Addiction, alcoholism, and sobriety are difficult subjects that often lead to challenging conversations and ongoing struggles, which is most definitely the case for Samantha Fink (Sofia Black-D’Elia) on the new Freeform dramedy Single Drunk Female, inspired by the life experiences of show creator Simone Finch. The 20-something alcoholic is forced into sobriety in order to avoid jail time, but when that leads to moving back home with her mother Carol (Ally Sheedy), who’s giving it everything she’s got to have a life of her own, and having to face all the triggers that lead her to drink in the first place, figuring out who she is and what she wants while sober seems like an insurmountable task.
During a virtual junket, Collider got the opportunity to chat with co-stars Black-D’Elia and Sheedy for this interview, which you can both watch and read, about playing messy characters on a messy show, the instantaneous bond the actresses had with each other, having endless amounts of material to explore in this mother-daughter relationship, shooting a very memorable scene in the grocery store that Sam finds herself working at, and always finding the truth in the material.
Collider: This is a messy show with messy characters, which makes them feel very real. What made you want to be a part of telling this story? Was it the fact that you could play characters that weren’t ever going to quite get it totally right?
SOFIA BLACK-D’ELIA: That definitely was a part of the appeal because, like you said, it felt real. As an actor, you really wanna play people you feel like you can recognize and that other people will recognize and see aspects of themselves reflected back in an honest way. And the other big draw for me was just the amazing women involved, like Leslye Headland and Jenni Konner. I loved Simone [Finch]’s script. So yeah, all of those things combined, it was just like, “Oh, yeah, I wanna be a part of this.”
Ally, you’ve been doing this a while, so I would imagine you can get a sense from a script and the people you’d be working with, if it’s something you want to do. So, what was it for you?
ALLY SHEEDY: That. What you just said. It was the creative people involved, the producers – Jenni, Leslye, Simone – the writing, and this character and the dynamic with the relationship between Carol and Sam. But then, Sofia made this entire show work for me, I just have to say. All our scenes together, our dynamics together, our energies together, are just joy.
As someone who’s been in this business for a while now, what keeps you acting? Do you enjoy the same things about it now that you enjoyed when you started doing it, or has that changed and evolved over the years?
SHEEDY: It’s changed. I love being able to work on something when it can be like this. It’s not always like this, the way that this show felt and was. There are other things I love to do. I’m a teacher. I love to teach. I do freelance book editing. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I have going on. I love acting. I really miss it when I haven’t done it for a while. I know that I truly love it. But it’s the experience of the particular project. This one was just a joyful experience.
Sofia, I first became aware of you and your work on the American version of Skins. How different do you feel, as an actress on a TV series, than you did when you were an actress on that TV series?
BLACK-D’ELIA: Oh, my goodness. Well, as different as a person feels, 11 years later. I was 19, when I made that show. It was my first real acting job. When we shot the pilot, I was still a senior in high school. I just turned 30. I would hope there’s a pretty big difference in who I was then and who I am now. I was just so green and confused, most of the time. I’m still a confused person, but I’ve definitely grown to appreciate the craft of acting more. I hope that I have deepened what I’m capable of. I definitely am way more drawn to comedy now than I was at that age. So yeah, I feel very, very different, as a person and as an actor.
One of the things I remember most from watching the season is the moment when Samantha climbs onto the lower shelf in the grocery store and goes to sleep behind the cereal boxes. What was it like to shoot that? How difficult were the logistics of actually getting in there behind the cereal boxes?
BLACK-D’ELIA: Honestly, I was very tired, a lot of the time, when we were shooting this show. I’m so grateful for the gig and the experience, but it was quite a lot of work, so I was just tired all the time. I was very, very happy to have a scene where I was lying down. It didn’t really matter that I was on a cold shelf. It didn’t really matter that I was behind cereal boxes. I was just like, “I’m ready to shoot this, all day. This is great.” It was really nice for me.
There’s just something so funny about it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scene like that before.
BLACK-D’ELIA: It’s a very specific and weird thing to do, which means it had to have happened to who wrote it. As somebody who can fall asleep really easily at work, I was like, “Yeah, I buy that.”
I love what we get to see of the dynamic between these two characters. When did you guys first meet each other? Did you spend a lot of time figuring that out? Was it a constant conversation about who they are to each other?
BLACK-D’ELIA: We first met in Chicago, when we shot the pilot, and it was really an instantaneous bond between Ally and I. I’ve been a fan of hers for so long. It was such a dream to work with her. And then, to become her friend, and for her to be so fun and cool and nice and a great hang, that was just icing on the cake. The Carol-Sam relationship, for both of us, is the heart of the show and the show to us. We both took it really seriously and really wanted it to be special because it felt special to us. Working together, at least for me, it was just so easy, right from the jump. I think we both saw their dynamic in the same way, so it could just be playful, and we could find stuff on the day. It was a constant conversation and still is. Ally and I still chat about where they are and what they did and where they might go.
I love it because it’s not an expected dynamic. So often, when you see somebody like Samantha, you figure like her home life must be horrible, that these two people must not get along, or they’re trying to tear each other’s throats out all the time, but there’s something just so interesting and different about this dynamic.
BLACK-D’ELIA: I think Simone did a really great job of not making everything feel like the stereotypical version of itself. She just really wrote what she knew and the truth. So many mother-daughter and just parent-child dynamics are never just one thing. Yes, some of them are really dark, abusive, traumatic and all in that universe, but at least from my experience and from my point of view, most of them are very much in the gray area in between. I love the way she wrote Sam and Carol as two people who love each other. They’re so passive-aggressive, and they know exactly how to push each other’s buttons. It feels so juicy.
Ally, how does Carol feel about Sam moving back home? Does she have any faith that her daughter is going to get it together this time? What are her feelings at the start of this journey for Samantha?
SHEEDY: The whole thing is horrifying. I have to pay for the rehab. And then, it’s like, “Okay, we’re gonna try.” She’s gotta move back home, so I’m not thrilled, but I understand the situation. She doesn’t have any money. She doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t have this, that and the other. So, she comes home, but then right away, it’s just another disaster. She wrecks my car and ends up in jail, immediately. So yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s gonna go to the meetings, she’s gonna do this, and she’s gonna do that. Do I believe that she’s actually gonna pull this off and get sober and change her life, and all this stuff? No, I actually don’t. But we’ll see. I wanna see how it’s gonna play out. It takes a while to watch her moving through, just beginning to get the dregs of her life sort of together. That gives me a little bit more faith in her, but there’s a very long way to go.
I love that Carol doesn’t really let it consume her. She has her own life, and she has things that she does herself, and she’s going to go on doing them, even if her daughter doesn’t get herself together.
SHEEDY: It’s complicated though. As Carol, I can tell you, “Yes, I’m doing what I wanna do, and she’s not gonna come in here and cross all my boundaries and do this or that.” But if I texted her, and she didn’t text me back, I would be thinking about it excessively. I’d wonder what she’s doing and then fight with myself against caring too much, thinking about her too much, and letting her take up too much space. There’s an inner thing going on with Carol, and then there’s the dynamic that’s going on with Sofia.
Sofia, in what ways do you think her mother is the bane of her existence and in what ways do you think she really appreciates having her mother there, even if she wouldn’t say so?
BLACK-D’ELIA: I think that it is a lot easier for Sam to blame other people for where her life has ended up and for her pain, and Carol is her favorite person to blame stuff on. As the season progresses and as Sam moves through her journey of recovery and reinvention, she starts to take a little bit more responsibility and in doing so can see that maybe not everything was Carol’s fault, which is a really hard thing for her to accept. I definitely don’t think she’s the bane of her existence. In a lot of ways, they’re way more similar than they’d care to admit and need each other a lot more than they’d care to admit. Like Ally said, they can have their own lives and say, “I wish I didn’t have to deal with this person,” but at the same time, they think about them a lot. I think it’s a really beautiful relationship and, of course, at the center of it is this gaping hole of their loss and their grief. It’s the elephant in every room for the two of them. I think that grief has affected this relationship in a lot of ways as well.
When you’re trying to get sober and turn your life around, knowing that your former best friend is going to marry your ex doesn’t really seem like it’s going to help keep you on that new path very well. How challenging is that for her to have to continue to deal with and face, when that’s something nobody would want to have to deal with by choice?
BLACK-D’ELIA: I don’t think so either. That was always so hard for me. I feel like there’s a really strong girl code and that is just not something you do. But also, Sam was a bad friend, long before Brit did that to her. It’s just another aspect of the way in which Sam sees herself as the center of the universe. Her relationship with Joel was this high school juvenile thing, and she ended it with him. She messed that whole thing up. And then, years later, she finds out her ex best friend is in love with him and somehow makes that all about her. It’s another thing that she needs to deal with on this journey of recovery. They always say that there’s never a perfect time to change. There’s never a perfect time to quit. There’s never a perfect time to give up your vice. If it wasn’t this, it’d be something else. This does happen to be a really challenging thing for her to deal with, but it’s a TV show.
Ally, if there is a second season of this show, are there aspects of Carol that you’d love to get to explore or see explored, especially since it seems like there’s so much about her that we don’t know yet?
SHEEDY: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the relationship with Sam has a lot of places to go. There are a lot of layers and a lot of unexplored stuff. Carol has had a 29-year relationship with this kid, with all of this stuff going on, and I’m still figuring the whole thing out. Who am I without my husband? Without that particular role, I don’t think I really have an understanding of who I am. I’m speaking as Carol. She’ll do a little dating and see how that goes. And there’s this ridiculous scenario with the book club. She’s trying to figure out what her life is gonna look like now, and there are a million places to go with that.
It definitely feels like a constant back and forth between what she’s supposed to represent and what the expectation of her is, and what she actually wants to be?
SHEEDY: Yeah. Carol is in her 50s. I’m in my 50s. What do you wanna do now? When you’ve done this, this and this, what do you want your life to be? How do you want a relationship with your kid to be? Fifties is a very interesting time. I’m 59, so I’ve already been through that, all the 50s. It’s a time for reinvention, definitely.
Single Drunk Female airs on Thursday nights on Freeform, starting on January 20.