‘The Other Two’: Heléne Yorke on Brooke’s ‘Period of Rebuilding’ & ‘Full Circle Moment’ With Lance
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Other Two Season 3 finale “Brooke & Cary & Curtis & Lance.”]
The Other Two Season 3 has not been easy for Brooke (Heléne Yorke) and Cary (Drew Tarver), nor for those closest to them (Josh Segarra‘s Lance and Brandon Scott Jones‘ Curtis). But the finale leaves those key relationships in, if not a good place, a hopeful one.
Brooke steps up and takes blame when when Pat (Molly Shannon) and Chase (Case Walker) come under fire. Pat problem is deleted tweets that paint her as a classist elitist with disdain for small town America. Meanwhile, Chase wins a Peabody for a mental health special while exploiting people struggling with mental health to sell albums. After Brooke reconnects with and is honest with Lance, the two reunite. Meanwhile, Cary realizes how he’s been acting and talks to Curtis and turns down the film he’d wanted to score him an Oscar.
Here, Yorke (prior to news of the Max comedy ending with Season 3) talks about Brooke’s journey.
I love the flashback to open the finale.
Heléne Yorke: I know! Nobody’s asked me about that yet. That’s so funny. I almost forgot about it. Yeah, it was fun to even do the wardrobe for that and the hair and the frosty eye makeup. It was really a flashback for all of us. [Laughs]
Something that I enjoy about this show is that these are flawed characters and you don’t know if someone is going to act out of their own best interest or step up. And we see Brooke really step up for Pat and Chase in the finale. Is that a move that Brooke could have made earlier in the season when she was still struggling to figure things out?
I don’t know. I think that maybe would’ve made it a little less of a bats**t season, and I hope that fans like that. It turned out to be as crazy as it was. I thought that it was a wonderful build that Chris [Kelly] and Sarah [Schneider] put together because just when you think Brooke and Cary are at their absolute worst, they upped their ante even further. So I just remember reading the episode of the Night of Undeniable Good and being like, how could this character fall further? And then by Episode 9, she’s lighting an apartment building on fire. So I was really delighted that they took us so far.
And what I love about the finale is that I think the thing that makes our show so special is that at the heartbeat of it, it’s a show about a family who really loves each other. That’s the thing that I think audiences and certainly people we’ve spoken to have been the most surprised about. And the fact that Brooke makes that decision so quickly and so easily, I think is a testament to what this show has been all about from the beginning.
Greg Endries/HBO
Yeah. I love when we get the family all together because it’s kind of rare when that happens just because of the nature of their jobs.
Yeah, exactly. It’s so funny because we read scripts and Brooke and Cary are never together. All of our scenes have been phone calls, which, we love each other so much, and we’ve been through now three seasons of this, and we always just miss being together because all these characters have been off on their own adventures. So it’s always so fun when all of us come together for scenes. It’s a great pleasure. I love working with these people so much.
And then the episode ends with Streeter (Ken Marino) calling to say that people want her to represent them after she shows she’ll be the bad guy. So is Brooke in a place to handle that better than she might have been in the past, or might she backslide because of it?
I don’t know. I think the message is that if you’re willing to go to the absolute depths for a client, then this is definitely the person you want to rep you when she thinks, oh, this doesn’t mean that I’m done forever. So I sort of just really loved that as a twist. And again, I think it speaks to Chris and Sarah, our creators’ abilities to do things that are surprising and not necessarily what you’d expect.
Let me just say how happy I was to see Brooke and Lance’s reunion, and I agree with Brooke that I loved it was raining.
It was a callback actually to the last scene of them in the first season where they’re in Rockefeller Center and she says, and she’s trying to get him back and she says, “Oh God, I really wish it was raining right now.” It was a sweet, full circle for those two.
Why did they, especially Brooke, need that time apart though?
I think when we’re really close to things, when they’re right in front of us, we tend to take them for granted. And she’s certainly somebody that takes the good things for granted and having distance, I think, slaps her back into reality of how good she has it. That’s been the back and forth with her and Lance over the course of the time we’ve gotten to know them is that she constantly is messing it up thinking that she’s so much better and not realizing that what’s right in front of her is exactly what she needs. If you’re close to something, you can get stuck taking it for granted.
And now it seems like they can make it work, right, for good?
Yeah, we’ll see. I mean, what keeps the story going? Ross and Rachel never got together, so who knows?
Are they engaged again? Because I didn’t think I saw a ring in the restaurant scene, but then it looked like there was one during the call with Streeter.
Oh, yes, I did put a ring back on for that. So yes, I think the engagement’s back on. I’m remembering that now from shooting it. That’s so funny that you’ve noticed. How sweet.
Greg Endries/Max
What do you think their wedding would look like?
Oh God. I like to think that Brooke would probably think, “Oh, we’ll just do a quiet courthouse thing. It’ll just be us and our families. We’ll all go to have lunch at the Odion afterwards,” but then that would quickly spiral into a grand affair at some estate on Long Island.
Do you think she ever tells him she broke into his apartment and the extreme she went to to hide from him?
No, I don’t think so. [Laughs] She conveniently keeps that from him. That’ll be her dirty secret for the rest of her life. Maybe she tells him on her death bed.
How is Brooke feeling about her life at the end of the season? Is she maybe as happy with it as she ever been or has been in a while?
I think she’s resigned to who she is and letting herself be happy. She has that nice scene with Lance on the bench before they reunite and she’s apologizing for the lengths that she’s gone to. She’s gotten completely lost in it. And I think when we make mistakes, when we go through a period of darkness, as it were, in our lives, coming back down to Earth is hard to do. But it takes some time and I think by the end of the season she’s like, “I’m doing the right thing. I’m living as me and I’m back with this person that I love.” But she’s in a period of rebuilding.
How worried should the family be about Chase given that last scene with him and the tattoo?
Oh yeah. I don’t know. [Laughs] We’ve seen what happens with these pop stars, so … I think what Chris and Sarah do so well is poke fun at pop culture and all these things we see from the outside as being cool or glamorous or bizarre and out there and it’s fun to pull the curtain back and think, “Oh, this has all been orchestrated by a very good publicist, played by the wonderful Wanda Sykes.”
You and Wanda are so good together.
Thank you. I truly love her. She is a wonderful person and a hilarious comedian. We’re so lucky that she does this with us.
What was your favorite scene to film this season?
I don’t know. I think probably the most gratifying moment — and it was a difficult day — and the most satisfying as an actor was in Episode 5 when Brooke and Lance are breaking up and sort of playing Brooke being backed into a corner and how she tries to fight her way out of it. I think that was my favorite scene to shoot. I’ve known Josh Segarra for about 15 years now, and he’s such a wonderful actor, and being opposite him, it’s just playing catch. He makes it feel so easy even when it’s hard. So I think that would be my favorite.
The Other Two, Seasons 1-3, Streaming Now, Max
