Chloë Sevigny on ‘Weight & Responsibility’ of ‘The Girl from Plainville’ (VIDEO)
If you have not watched The Girl from Plainville on Hulu yet, you are missing Chloë Sevigny giving one of the best performances of the year. One of the best, as well as one of the hardest to watch, as she is playing Lynn Roy, the real-life mother who comes to realize that her teen son Conrad (Colton Ryan) who died by suicide was goaded into the act by his semi-girlfriend, Michelle Carter (Elle Fanning).
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The cast is phenomenal across the board, but it’s Sevigny’s heartbreaking, often silent turn that roots the show deep within the pain of Lynn’s grief and guilt, her ensuing struggle to understand a crippling loss, and then fury at Carter’s complicity. Her scenes with Ryan (who is just devastating) are also some of the sweetest moments throughout the eight episodes, revealing the unshakable love Lynn had for her child and the sporadic bursts of hope she was able to hold on to in between his multiple mental-health crises.
It’s no shock that the award-winning Sevigny is so damn good in Plainville — or that she’s A+ in a wildly different gig on Russian Doll — but what is surprising is that the actress was able to come in blind and still inhabit the role of Lynn Roy so delicately. “I was cast late in the process,” she revealed during our recent chat, explaining that she joined the project “a week before shooting” commenced. And though the real-life Roy was involved with the production, Sevigny opted to forgo conversations with her before filming.
“That would have made my process more difficult,” she says. “There was already such weight and a responsibility to telling this true story…I was afraid if I spoke to her it might kind of get in the way of me trying to access my own emotions.”
And speaking of emotions, it’s not all drama for Sevigny these days. Later on in the convo, we discussed her joyful work with longtime pal Natasha Lyonne on Russian Doll, as well as her recent marriage and for the Chalamaniacs out there, a little bit about her excitement over an upcoming horror film called Bones and All with Timothée Chalamet, “who I love,” she reveals while fanning herself.
We hear ya, girl.
The Girl from Plainville, Streaming Now, Hulu
Russian Doll, Season 2, Streaming Now, Netflix
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