‘Alice & Jack’: Andrea Riseborough Breaks Down the Show’s ‘Uncontrollable’ Love Story (VIDEO)
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Love stories don’t always get the rom-com edit. Alice & Jack, premiering March 17 on Masterpiece on PBS, is a modern love story that explores all the best and worst moments of a relationship that spans 15 years.
“I think perhaps in episodic stories, I crave seeing characters whose relationships reflect more accurately the mess or the messy fallout of love,” series star Andrea Riseborough tells TV Insider. “Alice & Jack is a piece that is about two people who are getting things so horribly wrong and really causing such a mess in their wake but are unavoidably linked.”
Despite complications from the start, Alice (Riseborough) and Jack (Domhnall Gleeson) form a “deep love” that’s “completely uncontrollable.” Riseborough adds, “It’s like, as a friend of mine would say, trying to ride a squirrel. There’s nothing predictable about it, but there’s something… Love can look like so many things, and it can be between so many different types of people. It’s endless and vast.”
Domhnall Gleeson as Jack and Andrea Riseborough as Alice in ‘Alice & Jack.’ (Fremantle)
The love between Alice and Jack constantly evolves as the years pass by. As Riseborough says, love can look like “lifetimes of estrangements. It looks like people being very close together. It looks like relationships, no relationship. It looks like being married to other people you don’t have that soul connection with.”
Relationships are never easy, nor should they be. The Oscar nominee points out that the show doesn’t take the “conventional romantic comedy narrative” where the protagonists are “impossibly good in some way or behaving in a way that is perhaps funny.”
Riseborough notes that Alice and Jack’s relationship over the course of the six-episode series is “brutal” at times because that’s “how sometimes we behave when we’re in love because it brings all of those things, those irritating things that we like to ignore, to the surface like insecurities and terror and obsession.”
So, what is it exactly that draws Alice and Jack to each other in the first place? Riseborough explains that it starts from the moment Alice meets Jack. For the first time in her life, Alice sees Jack “receiving her” and not “wanting to run away from” her “wrath and candor.”
She continues, “And as time goes on, we understand more and more about Alice, and I think for many, many reasons, that’s why we should persist in telling love stories about people who have had a difficult past because they, like everybody, are deserving of wonderful love. Even if it can’t look like the quintessential love story that perhaps we’re used to, those stories are still as important and those people are as deserving. Love is for all of us.”
Alice & Jack, Series Premiere, Sunday, March 17, 10/9c, Masterpiece on PBS
