Ali Sheedy knows how to play a woman on the verge—and in Single Drunk Female, she’s turned that into a season-long high-wire act. As Carol, the not-so-gently unraveling mother of Sofia Black-D’Elia’s Samantha, Sheedy gives a performance that’s equal parts barbed, broken, and painfully recognizable. “Carol basically has to get broken completely down in the season,” Sheedy tells me. “And then try to figure out how to heal that relationship with her kid somehow.”
The second season of Single Drunk Female doesn’t dwell in the “muscling through” part of sobriety. “This is actually about [Samantha] continuing to figure out how to live her life without alcohol,” Sheedy says. “Carol’s story is so complicated this season… she was always the problem, right? But now she’s not drinking, and there’s still chaos. So maybe—it’s Carol?”
There’s a bitter kind of comedy to watching Carol spiral, desperate to control her surroundings while alienating literally every single person in her life. “She has this tremendous need to control absolutely everything at all times or else it’s just gonna be chaos,” Sheedy says. “And in doing that, she does nothing but create chaos.” It’s a quietly devastating arc, one that forces Carol to look in the mirror and ask: who am I, without someone to fix?
That question gets even messier thanks to some haunting flashbacks that unpack Carol’s long-simmering grief. “When we go back to the Shiva scene, that scene is so much grief,” Sheedy says. “My husband has died. And Samantha is drunk through the entire Shiva… not only drunk, but really, really mean.” The resentment is buried deep. “I remember everything about it, and she remembers none of it.”
Even more complicated, the arrival of Molly Ringwald—yes, that Molly Ringwald—in a cameo that doubles as a generational wink. “I really wanted her to come on the show and play that part,” Sheedy says. “It was just… we had a wonderful time together.” She compares their connection to the way ex-presidents talk about being in a club. “There are four other people in the world that went through an experience that I went through that nobody else ever went through.”
That experience, of course, is the Brat Pack, a phrase Sheedy still can’t say without some psychic eye-roll. “Andrew [McCarthy] being Andrew,” she laughs, “he wanted to deconstruct it.” McCarthy is helming a documentary about the whole 80s teen phenom, and despite initially refusing, Sheedy eventually let him come over with just a camera to shoot her part. “I thought, if Emilio was doing it, I should probably be really nice and do it.”
Sheedy’s been a lot of things over the years—outsider icon, indie queen, recurring favorite on Psych—and now she’s also a teacher. “I just want them to know… so when they go to work, they don’t feel at the mercy of anything or anyone,” she says of her students. “There are things I can give them that I think I’m uniquely positioned to be able to give them.”
But as far as Single Drunk Female is concerned, Sheedy still gives as good as she ever has. “By the end of the season, Carol’s doing things differently by like an inch,” she says. “But that’s a lot for her.”
Sure is.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
