'Good Grief' scene inspired by Dan Levy finding sex toy in apartment (original) (raw)
Dan Levy says hilarious Good Grief scene was inspired by finding an old tenant's sex toy in his new apartment
The "Schitt's Creek" star was cleaning his bed when he felt something fall to the floor behind it.
Published on January 6, 2024 12:29PM EST
Dan Levy is pulling back the bedsheets on how a surprising gift left behind by an old tenant in his apartment ended up inspiring a hilarious scene in his new movie, Good Grief.
The Emmy-winning actor, who also wrote and directed the drama, revealed that the moment in the film in which his character Marc talks to his best friends Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel) about the time he moved into a new flat and found a previous tenant’s sex toy in his bed was based on his own experience in London decades earlier.
“I think I was 20? And I found an apartment, and I was cleaning the apartment, and I pulled the bed out from the wall and felt something thump behind the bed,” the Schitt's Creek star explained in a new Netflix interview with his costar Patel. “I didn’t have my cleaning gloves on — I thought it was a bottle of cleaning solution — and I went to reach for it.”
It was, in fact, not cleaning solution. “I felt something phallic in nature kind of slip out of my hands,” he said. “I looked over the bed and it was a perfume bottle that someone had wrapped in a condom to, I suppose, enjoy themselves with… and that was my first real London memory. And I’ve loved it ever since.”
“Such a terrible way of explaining why London is your favorite city in the world,” Patel teased.
Dan Levy.
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
Levy told Metro in 2021 that “a mother-daughter situation was happening” in the rented apartment before his arrival in 2005, adding, “They were running a very successful business.”
“I much appreciate their hustle,” he remarked at the time. “I just didn’t want to see the leftovers of what they were running!”
Dan Levy and his costars in 'Good Grief'.
Chris Baker/Netflix
Levy’s sex toy surprise wasn’t the only experience that helped shape Good Grief. He told EW that the film — which follows Marc as he navigates love and loss after the sudden death of his husband, Oliver (Luke Evans) — was based on his own struggles with grief after losing his grandmother and his dog during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I was in a very strange headspace in terms of feeling the weight and the profound sense of tragedy of what the COVID pandemic had done for all of us, while at the same time trying to honor the passing of someone who meant so much to me," Levy recalled. "It was hard for me to feel the specificity of loss when all I was feeling was grief for so long. It was that conversation that really expedited the concept of the movie."
Good Grief is streaming now on Netflix. Watch Levy in the interview above.
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