Alice & Jack’s Writer Victor Levin Gets Real About Love
Writer and creator Victor Levin has explored love in shows like Mad Men and Mad About You, but in Alice & Jack, his new MASTERPIECE miniseries starring Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson, he gets real, fancy, and honest about love. Discover his takes on keeping your comedy serious and keeping your bad guys good, soulmates, and that utterly heartbreaking wedding speech from Episode 3.
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How does Alice & Jack stand apart from your run-of-the-mill love story?
It’s a love story first and foremost, but I think it’s an unusual one. I don’t think it conforms to the formula that some viewers may be used to and that I certainly was used to. It talks about the messiness of love, the difficulties that attach to love, and the need to fight for love in a way that perhaps some other stories don’t quite accentuate as much.
It’s also unique in that there’s a complete connection of their souls in a way we don’t often see. It’s clear that Jack is Alice’s true north, but what is it in Alice that makes her his soulmate?
You’re right, he is her true north…But as to what she is to him, this is the person who inhabits his soul. She moved into his soul. She redecorated. She signed a 99-year lease. You don’t have any choice. He wasn’t asked. He didn’t approve, he didn’t disapprove, he didn’t vote. He didn’t sign on the dotted line. She just moved in and she’s not moving out. So, she is the architect of his emotional life. She is the occupant of his spirit, and she always will be. So, what happens when true north meets absolute unmovable rock? That’s the story.
To get fancy about it for just a second, he’s the romantic hero, and what romantic heroes do is they heroically act in service of romance. That’s what they do, in service of love. She—and this is the fancy part—is an existential hero, which means that the very fact that she exists is itself heroic and lots of other people wouldn’t under those circumstances. But she doesn’t just exist in the world at large; she exists in him. In him like the alien in Sigourney Weaver [in Alien]. She’s in him. So, you haven’t got any choice except to deal with what is. You cannot go backwards in time.
We get insight into what Alice means to Jack when he gives his toast on the night before her wedding. It’s telling that this occurs in Episode 3, the middle of the entire series, and feels like the turning point. What can you tell us about this moving, funny, painful speech?
I can tell you that’s maybe my favorite scene in the series—I have lots of favorites, but I love what Domhnall does there, and I love what Andrea does there. It’s tough because the character hasn’t written the speech—he’s caught by surprise, and I don’t know about you, but if somebody asked me to get up and make a speech at a wedding, I would appreciate a couple of days’ notice. And his heart is breaking because he’s basically blessing a union between the person of his life and someone else. And he doesn’t know that that relationship is never going to reach the altar—he doesn’t have any idea that this is going to be the result of what he said. He’s not doing it so that she’ll decide not to marry the guy. He doesn’t have the first clue about any of that.
He’s doing it because when you love someone, and someone needs you to do something like that, even at great personal cost, you do it. You do it because that’s how a good person behaves when placed in a terrible position. You do it because she has said to him, “It won’t be real unless you’re there.” You do it because she deserves someone to get up and say those things about her, because she’s a spectacular person and she’s had a terrible difficulty to get past. So he does it, but his guts are being pulled out through his ear while he is doing it. And he knows that his audience in the room is never going to be able to fully comprehend what it is that he’s saying or why he’s saying it. But that’s not who he’s saying it for. He’s saying it for her. He’s saying it for himself. And if he believes in God, he’s saying it for God and that’s it. That’s the audience for that speech.
And so he reaches as deep as he can and he comes up with what is to him the truth about who she is and how wonderful she is. And he finds a laugh or two, as we’re all grateful to do in wedding speech circumstances. And then, when he believes that he’s said his piece, he sits down. And he has to leave not too long thereafter because he’s so exhausted from the effort that this took. Imagine if someone took a hand mixer and plunged it into your brain and turned it on. And while that was happening, you were supposed to get up in front of a bunch of people you didn’t know, plus the love of your life, and say what you thought. And he manages to do it, but the next time you see him, he’s horizontal on the couch. He didn’t even have the strength to pull the bed out.
Amidst all of Alice & Jack’s beauty and honesty and romance and pain, there’s a lot of delightfully wry humor. What role does it play?
We all tried to keep the drama funny and the comedy serious. We all tried to be real in that way, and to understand that life is very often funny and serious at the same time. And sometimes at the saddest moments, the funniest things are said and vice versa, so we wanted the dialogue to reflect that. And we wanted the people’s characterizations to reflect that—we wanted people to be clever and funny, but also in pain and moved and distressed and distraught all at once, or sequentially, or in turns.
A quality of Alice & Jack that makes it so universal and relatable is the way people hurt one another even when their intentions are good. Can you talk about that, and the mess that accompanies it?
Well, the other thing about “keep your drama funny and your comedy serious” is “keep your bad guys good and your good guys bad.” There aren’t really bad guys in this, but the good guys are bad in certain ways, and they make mistakes, and they hurt each other, and they’re wrong about stuff. Both Alice and Jack make decisions that turn out to be wrong, just objectively incorrect. They realize it and they adjust and they try to make good, but they’re not perfect—they’re far from perfect. So this is another thing that I think maybe isn’t always the case, especially in a love story where the morality tends to be, at least in the American model, a little clearer and a little crisper and little less divergent. But here we’re saying, “No, look, we’re a mess. We’re all a mess. We’re a big giant mess and you’ve got to accept us on those terms and accept yourself on those terms.”
