Four years ago, Andrew Rannells published his side of a hookup gone wrong in Modern Love. Now, as a director, he explores the same story from both characters’ perspectives.
In his 2017 Modern Love essay, “During a Night of Casual Sex, Urgent Messages Go Unanswered,” the writer, actor and director Andrew Rannells recounts a second date that took a tragic turn when he learned that his father had collapsed and was in a coma. He died a few days later.
Miya Lee and I recently caught up with four writers whose essays inspired episodes in the second season of “Modern Love” on Prime Video. Below is my conversation with Mr. Rannells, who directed the episode based on his story. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You can also read my interview with Mary Elizabeth Williams (“A Second Embrace, With Hearts and Eyes Open”) and Miya Lee’s interviews with Katie Heaney (“Am I Gay or Straight? Maybe This Fun Quiz Will Tell Me”) and Amanda Gefter (“The Night Girl Finds a Day Boy”).
Daniel Jones: You directed your own story, from a Modern Love essay you wrote about your father dying when you were 22. What were you trying to capture in that story?
Andrew Rannells: Well, it was an unexpected, traumatic event that happened at an unexpected time with a super unexpected person, and that’s just the way life works sometimes.
I was on a first date with this guy I didn’t know very well. I wasn’t sure how much I liked him, but I was 22 and trying to date. I ended up having sex with him, and as soon as we finished, I looked at my phone and there were all these messages from my family that my father was in a coma and had had a heart attack. He was going to die. I had to take in that information with this stranger. And it put a lot into perspective about what I wanted and who I wanted to spend my time with, and to trust my gut. If you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t really want to have sex with this guy,” then you probably shouldn’t.
And yes, I felt panicked and upset that night, but I didn’t treat my date very well. This episode was an opportunity for me to imagine what his version of that night was.
This was your first time directing. Did you ever think, “What am I doing?”
Yeah, there were definitely times. We had prepped everything to shoot in March 2020, and obviously that didn’t happen because everything was shut down. So I had an obscene amount of prep time, and by the time by the time September rolled around, I was so ready. Also I got to cast some of my friends, so I knew that even if things started to go bad, I could just look at them and say: “Do something to fix it!”
People may not realize that the whole season was shot during the pandemic, which meant all kinds of restrictions and concerns — masks, protocols, tests.
Shields, eyeglasses.
I’m sure all of that made directing and acting harder, but did it also create unexpected opportunities?
I think the biggest one is rather than shooting in Manhattan, we shot in Schenectady, N.Y., because it was easier to control. And the directors of other episodes went up there early. Because everyone had to be in Schenectady quarantining in our hotels, we were there for much longer than we would have been had this been an episode that was shot in New York. We were all together for about 10 days, plus the quarantine time.
A lot of the cast were theater actors, so there was a summer stock feel to it, eating every meal together, and it brought us all very close, very quickly.
What was your hardest moment during the week?
This is going to sound really annoying, but it was just a joy the entire time. We were all so happy to be working. There was obviously some anxiety the day before we started. The first episode that filmed had shut down for two days over a false positive test, and I thought, “God, this is going to be such a disaster.”
The delays kept pushing the start date of my episode, and I was in this hotel in Schenectady thinking, “What are we doing? What’s happening?”
Were there benefits to shooting in Schenectady?
Yeah, I thought the town was great and everyone was so excited to have us there. After doing “Girls” for six years, which we shot in New York, I got used to people getting impatient with us on the street. We’d be filming and they’d be saying, “I’m just trying to get home.” And we’d say, “Please, we just have one more line to do.”
What do you hope people will take away from your episode?
That you have to forgive your younger self for mistakes you might have made. For a long time, it was really painful for me to think about that night — about my dad dying and how I behaved. I didn’t know how to handle it. And looking back on it now, at 42, I think: Well, of course you didn’t know how to handle it. There’s a lot that went wrong that evening, but it took me a long time to be able to forgive myself.
Daniel Jones is the editor of Modern Love. Andrew Rannells is an actor, director and author of the memoir “Too Much Is Not Enough.” His essay appears in “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss and Redemption.”
Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.
To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.
Want more from Modern Love? Watch the TV series; sign up for the newsletter; or listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”
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