The Hollywood Reporter is on the set of Alice and Steve watching a master at work.
It’s June of last year, and on a warm day in southwest London, THR is a guest of the Disney+/Hulu show that would go on to sweep Canneseries and garner some serious buzz for writer Sophie Goodhart, whose credits include Rivals and Sex Education.
That portfolio is a great symbolizer of what’s to come in the six-episode “wrong-com” Alice and Steve, streaming this week on June 8, a year on from getting to hit the set and see Nicola Walker do exactly what she does best: have a bit of a meltdown.
The series follows BAFTA-nominated Walker, famed for roles in Spooks and the hit BBC drama The Split, as Alice. She’s been best friends with Steve (Jemaine Clement, best known for Flight of the Conchords and as the creator of What We Do in the Shadows) for decades, but her whole world is turned upside down when Steve announces that he’s began dating Alice’s 26-year-old daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith).
In one particularly excruciating episode two scene, filmed on the day THR comes to set, Alice gives up on her attempts to appear calm about the situation and flips out on family board game night. Izzy’s Gen Z friends and Alice’s husband (Game of Thrones‘ Joel Fry) are forced to witness the toll that seeing her own daughter and lifelong pal hook up has taken. As aforementioned, it’s flawless work from Walker, who navigates each take with a combination of imaginative looseness and script-sharp precision.
“I have to apologize,” begins Walker to her co-star while sitting down with THR. “Halfway through the first day, I had to go, ‘I’ve been a fan of yours forever,’ and I’ve just been really, really shit the last two hours,” she says, referencing those board game takes — ones that required her to stay pretty emotionally fraught.
“No!” objects Clement. “I felt like the fan.” He turns to us. “Nicola’s probably not a method actor, but she’s a little bit method when we’re doing scenes.” Walker laughs: “I feel very angry today.”
The dreaded karaoke scene in ‘Alice and Steve’
Clerkenwell Films/Disney+
It’s a surprise that Walker, industry-acclaimed in the U.K., and Clement, a big comedy name here, have not yet crossed paths. All of a sudden, however, they are thrust onto a show that leans on the chemistry between two friends who have known each other for over 30 years. And their first scene together? A drunken karaoke bar that acts as a marker for that chemistry. “That was a hard day,” says Clement. “But we bonded over [it].”
Adds Walker: “I think they scheduled it really well, though. Right at the beginning of schedules, they always seem to put either having sex or getting on really well with someone — always, on any job you do, they always put those things first. And I think there is some method in their madness, actually, because by the end of that week, I did just feel like, ‘Oh yeah, Alice and Steve really know each other.’”
At this stage in their respective careers, they must receive a lot of scripts. Walker reflects on what attracted her to Goodhart’s writing. She remembers reading the first page, in which a middle-aged woman, seemingly in the process of a nervous breakdown, is walking up the stairs of a grand manor house carrying a blood-covered axe and stuffing wedding cake into her mouth. “I phoned my agent and went, ‘Please, please, I want to do this,’” she says. “It’s a very unusual tone. We keep talking about that. And when you get it, it feels amazing. So, I think what Sophie’s done is written something very, very, very funny, but then it can go really sad, and it’s sort of brutally honest at times.”
“It’s definitely intergenerational,” she continues about the broad audience appeal of Alice and Steve. “Which we don’t really have enough of. When people go, ‘What’s it about?’ and you say, ‘It’s about best friends, about mothers and daughters. It’s about betrayal and really hating someone you actually really love.” Clement chimes in: “They all picture it in their own minds with their own friends and parents’ friends. It’s a really easy one to describe.”
So what exactly is Steve thinking, getting involved with Izzy? “He isn’t thinking,” is the simple answer from Clement. “And then the rest of the time he’s thinking, ‘How can I fix this?’ [But] it’s too late. He’s trying to put the water back in the balloon.”
Just before Alice loses it over Trivial Pursuit, Steve, a celebrity hairdresser, is telling a half-ridiculous, half-touching story about one of his clients. Clement’s propensity for comedy is, of course, effortless — has it been a different muscle to stretch for Walker, as someone who has such a vast background in drama? “Not really, because I think that it’s all about good writing, and I think this is his good writing,” she says. “Our job is to put flesh on to a set of characters, [so] I didn’t really think of it like that.”
It’s ripe material indeed. Walker describes Alice as having “a can of hairspray under a lighter” burning every bridge around her, including her own marriage. “She ends up really isolating herself because she’s so convinced she’s right. She doesn’t allow for any gray in the spectrum of this situation.”
We’re privy to how this impacts all of the characters across the six half-hour episodes, including Izzy. Margalith tells THR: “She really looks up to her mum, and I think she considered her mum one of her best friends before this happened. It’s like when you’re a kid and you have something difficult that you want to tell your parents, and you think, ‘Yeah, they find that difficult, but not when it comes to me, surely — because she’s my mum.’ And then she does find it difficult. She still can’t be happy for me.”
Yali Topol Margalith, Jemaine Clement ‘Alice and Steve’
Courtesy of Disney+
“Because I do genuinely feel like I’m in love,” she continues about Izzy’s infatuation with Steve, “and I’m treated really well for the first time in my life after being hurt so badly again and again.” Clement says there is “a lot of understanding” between the two characters, despite his being twice her age: “They’ve both gone through a horrible breakup, and they feel mistreated.” Let the (board) games begin.
All six episodes of Alice and Steve will be available to stream on Monday, 8 June exclusively on Disney+ in the U.K. and Hulu in the U.S. It is created and written by Sophie Goodhart and directed by BAFTA winner Tom Kingsley. Petra Fried, Andy Baker, and Wim de Greed executive produce for Clerkenwell Films and the series is produced by Fran du Pille. The Hulu Original was commissioned by Lee Mason, vice president, scripted, Disney+ EMEA.
