Elizabeth Olsen executive produces and stars as Christina in His Three Daughters. The movie is currently playing in select theaters and will be available on Netflix starting September 20.
From writer-director Azazel Jacobs comes this bittersweet and often funny story of an elderly patriarch and the three grown daughters who come to be with him in his final days. Katie (Carrie Coon) is a controlling Brooklyn mother dealing with a wayward teenage daughter; free-spirited Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is a different kind of mom, separated from her offspring for the first time; and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is a sports-betting stoner who has never left her father’s apartment — much to the chagrin of her half-sisters, who share a different mother and worldview. Continuing his astute exploration of family dynamics in close-knit spaces, Jacobs follows the siblings over the course of three volatile days, as death looms, grievances erupt, and love seeps through the cracks of a fractured home.
“Mortality is a constant concept we’re dealing with in different ways all the time. We’re all walking into a room being polite, but we all have a deep sense of grief of something that we’ve experienced in our lives, and I think the way we got to explore it in this film of it being in relation to how we relate to our families in this situation and really specifically our siblings, where we have these ideas of who these people are in our family from either the last time we spent with them or from when we were children and we just create these ideas of who they are. For whatever reason with family, we just can’t shake it. We create something that we can relate to or project,” the actress explained regarding the concept. “Through the breaking down of the film, as the film continues, it becomes more complicated in the same way the sisters are starting to see each other in a more complicated view and it’s all through this thing that we all have to go through with our family, especially, which is watching people die and how we do that as a communal experience, which is so specific to everyone’s experience, but it’s also something that we all have a relationship with every day of our lives.”
We had an insightful conversation about the different ways that grief is portrayed in film and television, presenting the sibling dynamic through this project, creating a community, and how she used music to connect with her character.
Watch my interview below:
