Nestled in the Massachusetts countryside, a cozy house that’s equal parts gorgeous and spooky was invaded by some of the entertainment industry’s most seasoned pros, including Edie Falco and Brian Cox — both playing just about as far from their usual casting as they can get — to film the horror comedy “The Parenting,” now on Max. The duo plays a married couple invited by their gay son to a weekend away in a rented house to meet his boyfriend’s parents. They soon find out that the house isn’t vacant after all, but rather haunted by an ancient demon looking for an earthbound host to occupy… and it finds an unsuspecting one in Cox.
This is quite a leap from Logan Roy, the role the classically trained Cox so brilliantly played on HBO’s “Succession.” In “The Parenting,” he gets to be downright silly — in a foul-mouthed, mischievous way. (In one scene, his possessed character struts naked into a room and orders everyone to “look at it!” while pointing to his nether regions.) Fans of Falco will also appreciate her take on light comedy — she goes so far as far as breaking into “the robot” dance to lighten the mood.
“These are laugh-out-loud people, even off camera,” Falco says of the cast, which also includes Lisa Kudrow, Parker Posey, Nik Dodani, Brandon Flynn and Dean Norris. “We had a ridiculously good time. That kind of thing where it’s late and you’re working long hours and you start getting giddy, and it’s outta your control at that point. There’s no coming back from laughing your head off. You’d be well beyond the point where you really want to stop. That happened a couple of times because it was such silliness, and we were all in for the game.”
The actors in “The Parenting” are Brian Cox, Vivian Bang, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Dean Norris, Brandon Flynn, Nik Dodani, and Edie Falco. They are arranged in a clockwise order starting from the left side of the image.
Falco’s Sharon is a retired psychologist (who also “did some modeling in the ‘80s”), who just cannot stop psychoanalyzing everyone around her. “She can’t help herself,” says Falco, who was thrilled with the chance to have a fun script like this come across her desk. “Every time I read the script, I’m like, ‘All right, I guess I’m doing this!’ I was very happy because it’s not normally the kind of thing I would get called for. I mean, actors hope for this, that casting people or whoever it is that ends up making these decisions will have a creative state of mind when they are looking to cast things. It was so out of my wheelhouse.”
“The Parenting” is what you’d categorize as a horror comedy, but it is also a relationship story with character arcs for all three couples. “It’s all in the writing,” Falco says. “It could have started and ended in the same way in so far as their relationships were concerned. But they all traveled some distance in the face of this chaos they were forced to deal with, as would happen in a situation like this. Ridiculous as it is, people kind of find out who you really are when you are up against some weird stuff.”
Edie Falco in “The Parenting”
For example, there is one crazy scene in which Cox’s character grabs Falco, during which she got to experience something that she has never done in her almost 40-year career — using a harness and a lift. It wasn’t a stunt double; it was all Falco. “I got a chance to do some of that fun stuff too. I was like, holy crap! I’m in the midst of doing it, and I’m like, ‘Wait a second, nobody’s gonna buy this because it looks sort of ridiculous’ because we’re looking under the hood, as it were. But when they put the thing together, you’ve got artisans on every level of these projects. It was very impressive.”
It was a fun ride for Falco, and it is for the audience too. “It’s silly and you might actually jump out of your seat a bit, you know?” she says. “There’s a lot of moments that I myself was surprised are jarring. We really had a tremendously good time making it. And we hope that reads.”
