‘The Cleaning Lady’: Élodie Yung Talks ‘Painful’ Experience of Filming Adan Canto’s Farewell
The cast and crew of The Cleaning Lady are still grieving the loss of star Adan Canto. The 44-year-old died in January 2024 following a private battle with cancer, and this tragic loss forced the show to completely rework its Season 3 plan.
The original plan was always to dive into Arman’s familial backstory, as we’ve seen in Season 3 with the addition of Ramona (Kate del Castillo) and Jorge (Santiago Cabrera), but Arman himself had to be written out. Filming the episode that revealed Arman’s fate was a “painful” experience for star Élodie Yung.
“I certainly have never had to do something like this,” Yung tells TV Insider. “As an actor, I certainly use my personal life and feelings for a character I have to portray. This is a very different thing.”
The Cleaning Lady Season 3 began filming after Canto’s death, but not long after. They’re all still grieving the loss of their friend. As Yung shares, “This is us personally as a group, mourning the loss of a friend of a colleague. I can’t even describe it.”
The Daredevil alum says that Season 3 Episode 6, in which Thony finally found Arman but a car chase with the FBI led to his tragic end, required no acting from her as she filmed her final shots with the character (Canto is superimposed into the scenes).
“There’s work and there’s reality,” Yung says. “None of this, none of these scenes you see felt like work for me. It was just painful. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. This whole season, there’s not one day on set I haven’t thought of Adan. It’s been very painful.”
Season 3 has been dedicated to Canto’s memory, and their love for him “spills” into all the work they do, says Yung.
“The show, our producers, the writers, myself, we try to definitely honor him, and I put all my love in whatever we had to go through,” she says. “But everything was just a very strange, painful situation. Not even strange, but it’s like it spills. You play lovers on screen, things spill, and you can’t help just really loving the person. Thony is mourning Arman, and we are mourning a friend. We are driven on that. So hopefully it’s been done with decency and all of our thoughts are constantly going to his wife and his kids.”
Thony is driven by revenge in the remaining episodes of The Cleaning Lady Season 3. She suspects foul play with Ramona and her possible ties to Arman’s kidnapping, and Thony won’t rest until she gets answers.
The Cleaning Lady, Tuesdays, 8/7c, FOX
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