Is there an appropriate way to grieve? That’s one question that Dan Levy—the Canadian multihyphenate who dominated our screens during the COVID-19 pandemic with Schitt’s Creek—lays at the center of his feature directorial debut, Good Grief. Out on Netflix on January 5, the film stars Levy, Ruth Negga, and Himesh Patel, with Levy also serving as the writer and coproducer. (In other words, it’s the Dan Levy equivalent of that one Jacobs by Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs meme.)
Levy plays Marc, a gay man in his late 30s confronted with the sudden death of his dreamy husband, Oliver (Luke Evans). An artist who abandoned his painting practice after the loss of his mother, Marc had been living contently in Oliver’s shadow, illustrating his young-adult novels and playing the role of gay best friend to Sophie (Negga), an effervescent hot mess, and Thomas (Patel), Marc’s moody, forever-single ex-boyfriend. Of course, Levy is no stranger to playing the bubbly GBF (remember his turn opposite Kristen Stewart in 2020’s Happiest Season?), but in Good Grief the friendships aren’t a B plot to some sweeping love affair—they’re the very core of the story.
“Once I started to explore the territory of grief, it became clear that there was a story about the importance of friendship in the wake of a great loss,” Levy says. His goal was to give platonic bonds their proper due onscreen, even prioritizing them over romantic ones. (That’s not to say, however, that there’s no romance in the film; while Marc processes Oliver’s death—and a troubling discovery that he makes about their marriage—he finds a suitor in Theo, a charming Frenchman played by Arnaud Valois, whom he meets on a trip to Paris.)
“When you’ve been single for a while like I have, your friends are the loves of your life,” Levy says. Besides, he notes, adult friendships can come with their own tangled baggage, which he was eager to unpack: “It was about speaking to the truth of the dynamics of friendships, and in order to speak the truth, you have to show the complexities and the mess.”
Marc is buoyed by Sophie and Thomas in his grief, but his friends also have troubles of their own. While Sophie realizes that she needs stability, not just more excitement, Thomas reckons with the root of his own loneliness in the film’s most affecting monologue. “It’s never me,” he yells into the ether, dealing a sharp but familiar blow to those of us who have settled into adulthood single, treating friendships as partnerships.
In modern media, the sign of a successful portrayal of friendship is a group of characters that viewers can map onto their own social circles—think Sex and the City or Friends. So, which of Good Grief’s three antiheroes does Levy relate to the most? “I’ve experienced the most vulnerable parts of every character,” he says, “but particularly in my 20s, I was very much Thomas. My idea of love was giving people things, and the more I gave, the more I expected in return.” He continues, “The naive belief of ‘it’s never me’ is building that narrative to comfort yourself—allowing it to be true, as opposed to holding on to hope and the optimism that one day it will be.”
While it’s Levy’s poignant writing that takes center stage in Good Grief, his visual and stylistic choices—from the settings to the artworks and the costumes—do their fair share too. “I hope that people not only feel comforted by the sentiment of the movie but also by the lushness of the locations and the people,” he says.
Levy’s most personal choice in this space involved the artist who created Marc’s paintings. He tapped a fellow Canadian, Kris Knight, for the job. “I have long loved his work, and I am a collector of his work,” Levy says. “The minute this movie got greenlit, I called him immediately. I wrote the movie with no actors in mind but with his work in mind.” Knight’s paintings evoke the same warmth and sophistication that Levy wanted to define Good Grief more generally. “The whole end of the movie is predicated on Marc’s expression of love for his friends and the people who helped him get through this grief,” he says, “and Kris has such a specific aesthetic that is on the one hand quite cold but on the other hand romantic and nostalgic and singular.”
There’s also the fashion, with costume design by Julian Day. Marc is clued into a secret his husband kept from him by a Loewe shopping bag in Oliver’s closet. This is no throwaway detail—Levy has a good relationship with the label and its designer, Jonathan Anderson—and it’s one in a series of fashion Easter eggs scattered throughout the film. (Just see Marc’s Marni trousers and Sophie’s Alaïa dress in the first scene.) “So much of the storytelling can be done without the characters actually saying anything,” says Levy. “Personal style can say so much about a character. The idea of exposition and characters explaining to an audience who they are is of very little interest to me.”
Indeed, Marc’s style tells us he’s playful yet somewhat self-serious, while Thomas’s subtler wardrobe nods to his broodiness and Sophie’s vintage Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière shearling jacket hints at both her sophistication and the way she tends to privilege style over substance in her relationships. Marc’s lawyer, played by a pitch-perfect Celia Imrie, wears mostly Céline by Phoebe Philo as she imparts hard-won wisdom to Levy’s character. “For people who pay attention to fashion, it’s not just exciting to find them,” Levy says of these “if you know, you know” pieces, “but they are a point of connection to the characters and their style.”
During the pandemic, just as Schitt’s Creek was reaching the peak of its belated popularity, Levy’s grandmother died. (A beloved dog would follow sometime later.) That experience helped to inspire Good Grief. “There were moments, as I was writing the movie, when I think I was having a conversation with myself,” he reflects. “Some of those moments were answers to my own questions.” One lesson was worked into one of the film’s final scenes, in which Imelda tells Marc that to avoid sadness is also to avoid love. “That was a natural conclusion I came to in the process of writing the movie,” Levy says. “This movie was the greatest expression of my grief. Sometimes when you don’t have the words to speak, you have to turn to the page and put the words down.”
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