Taylor Schilling has a way of speaking that’s both meditative and offhandedly philosophical—like someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking about the hardest parts of being alive but still somehow manages to smile about it. Which makes her the perfect center of gravity in Dear Edward, Apple TV+’s beautiful, heartbreaking grief spiral of a series.
“I was really compelled by her journey through motherhood—to motherhood, and then out of motherhood,” Schilling says of Lacey, her character who takes in the lone survivor of a plane crash that also took the life of her sister. “It’s such an interesting place to start a show—someone who’s lost their own chance at having a child, and then suddenly finds herself with this child.” In other words: trauma on trauma on trauma.
Still, Schilling doesn’t treat the material like emotional quicksand. “Oddly enough, it wasn’t heavy,” she says. “Colin [O’Brien], who plays Edward, and I, we kind of treated it like a game. There’s something satisfying and even playful about being in the depths of those waters.”
That disconnect—the gulf between the crushing drama on screen and the levity between takes—is part of what keeps the show from tipping into pure misery porn. It’s not just about pain; it’s about living with pain, which is a much harder needle to thread.
“It’s devastating. But we keep going. And we’re okay. Both are true,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious contradiction in the world.
If Dear Edward is a meditation on the absurdity of survival, then music is its oxygen mask. Schilling lights up when the subject comes up. “Music’s really important to me. I find my way into a character a lot of times with the right soundtrack,” she says, even if she can’t quite remember exactly what was on rotation while filming. “I’m sure there was some Fleetwood Mac… probably some ‘Dreams’ happening,” she adds with a laugh.
It helps that the series is laced with a killer soundtrack—Neil Young, The Velvet Underground, you name it. The show’s final moments land on Lou Reed’s “Rock and Roll,” which somehow makes all the grief feel triumphant. Schilling’s own first concert was Bob Dylan, during his “white-face clown” phase. “It set the tone for my entire personhood,” she says.
When asked if everyone on the show’s orbit of tragedy ends up okay, Schilling doesn’t hesitate: “Everybody’s fine. That’s the tragedy and the comedy of it. We keep going. We also keep going well. Doesn’t make any sense—but alas, here we are.”
Taylor Schilling, existential optimist. Or maybe just a realist with a good playlist.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
