“When I watched Alice & Jack, I just fell in love with the show,” explained Susanne Simpson, executive producer of Masterpiece for PBS. The project was on Susanne’s radar before filming began, although it didn’t become clear to her that Alice & Jack was a natural fit for Masterpiece until the final edit was nearly locked ahead of the show’s debut last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival. “We try to find these very special programs so that the American audience has a chance to experience what other people have in the UK. This was produced with Channel 4 in the UK, and it's already shown there. But I find it to be a very special show. We're very lucky to get something with such amazing talent. I would say it's really among my favorite shows that we'll ever have on Masterpiece.”
(Rahoul Ghose/PBS)
Alice & Jack is a six-part series that follows the on-again/off-again love story of the titular characters over 15 years. “I feel heartened when I see characters who aren’t held to unattainable moral standards that I can actually identify with in a love story,” revealed star Andrea Riseborough during a TCA press conference. Andrea plays Alice, a character who feels so flawed that she routinely pushes the love of her life away. “Love is for everyone, and it looks like many different things. Sometimes it looks like estrangement. It can look very, very difficult. And love between two people who make lots of mess, and one of whom who’s gone through quite a lot of mess, these people still deserve to live out love, whether it looks conventional or not.”
Told in a nonlinear style, viewers will have to wait a bit to see Alice and Jack’s first date, which establishes the rocky road their love will take them on. “I don't think Alice is in any way what he was expecting,” Domhnall Gleeson shared about that life-changing moment for his character, Jack. While that first date might not have been one for the record books, what came after was. “When they kiss for the first time, there was a feeling of home there that he couldn't explain. Almost frightening in how close they were when actually it felt like he had been kept at a certain distance before that. And I think it was the clash of those two things, feeling so at home and then, obviously at various points during the series, he's worried that his house is on fire. You know, like it's a very, very tempestuous sort of a thing. But I think that feeling cannot be explained and only felt, and I think that's what happens. He suddenly just feels like he's home and he hasn't had a home in a very long time.”
For series creator and writer Victor Levin, who is based out of New York City, Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson were the actors he had in mind from the writing stage.“I always had it in my head that they would speak in their natural accents,” Victor explained, revealing that he reset the series in London after realizing each character would need too much backstory regarding how they got to the U.S. “I've made a great study of both of their bodies of work, and I love their voices. I think they have beautiful instruments, I love the way they listen to each other and to other actors. I love the way they make me feel. They're both really funny. I wanted this to be not just a drama, but also a comedy. I wanted to keep the drama funny and the comedy serious and try and be in that canal that’s a little bit of both. And so it was really about the two of them from the very, very beginning.”
While the love story of Alice & Jack is told out of order, viewers will eventually see the beginning, and the end, of their magnetic energy. The series premieres in the U.S. tonight at 10:00 pm on local PBS stations, part of Masterpiece.