How ‘Apples Never Fall’ allowed Alison Brie to mine ‘my own emotional pool’ in a new way [Exclusive Video Interview]
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[WARNING: The following story contains spoilers about “Apples Never Fall.”]
When Alison Brie read the scripts for “Apples Never Fall,” she knew she had to do the show and read Liane Moriarty‘s book on which it’s based. “It was Amy Delaney. It was love at first sight,” Brie tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above) of her character. “If I’m being totally honest, by the third episode — Amy’s episode and kind of the history of the character and everything she had been through emotionally — and you start to realize every episode was really fleshing out these characters and this family, and nothing was what it seemed or things were what they seemed but much more complicated and detailed. And of course the juicy mystery of it all. I think the mystery of it made me wanna read the book and everything I’m saying about the writing and those episodes made me wanna do the show.”
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The Peacock limited series follows the Delaney clan, a picture-perfect tennis family in West Palm Beach, Fla., but things unravel and secrets get exposed after matriarch Joy (Annette Bening) goes missing one day. The eldest of four siblings, Amy is the polar opposite of many of the Type A, goal-driven go-getters Brie has played on such shows as “Community” and “GLOW.” Amy is a breezy free spirit who wears her heart on her sleeve and sees the best and also the worst (she is the first to suggest Joy may be dead) in any situation.
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“It was exciting. I think it was the emotional depth that was really fun for me to tap into in a new way. Amy as a person is so in the moment and of the moment,” Brie says. “And she is driven by her emotions in a way that is so different from any character I’ve played before. Every other character that exists probably has more control over their emotions than Amy does and I sort of really respect that about her. So that was part of the challenge. Those two things — I think it was constant mining of myself, my own emotional pool to see how deep those waters ran, and then the flip side was just being very present and trying to experience the things that were happening that the character would be.”
On the surface and in the eyes of her family, Amy seems like a joke and a failure. Never into tennis, she stopped playing long ago before dropping out of college. More than a decade later, she is still trying to figure out what to do with her life. At the moment, she has decided to become a life coach. Amy might seem like the most unstable Delaney, but she’s arguably the most fulfilled after defying the family business and traditional paths, and is definitely the most open since no other Delaney is emotionally available.
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“I do think she is close to being one of the healthiest people in the family, like I actually think it’s really admirable the amount she wants to talk about things. That’s something nobody in the family does. She has no control over her emotions. She’s sort of like guided by every whim that she feels,” the Golden Globe nominee continues. “But that said, she seems to have a lot more joy in her life — I mean, no pun intended — than a lot of her siblings do by nature of rebelling against the way she was raised. I think the competition factor is such a big part of this family dynamic when your father is your coach. So much of his love seems dependent on winning and not losing. So I think that’s sort of been an uphill battle for all of the Delaney children.”
The Amy-focused third episode opens with a 2008 flashback that reveals Amy has dropped out of college and just survived a suicide attempt as Joy tells her that the latter will be their secret. “It was incredible to shoot that scene. I had admired Annette as an actress for as long as I can remember and she couldn’t have been more generous and giving,” Brie shares, adding that director Dawn Shadforth had the two rehearse the scene weeks before filming. Amy’s secret is revealed to the rest of her family at the end of the episode after authorities find a suicide note they believe to be Joy’s, but it was Amy’s that Joy had kept in her nightstand. She says she never told any of them because “you all can be so f—ing hard.” Brie calls that scene her “touchstone” for the whole series.
“I would reread that scene constantly because it really is the most vulnerable we see Amy, really, in the whole show, in front of her whole family. These things have been revealed about her not by choice. And she has to sort of make the decision in that moment to own up to that,” Brie says. “We block shot the show and I just feel like I had that scene like two months before we shot it and I would read it every night. And even after we shot it, I would often recall it and think about certain things that Amy says in the scene because it’s telling you everything you need to know about who that character is, how she thinks about her family, where she thinks she fits into the family. There’s a line from the scene that got cut from the final version, but there was a line that Dawn would come up and she would say it to me as our little touchstone for the character for scenes beyond that that was really helpful. It was about Amy feeling like a manatee in a sea of sharks. Maybe it was too funny. I have no idea why that moment got cut, but that is Amy. She loves the manatees, she’s a manatee, her family are sharks. They’re gotta keep moving, they wanna get ahead, they’re all teeth. And she wants to bob along.”
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