Elizabeth Olsen has opened up about her brand new show Sorry For Your Loss, admitting that she partially took on the project because she doesn’t think grief should be a taboo subject anymore.
“Grief is something that we have to all go through,” Olsen explained to me over the phone recently. “It is this inevitable thing that people don’t talk about. We don’t talk about what is acceptable and what is not.”
“Grief is a taboo subject. So I thought it would be interesting to fill that whole with storytelling that isn’t a step program for how to overcome loss. It is about someone that is genuinely dealing with loss.”
“My analogy has always been, we all have this backpack that we wear that is full of trauma and pain and loss. And we walk through life with this weight on us.”
“When you lose someone, the backpack doesn’t change the person doesn’t become forgotten, you just have to adjust how you get through life with that adjustment and that new weight.”
“It is about that process. It isn’t clean, you don’t go through stages and then it is over. There’s a cyclical nature that your mind goes through, in order to not lose the memory or details.”
“The moment the memory becomes fuzzy is the moment you feel like you’re losing them for real. That was something that we got to play with with the flashback. It is about how memory changes.”
“It is not just something we use as a tool to explain things. We use it in multiple ways throughout the season. It is about how we perceive our memory and how they change.”
But while that might make you think that “Sorry For Your Loss,” which sees Olsen star as a young widow that is still coming to terms with the death of her husband, is heavy viewing, the actress insisted that she was actually first attracted to it because of its unique humor.
“I just loved the dialogue and the way the characters developed. Leigh was a funny person to try and console.”
“I loved that the pilot made me laugh. There were certain things and details to the way her family lived and between her mum and her sister that I found really funny.”
It has been a whirlwind couple of months for Olsen, who is also a producer on the show, as she admitted to me that she has spent all of 2018 helping to orchestrate “Sorry For Your Loss.”
“We only went into pre-production in January, started shooting in March. I really didn’t understand how we would put a crew and cast and a writing room together in such a short time.”
“My whole 2018 has been ‘Sorry For Your Loss.’ We actually only finished editing a week ago.”
You can see what they have achieved with “Sorry For Your Loss” when it premieres on Facebook Watch on Tuesday September 18.
