Emmy-winning actor and writer Dan Levy will be making his film directorial debut with the forthcoming Netflix movie Good Grief.
The movie will follow the character Marc Dreyfus, who has “chosen to distract himself from the loss of his mom with a comfortable marriage,” per the Deadline announcement. But his husband dies unexpectedly, too, forcing Marc to confront his grief with a “Parisian weekend of self-discovery” alongside two friends.
“Good Grief is a cautionary tale about friendship and loss and all the mess that comes with it when the truth is something you’ve evaded for most of your life,” Levy said in a statement provided to Deadline. “It’s funny, it’s bittersweet, it’s a project that has helped me work through my own grief. And I hope it does the same for other people as well.“
The movie will star Levy himself, alongside a star-studded supporting cast of Ruth Negga, Himesh Patel, Luke Evans, Celia Imrie, Arnaud Valois, David Bradley, and Jamael Westman. It’s the first of several projects Levy is set to develop in his multi-year overall deal with Netflix.
Although Good Grief was originally billed as a rom-com, Dan Levy told the Hollywood Reporter in June that in the process of writing, he decided to widen the scope beyond a couple.
“It ended up having more to do with friendships in your 30s than actual romantic relationships,” Levy said. “What would a love story look like if it was really about a group of friends in their mid-30s?” he mused, adding that such a story would be informed by “the clarity that comes with age and the time you’ve spent with these people.”
Matt Winkelmeyer
“Sometimes we have people in our lives, decades-long friendships, but we know very little about them because the closeness and the intimacy of those relationships is so comfortable that we don’t ask the big questions or investigate them in the way that someone that you meet for the first time might feel inclined to,” the actor added. “There’s romance in the movie, obviously, but really, it’s a love story about friendship.”
Although Good Grief might not fit strictly within the confines of the rom-com genre, it seems that we’re in somewhat of a queer rom-com boom right now, with movies like Bros and Fire Island coming out this year. Then, of course, there’s the even more niche subset of queer rom-com holiday movies, like Happiest Season, Single All the Way, and the forthcoming The Holiday Sitter. Here’s hoping the LGBTQ+ rom-com (and rom-com-adjacent) canon keeps growing.