As Shrinking season three comes to a close, the cast and creatives behind the hit Apple TV comedy united at PaleyFest LA to celebrate the finale and give a tease as to what’s coming next.
What’s next is a fourth season that will look quite different, as creator Bill Lawrence has spoken about these first three seasons being a closed arc; the new season will feature a time jump and “a completely different story,” he told The Hollywood Reporter following the end of season three.
For star and co-creator Jason Segel, he hopes his character Jimmy can open up more and finally enjoy himself in season four, after being in the emotional trenches through the show’s first three seasons and ending the finale making a leap to pursue a romance with Sofi (Cobie Smulders).
“Maybe it’s time for Jimmy to try to have some fun,” Segel mused to THR on the red carpet. “We’ve seen Jimmy going through it, but it’s been with an emotional twisted ankle. We need to see him run a little bit and break out.”
Shrinking follows a group of friends and therapists, led by Segel, as they try to heal both their patients and themselves from their past traumas. The star shared the emotion that’s brought out of him over the past several years, as “every time I do a scene with Lukita Maxwell, who plays my daughter, I start to tear up. I think it’s just because I’ve been tuned to think of her as my daughter and we’ve been through a lot together in the show and I’ve watched her grow up as a human being. I think she was 22 when we started the show and she’s a grown-up now, so all these scenes about me being proud of her are how I really feel about her.”
Many of the actors — with Harrison Ford, Jessica Williams, Michael Urie, Luke Tennie, Christa Miller, Maxwell and Ted McGinley all in attendance at the event — confessed to feeling genuine emotions while navigating the challenges their characters face. Miller noted she felt overwhelmed while preparing for a scene in which her character’s husband was preparing for heart surgery.
Lawrence, meanwhile, had also confirmed that the entire ensemble will return for season four.
“We had the scene where my husband is in the hospital, and it’s very serious, and when I was rehearsing it in my office before, I kept crying. It was so emotional and I realized that I couldn’t do that in front of my children and my husband,” she explained. “I had to really tamp it down — use my childhood of chaos, because I have that super power of tamping it down. I didn’t want to scare Derek (her character’s husband) and then I got to let it go with Jason. And it was ugly crying, not cute crying, and I thought, ‘That’s not going to work.’ So it was tricky for me to keep pulling it back.”
Following the carpet, the group took the stage for a PaleyFest panel, where Michael J. Fox, who appeared on the third season, made a surprise appearance to answer a few questions from longtime friend Lawrence.
Fox plays Gerry on the show, a Parkinson’s patient who bonds with Ford’s character Paul, who is also diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Fox told the audience what it was like to work with the legendary actor.
“What Harrison was so brilliant about with his work on the show is that I didn’t have to prove I had Parkinson’s. I have it. He had to prove to me that he had Parkinson’s,” Fox said. “It was so great, so good. I looked in his eyes — Parkinson’s is about the shaking and the moving but you look in the eyes and see the world the way you see yourself and he nailed it.”
Later on, in his typically gruff and humorous manner, Ford gave a candid answer when Lawrence, the panel’s moderator, asked him how he created the emotional life of his character.
“I don’t know. And besides not knowing, I don’t give a shit, in the nicest possible way. I have so much fun working for you, Bill, that it feels really irresponsible to let you know that,” Ford joked. “I revel in the mystery that I am. I am delighted that I don’t know what the next script is going to say or where it’s going to take me. That’s like life. This feels like real life, the complexity of it.”
