All episodes of Netflix’s No Good Deed are now streaming and I had the opportunity to speak with Creator/Showrunner Liz Feldman as well as stars Ray Romano, Lisa Kudrow, Linda Cardellini, Luke Wilson, Teyonah Parris, O-T Fagbenle, and Abbi Jacobson about the dark comedy’s many twists and turns.
When Lydia (Lisa Kudrow) and Paul (Ray Romano) decide to move on from their empty nest to forge a new life, they list their gorgeous 1920s Spanish-style villa located in one the most desirable neighborhoods in Los Angeles — and the real estate frenzy begins. Multiple families all race to buy what they believe to be their dream house, convinced it will fix all of their very different problems. But as Lydia and Paul know all too well, sometimes the home of your dreams can be a true nightmare. As they struggle to hide the dark and dangerous secrets that linger inside their longtime home, Paul and Lydia begin to realize that the only way they’ll escape the past is to finally face it.
“Listen, these people are dealing with something tragic that’s happened and well, as far as my character, I’m swallowing it up and keeping it inside, and it’s not healthy,” Romano told me, reflecting on his character’s journey dealing with grief and healing. “I think the lesson to be learned is there’s nothing wrong with talking and speaking, reaching out, and sharing what you’re feeling.”
“But also, people process things differently,” Kudrow added. “He might not be able to talk about it yet or ever, but she can’t even go get therapy about it. She can’t say anything to anybody about it and so, that can make you nuts a little bit and really unbalanced. It’s almost an impossible situation for this couple and you don’t get to find out why is it that impossible until the end, and then you say, ‘Oh, okay, shit. Yep, I get it.’”
“I mean, that’s one of the fun things was how many different storylines you have and how we all were in our own little bubble with our own hopes, dreams, aspirations, hot messiness, and how that all collides, where it intermingles and where it doesn’t. It’s just so much to watch and to take in for each episode, so that is really one of the appealing parts of the show and the thing that feels titillating,” Parris concluded. “Like, what mess are these characters getting into now?”
“Well, Dennis had this big beard, which I always thought was a bit of an overcompensation for his inherent lack of adultness,” Fagbenle expressed. “It was a big beard and it meant a lot because he was a child inside, really, and so he was trying to wear the mask of an adult.”
“Personally, the idea of home and what that means, and it means different things to different people,” Cardellini explained when asked which theme resonated with her. “For me, I moved to Los Angeles, to Southern California from Northern California, but I always still consider, even though I’ve been here since I was 18, I always say home as Northern California. But now that I have my own family and I have my own family in Southern California, at what point does [it feel like] this is actually my home? It’s starting to feel more like my home now that my little family is here, so it’s just an interesting idea of like, what makes home? What is a house? Does a house make your home? Does the feeling of who you’re with make the home?”
Wilson commented, “One of the big emotions of it is striving for something more and it’s great to be ambitious, but then there’s also where you can be wanting something so much more or have envy for someone’s house, car, or where they go on vacation to where I think some people are kind of cursed with never being happy in the position they’re at. We were definitely in a project where that is a really strong theme and that’s something that really appealed to me ‘cause you can work on yourself and work on yourself, but you can’t help sometimes but feel envy about this person or that person or things like that.”
“Leslie and Sarah are loosely based on my wife and I, and the show is inspired by our search for a home. We were looking for a home while we were trying to build our family and there was a lot of chat, like I was talking about earlier, in the writer’s room about who should get this house and to be honest, in my original version of this, they did not get the house. When we sort of really got to know them as characters, invest in them, and love them, we realized as a room of writers, we wanted them to have a happy ending and we wanted them to have a happy ending with an asterisk because their happy ending is now taking place in a home that did not necessarily have a happy ending for everyone else who has lived in it,” Feldman, who is also a director and executive producer, shared. “I live in a hundred-year-old house and so many families have come through those walls and we do know stories about some of them and they weren’t all great. We feel really intentional that we want to give our home a happy chapter. And so, I think your home is not just what you make of it, but it’s a little bit like wherever you go, there you are. So it’s a challenge almost for you to be your best version of yourself and not to rely on this dream of an ideal house to solve all your problems for you. It’s just a house, it’s not the people in it.”
Jacobson continued to say, “I also love the fact that Leslie and Sarah are the ones that know exactly what happened. They know the whole story and still, that’s where they want to continue building their family. I think that was very… I love that too ‘cause they’re the ones that know all of it.”
We discussed their thoughts on the shocking ending, playing detective while reading the scripts, the show’s deeper themes, smaller character details, and much more.
Watch my interviews below:
