takeaway from this tale of “American tragedy,” for Glatter, is that given how “complicated and fragile” people are, “we all have to somehow take care of our inner selves and each other.”

Added Rabe, who appeared for the panel alongside Glatter and Olsen, as well as co-stars Fugit, Krysten Ritter and Tom Pelphrey, “There’s such delicacy in the series, in the storytelling and in the choices that everyone makes, and so I think…everyone will have such a unique experience. But I think they might be surprised along the way by how their experience shifts, and their relationship to each character shifts, and just how when we make these choices, if one little thing is different, [there’s a] ripple effect, and just the huge responsibility we have for one another, and for ourselves.”

Also starring Keir Gilchrist and Elizabeth Marvel, Love & Death was written by Kelley and co-produced by Lionsgate. The seven-episode Max Original, which was inspired by the book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs and assorted articles from Texas Monthly, is exec produced by Kelley through David E. Kelley Productions; Nicole Kidman and Per Saari through Blossom Films; Glatter; Scott Brown and Megan Creydt through Texas Monthly; Matthew Tinker; Michael Klick and Helen Verno. 

View the full Love & Death panel by clicking above. Watch more videos from the Deadline FYC House + HBO Max event series here.