By Kilian Melloy

Memories of his father’s funeral informed writer-director Jim Rash when he sat down to write a play that would become the screenplay for the HBO Max’s Miss You, Love You, Rash’s deeply personal film about grief, resentment, and the unexpected intimacy that can arise between strangers. His sister, juggling work obligations, brought her assistant to the family occasion. Watching this outsider navigate their most vulnerable moments became the seed for the story.

“I thought that was such an interesting lens to see when we’re in our most vulnerable and at our best and worst as we deal with our emotions,” Rash explained at HBO’s press day panel for the film. “That’s where I started.”

The play evolved into a movie script during the pandemic, and the result stars Allison Janney and out actor Andrew Rannells. Janney plays Diane, a prickly New Yorker transplanted reluctantly to New Mexico during her husband’s last years of life; Rannells plays Jamie, the assistant sent by Diane’s estranged son Tyler to attend the funeral of Diane’s husband, Tyler’s stepfather, in his place. The result is an emotionally raw exploration of how we share grief, and why sometimes it’s easier with a stranger than with family.

For Rash, the writing process was an alchemical distillation of narrative expertise and personal experience. “It’s a soup of stuff,” he told the panel’s audience. “I always carry my phone and write down what my family says, so I just use it for spicing.” Rash also drew on his father’s experience with Parkinson’s disease in writing about Diane’s departed husband. “Jamie is a lot of me,” he disclosed. “Writing is therapy. You pull from what you know, and then of course [the actors] elevate it and make it their own.”

At the heart of Miss You, Love You is a paradox both Janney and Rannells recognized immediately: The freedom that comes from opening up to someone who doesn’t know your history. “I certainly have gone through periods of my life where it feels easier to not share with people and you don’t want to be a burden,” Rannells admitted. “Then you find yourself in these situations where you’re opening up to a total stranger — someone next to you on a plane or a barber, and you’re crying in front of someone you’ve never met before. That was a big part of why I was so attracted to it, because I recognized myself in Jamie and in Diane. They’re both people that feel like they can just do it alone. And, of course, that’s not the case.”

Janney, who noted that the role is unusually large for her, saw the stranger dynamic as essential to Diane’s arc. “That’s why this works so well as a conceit,” she said, “a woman grieving and a stranger showing up in place of her son. It allows her to just lash out at him. I don’t think she would be able to do that to her son. I don’t think she’d even be able to be honest with him.”

“With family members we tend to go into another room to complain about the person we just walked away from to other family members,” Rash observed, citing insights he’s gleaned from therapy. “We love drama, but rather than deal with the drama firsthand, you choose to get stuck on the loop of it and it makes you feel like, ‘Yes, that’s right. I was wronged.’”

But strangers, Rash said, catch you in your own narratives. “With a stranger, I’m going to be the hero in this story and you’re going to see it from my point of view,” he explained. “But as soon as they find out the other person’s story, they realize, ‘Oh my God, that’s much more complicated and I wouldn’t have said that you were right to do that.’ That’s both the beauty of talking to a stranger and the danger of talking to a stranger.”

The creative challenge of producing the film was daunting. The film is, essentially, a 90-minute two-hander with a number of lengthy scenes. Rash and his cast approached it, in some ways, like a stage production, with Janney and Rannells committing the entire script to memory before shooting commenced and Rash allowing them the necessary time to rehearse. The strategy paid off: The film was shot in only 17 days.

The extended rehearsal period also allowed the actors to establish a working rhythm. “Jim created this space where we were in that house for a couple weeks all day, every day, really getting to know each other but also finding a good rhythm of when we needed a little space or when it was okay to joke,” Rannells said. “We still managed to have a lot of laughs in between those more tense, harder moments. It was a pretty joyful set.”

Another unusual aspect of the production was Rash’s decision to allow actorly pauses to play out. For Janney, those moments were essential. “A lot of times doing it, rehearsing it, Jim would say, ‘You know what? You don’t need to say that, because you’re doing it,’” the actor recalled. “So, he would take lines out of the script because the silence was so full already with what was happening. I love silences,” Hanney went on to add; “they are so loud with what’s going on inside both of them at any given moment. [The] silences are earned.”

Rannells appreciated that Rash preserved those moments in the final edit. “As actors on film, you’re often not in control of your own performance in a lot of ways,” he pointed out. “So, it was really exciting to see that Jim had chosen to leave those moments. A lot of times those things get taken out. We love a pause. But it usually gets cut.”

Rash credited the long-take approach with creating space for organic discovery. “Because we shot large chunks all at once, you’ve afforded yourself the opportunity to see where they naturally found them or the characters needed that moment,” he said. “There was a wealth of Allison and Andrew tackling large chunks, monologues even, and that really is to follow them at that point, to see what they are feeling in that moment.”

The actors’ theatrical training served them well. “I think we both have a certain amount of agility in acting,” Janney said.

“Dancers,” Rannells confirmed with a laugh.

One of the film’s most delicate achievements is its handling of Jamie’s sexuality and Tyler’s coming-out story, which is told with heartfelt compassion through Diane’s perspective. When asked about how representation in Hollywood has evolved, Rannells was quick to point to Rash’s script, calling it “the perfect example of that.

“Yes, his sexuality is involved in some ways, and you do see a little bit of his coming-out story, Rannells, who famously originated the role of Elder Price in the stage musical The Book of Mormon and who has played queer characters in films like The Boys in the Band, The Prom, and I Don’t Understand You, “but the movie is not a coming-out story, nor is it a movie about his sexuality or how the son’s sexuality changes their relationship.” Even so, he took note of the script’s depiction of how Diane’s son struggled to come out to her, and how readily Diane accepted him when he did. (That said, the film also pulls no punches when referencing Tyler’s long list of lovers and his reluctance to commit.)

“I love being the sassy gay friend, but I’ve done it a lot and it’s sometimes nice to not have to be the sassy gay friend,” Rannells said appreciatively of how Rash wrote his character. “I can be a sad gay friend too. That’s my range. I go from sassy to sad.”

Rash, for his part, went for both the specific and universal. “I want to tell the story of a mother who was very ready to receive that love, was very ready to be the parent,” he said. “In these times, it’s lovely to see those kinds of stories as well. When you put your love toward somebody who doesn’t reciprocate, that’s a unifying existence, gay/straight. Grief is universal, love is universal, all these things. We will all have this experience.”

Janney saw Diane’s unconditional love for her son as worth celebrating. “I like feeling that maybe someone who watches this will be able to help if they have a child or someone in their life who is gay and hasn’t come out yet, to just give people the space,” she said. “I love the way Diane is there for Tyler when he’s coming out and doesn’t force it out of him, lets him come to it in his own time, and just says, ‘I love you.’ It’s such a beautiful way for a mother to help her son, knowing that he’s gay and help him know that he’s safe.”

The film’s central themes are complicated family dynamics and the resentments they can generate, but Rash didn’t want the audience to come away resenting Travis on Diane and Jamie’s behalf. “I knew with Tyler people were going to [say], ‘He’s awful,’” Rash mused, “but then you start to understand, “Okay, there’s complicated things.” Tyler, too, harbors his resentments, and they stem from his parents’ divorce. “Parents make decisions that happen in the moment,” Rash pointed out. “The child’s going to take that, so then that adds a layer. Eventually, you have to believe that Tyler’s going to come to his senses, and maybe it’s because Diane is going to choose to operate differently at the end, which is going to make him operate differently.”

The decision to keep Tyler off-screen was crucial. “The one thing they share is Tyler,” Rash explained of Diane and Jamie. “That’s why the whole theme is resentment. We all know the saying about drinking poison so that the other person gets sick. I knew he would never show up in the movie. We don’t need him, because he’s the reason they change.”

For Janney, this theme held deep personal meaning; the actor spoke of the “notion of letting go of what my version of what I need someone to be for me — someone specific in my life — and letting go of that and letting them be who they are. Let him be who he is, stop needing him to be who he’s not, and let it go and there can be love there even though there’s estrangement. There’s still love there. That resonated with me a lot.”

Rash became emotional when the topic of performance crossing into personal reflection arose. “Are there moments where… I’m tapping into something that is a little bit more visceral than I intended?” he asked. “Absolutely. When I tap into something… I start tearing up, I feel like I’m somewhere in the right neighborhood.” Pausing to collet himself, he added: “I am in Jamie. I’m absolutely in that archway as a person who came out later. You don’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t get to do that when my dad passed. Part of this was dealing with those kinds of things — what do I need to say about that?”

For Rannells, the lesson was no less profound. “It’s okay to be vulnerable with people,” he said, “it’s okay to open up to people, even if it’s in brief moments. That is important. And it’s not selfish. It does make dealing with especially big life events, and sometimes small life events, just easier to go through when you share what you’re going through with someone else.”

The panel wrapped with warm exchanges about the production, including the revelation that Janney and Rannells went directly from filming in New Mexico to Rome, where they had both been cast in another film, Another Simple Favor, the sequel to the popular 2018 comedy. Janney is a fresh addition to the franchise, with Rannells reprising the character of Darren.

Calling the film a “weird movie where we didn’t have to work that much, or at least I didn’t,” Rannells shared that he and Janney “would have days off together, so I just got to walk around Rome with Allison and watch her shop.”

Not that the shopping expeditions were without challenges of their own. “We got to a point where I sort of lost her in the crowd because there were so many people,” Rannells recalled. “We both sort of started running through the streets of tourists. We both have kind of the same anxiety about crowds that was all of a sudden just at the exact same moment — we were like, run! Just shoving teenagers aside; ‘The Vatican’s that way!’

“I will think of that very fondly,” Rannells added, with perfect comic timing.

Miss You, Love You is streaming on HBO Max.