From show creator Sam Boyd, the HBO Max romantic comedy anthology series Love Life follows millennials on a journey through heartbreak and all the wrong ones, until they find their soulmate. After exploring Darby’s (Anna Kendrick) love life in Season 1, the story of Season 2 is centered around Marcus (William Jackson Harper), as he tries to figure out who he is now that his marriage is over.
During this interview with Collider, executive producers Boyd, Rachelle Williams, and Bridget Bedard talked about the support they receive for the show, the challenges of doing an anthology series, wanted to make Marcus’ journey an authentic Black experience, why they wanted to cast Harper, the Marcus-Mia (Jessica Williams) relationship, and whether they’ve thought about a third season yet.
Collider: Sam, when you did the first season of the show, it was your first show as creator and showrunner and it was for a new streaming service. Did it feel any different doing the second season? Does it all still feel a bit new, since you’re telling a different story with different characters?
SAM BOYD: Honestly, both seasons were amazing, in different ways, and both seasons were really fun. With Season 1, we were very lucky to finish the show, right before everything shut down because of COVID. At the same time, HBO Max was launching this streaming service. With Season 1, there was a little more focus on us, as one of their launch shows, but both seasons, they’ve been amazing. I would say that it feels that different. I felt super lucky to make this jump and be able to not just create the show, but be involved in its day-to-day execution and working with actors and really making it. Ultimately, that’s the most fun part of it for me and the most rewarding part of it for me. With both seasons, I just learned a ton and had a lot of fun.
Was there anything really nerve-wracking with the first season, that wasn’t as nerve-wracking with the second season?
SAM BOYD: Maybe just a little bit, the launch of a streaming service, which is a pretty unique position to be in. Day one of this show was also day one of this whole platform.
BRIDGET BEDARD: I felt like some things were easier and some things were harder. That’s just the way it goes. I definitely feel like we had a lot of good will this season because they were really happy with last season. That’s always nice, to know that you’re not going to get so many notes. They’ve been incredibly collaborative and supportive and amazing entire run, but they felt the pressure and we felt the pressure with Season 1. I do feel like that was off a bit this season. We were able to just do our thing and be trusted. But then, it’s building a whole new world and a new set of characters and it’s like, “Why did we do this? Why are we starting over, every time?” But ultimately, for the good of the show, I think it’s really great that we did that. That’s challenging because it’s new writers and new directors. There’s always a learning curve going on.
Considering that you were going from a story built around a white woman to a story built around a Black man, what did you want to do going in, and what did you want to avoid or not do? Were there lists of things that you wanted to address?
WILLIAMS: We wanted to make it as real as possible. Season 1 was real. That was her real experience. With Season 2, this is a new person and this is his real-life experience, so we wanted to make sure that the room reflected who the lead would be. We also kept each other mindful of cultural differences, of how Marcus would move about the world, and of what his backstory is. We wanted to make sure that it didn’t seem like a guy who just happens to be Black, and it’s moving the exact same way as Darby because then the show isn’t accurate. But it’s also still a story about love, which is so universal and I’m happy it came out this way. It’s definitely specific to Marcus, who’s this Black man, and what he goes through and what he’s dealing with, but also it’s so universal. And even moments that deal with cultural differences, you get to see his side of it and that’s a conversation that hasn’t been seen before. In Episode 5, he has a conversation with Becca about possibly having this baby and what it means. Being able to do stuff like that is stuff that we wouldn’t be able to do with Darby, unless Darby was on the other side of it and she got pregnant by some Black man. We just wanted to make sure that it felt right for the character.
BOYD: We were really thinking about it on the most base level. No matter who the main character with the love life is, the goal is to explore them as authentically and as deeply as possible. When I had written the original pilot for Season 1, I had drawn on a relationship that I had been in. But once we got it on its feet and it was actually gonna be a show, I’m not a woman. The only thing I do know is collaborating with other people who are so talented and who do share the experience of the characters. We’re able to tell a story that rings as true as possible that way. I just get out of the way as much as I can.
What was it about William Jackson Harper that made you want to center this around him? I loved him in The Good Place and he’s been great and everything I’ve seen him do, but this is very different from anything I’ve seen him do before, which I totally got is the point of acting. When did you realize that he could deliver what you were hoping for with this story and this character?
BEDARD: Sam was pushing to get him, from the very beginning. Sam just had a very strong vision.
BOYD: He’s such an incredibly skilled actor. I think it’s exciting to see someone who we haven’t quite seen play this kind of character before, or maybe we haven’t seen him carry something this grounded, given a new opportunity or a new showcase for his talents, as an actor. To be honest, Anna [Kendrick] left pretty big shoes to fill. She’s so talented. She’s so dramatically gifted, and also so funny and able to play things so real. We needed someone who could just, with their face in one split second, do everything that we need to convey in this moment. You hope that any actor you work with is that talented. We just had this feeling that Will was, from seeing his previous work and meeting him and being so excited about the opportunity to collaborate with him. It really was just about collaborating with him and leaning on his abilities and letting there be a symbiosis between the development of the character and the story, his abilities as a writer, our conversations with him, and getting to know him better.
It seems like you guys work pretty closely with the lead for the season. How do you find that relationship, so that if they something for their character that you feel doesn’t work, you don’t end up fighting about it? How do you establish that sharing of ideas, even if they don’t always work out?
BOYD: My secret is to work with people who are smarter than me because then you disagree with them less. That sounds maybe like a coy or a jokey answer, but it’s hard to think of moments, especially in the cases of Will and Anna, will or with Anna, where they had a really strong instinct about something and I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. That’s way off base. That doesn’t go right at all.” It really did always make sense and it always made it better. My whole approach to all of it is that I just want to make the show as collaboratively as possible. If we can have this be an open and collaborative process, with everyone from the actors, to everyone in the writers’ room, to all of the directors that come in, and everyone on the crew, than this will feel as alive as possible and as fleshed out and as real as possible. That gives us our best chance at making something good.
We get to see Marcus and Mia’s story weave in and out, throughout the season. Why did you decide to tell their story in that way and to really tell us their journey over the full season?
BEDARD: That’s what makes it different from Season 1. It’s that When Harry Met Sally style format of will they or won’t they. It follows the ins and outs of a love story, over several years. Now, he’s at a different point in his life and she’s in a different point in her life, and she’s matured and he’s matured. It’s watching a couple grow together. You become invested and hope they can make it. They’ve seen the bad of each other. With Season 1, it was a fantastic ending, but they hadn’t seen the bad in each other yet. They had just fallen in love. I like that we go past that in Season 2. Then, it’s about, how do we stick the landing and make it work?
WILLIAMS: When we were writing the pilot, if you have a person come into your who’s powerful enough to make you blow up your life, there’s probably something more there. It was something where we couldn’t just dispose of character afterwards, once we created her. It just took on a life of its own because that person obviously is going to be a force in that character’s life. It just became a process of figuring out how much, and how to keep them apart, and go in and out and really build both of their arcs until they’re finally calibrated. That’s the way that got built. I don’t think we started out knowing that’s what we’re gonna do. We just found it.
One of my favorite relationships this season is the one between Marcus and his sister. What did you want to bring to that relationship and when did you realize just what absolute gold that was?
WILLIAMS: Honestly, Ida was one of the characters we had figured out earliest. We knew we wanted someone to counter Marcus and put him in his place, to have older sister vibes and be like, “March you’re a screw up,” and just keep it real with him. I love their dynamic, and they just settled into it perfectly.
BOYD: A lot of that just came from wanting the show to feel the same in a lot of ways, to satisfy people that were satisfied that the first season, but also to push it in new directions and to push the format as far as we could. We started the story with someone who’s at a different stage of their life, at the age that he is, and with the marital status that he has, at the beginning of the season. We were just like, “How can we make this feel new?” He has male friends too, but we were excited about the idea of one of his best friends being someone where they’ve known each other their whole lives and they know everything about each other. They move through the world in different ways, even though they’re from the same family, so we wanted to see that, as we push Marcus through.
When you left Darby’s relationship at the end of Season 1, did you know where we would see her and how it would evolve in Season 2?
BOYD: It came later.
WILLIAMS: We always wanted to have a light braid between the seasons. We always knew we wanted a little bit of Darby in Season 2, but not so much that it felt artificial or that it was taking any real estate away from Marcus. I think we found a nice balance to just have her be in a shared universe and braid it together, but not, in any way, have it overshadow the new story.
Well, before I sign off, I just have to say one of the things I loved about this was just how natural the conversations are. I mean, that’s always one of the things that makes me dread like romantic stories a lot at the time is that it just the dialogue and the conversations feel so forced and oddly manipulated because he want the couple to get together. And I just, I love how natural the conversations and the friendships and just all the relationships are in this series.
Do you already have a third season, a story and a character to center it around in mind, or do you try not to get that far ahead of yourself?
BOYD: We don’t. So much of it is casting dependent. This season, we were so excited to work with Will, and it became this big collaboration to build Marcus from the ground up and start the writers’ room, literally without even knowing what the character’s name was gonna be. That was really exciting. That just feels like the right way to make this show. It’s a format and an incubator. It’s not as much like, “Okay, now we wanna do this kind of thing.” It’s a performance showcase and a character study. So much of the fun of it is building it around the actor.
Love Life is available to stream at HBO Max.