As the two bond over first times and room-temp pizza, we finally get a glimpse of how Fran and Annie — what Aidy Bryant tells Vulture is “the whole heartbeat of the show” — officially become friends. We’ve done this twice, and we can work through this. I would say that and Annie breaking up with Ryan are two of the things I hear the most about. Since you didn’t know going into season three that it was the end of the series, what did you feel like you wanted to include once you found out? Even, actually, to the very last scene that we ever do in the show together, that is also almost an entirely improvised version of what was written. We shot the pool party over two days, and it was just overwhelmingly emotional to see all these beautiful women comfortably dancing, swimming, and hanging out together. I was just studying her face because she’s barely moving her face at all, but you feel it so deeply. Now that there’s been space between it, do you still feel that impact?Aidy Bryant: I definitely still do. Photo: Courtesy of Hulu
There’s a moment in Shrill’s final season between Fran and Annie (played by Lolly Adefope and Aidy Bryant, respectively), as the series flashes back to their early college days. Photo: Courtesy of Hulu/Allyson Riggs / Hulu
How often did you find yourselves improvising on Shrill? Long portions of one of us holding up an iPhone, so the music was playing. Would you ever put your friendship to the test and trust each other to cut your bangs?Lolly Adefope: I would trust you to cut my hair. I didn’t think I was going to see you straight away. I mean, it’s funny because we’re acting like we’re friends, especially the early days of the show, but I think pretty quickly Lolly and I were like, “Oh, we’re going to be real friends.” It was just so natural. Please tell me everything you remember from that day.Lolly Adefope: My greatest memory of that day is when we do the slow-motion walk. I think for me that was what Shrill was in a lot of ways. The very first episode of Shrill ends on a similar note, too, so it feels like a full-circle moment. When we were making Shrill, in the early, early casting days, they flew Lolly out for a screen test, and that was the first time we met, on the Warner Bros. Lolly Adefope: It was love at first sight. I spoke to Aidy and the writers to draw on some of my own experiences in order to infuse that into moments with Fran and her mom, which obviously are very emotionally charged. Their lead singer, Beth Ditto, is a fat, queer woman, and she was in a little tiny outfit dancing and moving her body so unapologetically, and here was this crowd of people cheering for her and obsessed with her powerful voice. Is that the true mark of a good friendship? By now, we thought, We can do this. Lolly Adefope: Wow. lot. Even though we couldn’t go to the dinners or bars on the weekend like we normally would, it still felt like we got our time in. Photo: Courtesy of Hulu/Hulu
One of Fran’s big moments is “Wedding” in season two, which digs into more of Fran’s story through her and her family. I’d also say the Edinburgh Festival, doing solo shows there in front of loads of people every night, to just do whatever I want and thinking, Yeah, I want to be a comedian. I certainly felt so privileged to be on set and be working, when me and most people had been in our houses for months and months at a time. I do feel like that was where we got to bond together. It was totally thrilling. Aidy Bryant: Yeah, the show ends in a really simple way, which is just two friends who really understand each other on a bench. And while Annie and Fran’s friendship grew, so did Bryant and Adefope’s. We usually shoot it once or twice pretty tightly scripted, but then almost always, especially for scenes with Lolly and I, it was like, okay, let’s loosen it up. I’m ready and willing. That was a scene where it was going okay, and then the director was kind of like, “Why don’t you guys do an improvised take where you don’t say the words that are in the script, but say like the spirit of them.” That entire scene is almost entirely improv from both of us, and that’s what we ended up using in the cut, because it just felt so much more real. It felt really thrilling to hug a friend after all this time. Why did I think I could do that? She makes it real easy to cry when she cries. Fran knows Annie better than she knows herself sometimes, and vice versa. Aidy Bryant: Yeah, they absolutely blasted it so hard for us. Lolly Adefope: I think I got asked the other day if I thought that scene had changed television in any way, or if it had inspired other TV shows to create scenes from that gaze. Photo: Courtesy of Hulu
Moving on to season three, there’s this really hilarious moment when Annie, Fran, Ruthie, and Maureen go party at an empty bar. Aidy Bryant: I’ll also just say this: I love everyone in our cast, and I’ve gotten in such an easy rhythm with everybody, but I feel like for Lolly in particular, especially in these later seasons, it was always such a sigh of relief for me when Lolly came onto set. Lolly Adefope: Yeah, it makes the emotional scenes so much easier to do because I think there’s a lot of trust between us, and I’ve always felt very comfortable in those scenes because I know that Aidy brings out the best in me. [Laughs.] That makes it sound like it died, but you know what I mean. Aidy Bryant: Yeah, it really was. That was another one where we shot over two nights, and we were basically just dancing and singing and yelling together every time that the camera wasn’t rolling. I want to feel that confident and share myself in that way. Aidy Bryant: Romantic. That laid this foundation for most of our scenes where we use the script as a kind of blueprint. I kept thinking like, Oh man, we should like pace ourselves. Lolly Adefope: We would always work out a scene, get it how it is in the script, and then have fun with it. I remember we all did it, and we’re kind of like, Oh my gosh. She’s not just one of the funniest people, funniest writers, and has a writerly brain, but she can also carry those deeply emotional moments. The kinds of conversations that I would have with moms and aunties and that feeling of wanting to go down another path and wanting acceptance, that’s all universal. I kind of knew about Lolly, though. Was it through Shrill or before?Aidy Bryant: It was through Shrill. Aidy Bryant: I feel the same. But really, those days were really intense. Solomon [Georgio] who wrote the episode did a very good job of not making anything seem too on the nose. Was that always how you imagined they met from the beginning?Lolly Adefope: I think there’s moments in season one where we allude to their college friendship. There’s that scene where we’re talking about whether I should get an abortion or not, and we’re at the vintage market. Aidy Bryant: When we wrote and shot this season, we didn’t know it was going to be the final season, so it was more in editing that we were, you know, massaging the footage to get it to this final resting place. Lolly Adefope: We were bonded by the restrictions, but I missed going for dinners and going to the bars afterwards, though it didn’t feel like there was a huge gap missing from the experience. I tried to draw on my own Nigerian heritage as well. There’s one bit, in that college flashback, where Annie has a different best friend in the beginning and is a dweeb. Also, it was like 30 degrees outside and we were all scantily clothed. Eventually we settled on … What was the song? To me and really to all of us who write [on Shrill], the whole heartbeat of the show is Annie and Fran and their friendship, and I think both of their stories then branch off from that. And there’s something so fortifying about that, just knowing that you can process the hard stuff with someone who understands you. Aidy Bryant: We improvise a lot. I feel like weirdly I wouldn’t hesitate to do that. I think we hadn’t really seen that from Fran up until that point, so we wanted to make sure it felt as based in truth as possible. Let’s put it into our own words. There was a huge trust and love and support with the crew as well. We’re going to be exhausted. Did filming during the pandemic feel like summer camp on steroids? In a weird way, it just naturally happened that the show ends with them. If it had been [season] one, though, it would have been a lot harder to form that bond. Lolly Adefope: I was waiting, holding my script notes, and then Aidy came out, and we both gasped. Aidy Bryant: No, I mean, here’s a little new feedback: I came out to say hi to you. Aidy Bryant: It was Britney Spears’s “Gimme More.” The one that’s like, “It’s Britney, bitch!”
Lolly Adefope: I don’t know how they managed to set up huge speakers. Minor spoilers for the final season of Shrill lie ahead. They [have this] next-level connection. It was like, “Oh, this is someone who really views a lot of the world in the same way that I do.” And that feels so refreshing or just easy, and really worth the extra effort, even though we’re like, oceans apart. I haven’t seen much about the first time you guys met. I want to sometimes talk about race and sometimes not talk about race, but mainly just do silly voices and pretend to be like strange people, and having people be like, “That’s fine, we accept that.” I think that’s maybe not so much as completely authentic, but definitely the most satisfied I’ve been with myself, I think, in terms of just doing whatever I want. [Laughs.] There’s like one scene where I can’t remember the character’s name, but Annie’s friend does something with her hand that’s quite cool, and then Annie has to do it as well. “To me, and really to all of us who write [on Shrill], the whole heartbeat of the show is Annie and Fran and their friendship,” says Aidy Bryant. The two talking earnestly is something we’ve seen plenty of times on the Hulu series, but here, it’s new to them. I haven’t noticed it, maybe it takes longer than a few years for it to change the landscape of television, but it still feels significant that before or since, I haven’t really seen anything like it. There’s a scene where I talked to Ryan, laying down the law, and I say how amazing Annie is, how we first met at college and how welcoming she was to me coming from London. Aidy Bryant: [Laughs.] You know what’s weird is that I do feel like with Lolly, we sort of broke new ground, at least for me, and it was something I had never really done until the very first episode of the very first season. Things fall into place for us, and we can improvise together, or follow each other’s lead in a way where it just felt like it took so much less effort. Lolly Adefope: I’ve had hair from one ear to the other, like swept over to the other side. For me, that really was my pool party moment where I was like, Oh my God. Lolly Adefope: Yeah, I would trust you to pick a tattoo for me. I just always felt very in awe of Lolly in those moments where it’s like, this is such a complex performance and to be so good at both things is so remarkable. It feels like a very realistic ending to me, very grounded and not overly cartoonishly triumphant. People bring it up to me all the time. I don’t know if that stayed in. We should have music playing while we film this to help us do this walk,” and then like the four of us just sat around basically screaming suggestions for what the song would be. Photo: Allyson Riggs/Hulu
To that point, your show really captures the feeling of wanting to be wholly authentic; being fat or being a woman shouldn’t be all that defines you. There’s a really powerful moment between Fran and her mom that really gets me.Lolly Adefope: Yeah, Patrice Johnson is an incredible actress. Aidy Bryant: Oh, I mean, I had those in college that I cut myself, which is like, so violent. What was it like making that episode?Lolly Adefope: In a similar way to the pool party episode, it was a very emotional and real experience. We’re having these days together of being in swimsuits and being on camera together, and it is an intense experience. Love how the college flashback features Aidy in a straight bang. We had a mutual agent, so I had always been a fan. It felt like we were at this wedding and the dancing and party scenes felt very euphoric. And I mean, it killed me, like I cried forever. And instead, it was almost the opposite, where it was like, human Red Bull psychos pushing each other. Then all of us dancing in really long coats while it was raining. I want to have that kind of power. While they were setting up the cameras, we were like, “Should we have music? These girls are going to face more difficulties, and their relationship may evolve and change, but they always have each other. It’s not going to be hard. Lolly Adefope: It was the last time I got to do scenes with Patti [Harrison] and Jo [Firestone] as well. I know Lolly and I were both kind of overwhelmed by that. I really like how it ends on a quiet moment between you two. I don’t know that this is necessarily me in the entertainment industry, but when I was in college in Chicago, I went to see the Gossip perform. It was just like, I know we got it. Bryant and Adefope talked/gushed with us over their on- and offscreen friendship, Fran and Annie’s best moments, and of course, their characters’s heartfelt ending. Related
Shrill Doesn’t Need Closure
How Shrill Made Its Dream ‘Fat Babe Pool Party’ a Reality
Aidy Bryant Has Figured Out How to Get What She Wants
Tags: It’s the guiding force of this show. Aidy Bryant: Definitely. That was part of why filming an episode like a girls’ night out was total wish fulfillment. To that end, when was the first time you truly felt comfortable to be authentic, especially in the entertainment industry? I can’t remember what scene it was, but it was one of the first scenes that we shot of the season where something like Annie, Em, and Fran did a three-way group hug. Very glamorous. The two spoke with Vulture over Zoom, and even from behind a computer screen, separated by thousands of miles of ocean, their vibrant energy together and love for each other was anything but subtle. Looking back at past seasons, the Fat Babe Pool Party was a top Shrill moment from the minute it aired. Lolly Adefope: I feel like I had a similar thing with seeing Kanye West at Glastonbury. Aidy Bryant: It’s hard to say. I had really lopsided bangs in college that I’d love to never revisit. It’s very cute to see young Annie and young Fran. It was the most fun ever, and we’re all four friends on top of it. Were there any particularly memorable scenes that you guys just did off the cuff? I think you just came out of the casting room to go somewhere, and I was there and then we gasped. Annie is laughing as she tells Fran about how she just awkwardly had sex for the first time, to which Fran sincerely tells her that she just kissed a girl for the first time. Even though he’s a man, it’s one more situation of a person being completely themselves. For three seasons, their friendship weaved together and apart as they grew into themselves through romantic relationships, work, and family drama. Aidy Bryant: I would trust you to cut mine, too. It was a little creepy. It really blossomed into something much bigger than just that summer-camp kind of friendship. How do you think your characters’ friendship has grown as your personal friendship has evolved making this series?Aidy Bryant: What a nice question. I think it’s like the ribs scene where I’m eating ribs, and then there’s the bit where you’re coming down the stairs, and I had to improvise a song. Aidy Bryant: I was on set when they were filming those, and I was at the monitor with our director Shaka King, who just directed Judas and the Black Messiah, and he was just like, “Lolly is a perfect performer,” and it’s so true. We had hints of this college friendship, but it was so nice to dig deeper into it in that episode. Photo: Courtesy of Hulu
The seventh episode has flashback moments to when your characters first met. Then doing the show, it’s long days of filming, so yes, you’re spending time together, but I also think things like doing emotional scenes, you end up having emotional conversations, or needing to help each other get through the duration of shooting, or you miss loved ones who are back home, so you’re kind of bonded in an almost summer-camp way. I think that sometimes when topics are dealt like that on TV, it can feel a bit like preachy, and we’d steer clear of that. And I don’t think they look bad, but like, the version that I cut myself was really an act of defiance. Shrill, based on Lindy West’s memoir of the same name, may be presented as Annie’s story of finding authenticity in a world full of people who want to define her for themselves, but it’s Fran and Annie’s friendship that actually propels the show forward.