Tears flowed this week during Christina Applegate’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony. The Dead To Me star was flanked by co-star Linda Cardellini and showrunner Liz Feldman, along with Married With Children co-stars David Faustino and Katey Sagal, the latter of whom happens to have a recurring Dead To Me role. To prepare for the Netflix show’s final season, Feldman sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss that already topsy turvy Season 3 shoot, which not only danced around the pandemic but also Applegate’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis.
To that end, Feldman discussed how the show’s production took nearly half a year of downtime following Applegate’s news, which arose about halfway through shooting the third season. However, things were already quite chaotic and “completely out of order,” as the showrunner described:
“Well, my hands were tied because we had shot 50 percent of the season — and we shot it completely out of order. And when I say “completely out of order,” I mean we only shot with James Marsden for that first month. Hopefully, one of the great achievements of this season is the fact that you can’t tell … because there are certain episodes, I won’t say which, where 10 months have gone by. If you look closely at Luke Roessler, who’s fantastic and adorable as Henry, he very much grew up in the course of one episode.”
In other words, embrace the chaos. As Applegate previously revealed, her MS diagnosis led to a series of swift phone calls, and then “[I]t was about kind of learning — all of us learning — what I was going to be capable of doing.” After watching the entire third season, I can confirm that the entire cast and crew definitely pulled off a satisfying finale and a series of “great achievements.”
Dead To Me returns on November 17.
(Via Hollywood Reporter)