He's a Brit and a wanna-be indie musician. Much more her type than Alex.
Big Little Lies is returning for a second season on HBO because there is more story to tell.
"I would say we do go a little bit broader, but mostly we go deeper," David E. Kelley tells
The Hollywood Reporter. "There are more stories to tell when you look at the Monterey Five plus one."
The creator, writer and executive producer of the HBO drama is, of course, referring to Meryl Streep as the "plus one." Her character,
Mary Louise Wright, comes to Monterey searching for answers about her son Perry (Alexander Skarsgard), who died in the season one finale, and her arrival shakes the Monterey Five tree enough that their secrets might just come spilling out.
"In terms of year two, the cast and producers, we didn’t want to come back unless we thought we had a legitimate shot of measuring up to the bar that we all set for ourselves," says Kelley, who spoke to
THR at the recent
New York premiere for season two. "Liane Moriarty wrote a novella with some terrific ideas — the best and the brightest being introducing Perry’s mother, and we were lucky enough to get Meryl Streep."
Since the first season used up all the source material from Moriarty's best-selling book of the same name, the
Big Little Lies team asked the author to return to the page for season two ideas. Within her 200-page novella that Kelley would adapt into the season two screenplay was
a "telepathic message" to Streep, since Mary Louise is the Oscar-winning actress' legal name. Streep didn't even read the script before agreeing to the key role.
...
And Kidman agreed. "After playing Celeste, my connection with so many people who are either living it or going through it or have been in it, suddenly was augmented," she said of connecting with survivors of domestic abuse. "I was suddenly able to hear the stories, be a voice for a lot of those stories and I’ve continued on with that. But when you’re dealing with Celeste, it’s her particular story. We’re not doing an overall analysis of domestic violence. It’s very specific. Hopefully it’s incredibly real. And there’s an enormous amount of truth in it. I was adamant when we started the series that she wasn’t a superhero. She wasn’t coming out of this saying, 'I’m healed. Off I go. Let’s go.' So you’re going to see the path and her navigating the path of what that means."
She continued, "I wanted it to be deeply authentic, and so did Meryl with what we were doing in terms of our relationship to this man. And the way in which he changed my life, her life, the way we both perceive him. And then with Jane, who has been abused by him, she is also a survivor, has a child and the way in which we're all connected — and that’s just one of the storylines. But it’s such deep material, and to mine it is just extraordinary to have that chance and hopefully, with that we reach out and reach out to building conversation. Because it will be controversial. There hopefully will be discussion and create more and more awareness and, hopefully, change."
Ultimately, Witherspoon said
Big Little Lies is about the spectrum of the female experience and raises a universal question within all of the characters: "Am I living the life that I'm supposed to be living?" The producing pair said they fight for the characters in the edit room and they fought to bring them back to the screen."..
