Thursday, May 30, 2019

Welcome Back, Big Little Lies

There was a time when many fans were vocally against the very idea of a second season of Big Little Lies—HBO’s glossy onetime limited series, which wrapped up its central mystery with a neat little bow back in 2017. Then stars Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, and Zoë Kravitz decided they wanted to go ahead and reunite for another go-round anyway—and after the show got Meryl Streep on board as well, any remaining reservations seemed to dissipate into the early-morning Monterey mist. On Wednesday season two’s full-court press officially began with a panel featuring the show’s stars at New York’s Wing Soho, moderated by Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones.As Yohana Desta recounts, it was a fascinating conversation boasting at least one major revelation: Liane Moriarty, who wrote the novel on which season one was based as well as a novella used to plot out season two, named a key character Mary Louise specifically so that Streep might be enticed to play her onscreen. “The Oscar-winning actor was just as big a fan as anyone else of the hit HBO series, and was excited when she found out another season was in the works,” Desta writes. “She was even more shocked when she realized that the character she was being offered was named Mary Louise. Why? Because “Mary Louise is my actual legal name,” Streep noted. “So yeah, that’s how I got involved.”
Elsewhere in HWD, the cast of Big Little Lies gushes about Streep to contributor Paul Chi at the show’s glitzy New York premiere, also held Wednesday; Bob Igermakes a bold statement about Disney’s continued involvement in the Georgia film industry; Laura Bradleypreviews Netflix’s coming reboot of a classic Jim Henson film; and Mindy Kaling frolics in florals.