Julia Louis-Dreyfus on “Tuesday”, grief and death as a giant bird

For Julia Louis-Dreyfus, funerals can be a great place to laugh – “perhaps one of the best laughs you’ll ever have,” she says. “In dark times, a good laugh is almost like a drug. It’s encountering something it’s the opposite of, and that makes it all the more necessary.”

The ability to find humor and absurdity in the midst of deep pain is at the heart of Louis-Dreyfus’ latest film, the black comedyTuesday (in theaters now). Louis-Dreyfus plays Zora, a mother struggling to cope with the fate of her terminally ill daughter, the titular Tuesday (Lola Petticrew). Written and directed by Croatian filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusic, A24’s film uses a heavy dose of magical realism to bring levity and whimsy to the heavy subject matter: Death takes the form of a macaw – sometimes tiny, sometimes enormous – that visits people in their final moments on earth. But when the bird prepares to take the life of 15-year-old Tuesday, Zora makes a deal with it to buy her daughter some time.

The film is inspired by a friend of Oniunas-Pusic who died of a degenerative disease when Oniunas-Pusic was a teenager. Tuesday — who Oniunas-Pusic says suffers from neuroblastoma, although this is not explicitly mentioned in the film – is confined to a wheelchair and has to use a ventilator. Pusic says that in many ways writing this story helped her to process the great loss she suffered at a young age: “The selfish part of art or filmmaking is that its private function is often to help you process things and look at them from every possible angle, and then get over it, put that chapter of your life behind you and move on.”

When Oniunas-Pusic breathed life into Death, she knew she wanted a creature that could talk, dance and tell jokes. Humans seemed too mortal, she says, and dolls seemed too childlike. When she decided on a parrot, she studied 17th-century Flemish paintings and Ornithomimus dinosaurs to figure out how the film’s computer-generated bird should look – bright red plumage, soot and scars from the dirty work it does – and how it should move. Casting was the final step: actor Arinzé Kene voices Death in a gravelly, rasping baritone.

“One of the reasons I decided not to make him a puppet was because I wanted to avoid people thinking, ‘Oh, he’s a figment of Tuesday’s imagination’ or ‘He doesn’t exist,'” says Oniunas-Pusic.

In fact, highlighting this supernatural element only grounds the story. In Oniunas-Pusic’s imagination, Death is disturbed by the cacophony of voices calling on him to put the dying out of their misery. When the bird flies onto Tuesday’s porch, she instinctively makes a joke about penguins flying to the beach. The two become fast friends: She offers him a bath, they rock out to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” and pull around a vape pen. For Oniunas-Pusic, the mundanity of their connection is part of the problem: Yes, death is an inescapable reality, but we shouldn’t fear it or try to run from it; it’s neither positive nor negative; rather, it’s a driving force to live life to the fullest.

“It’s just a fact of life,” says Oniunas-Pusic. “If I had to say something about what the film says about life and death, I would say that life gets its meaning, its weight and its wonder from the fact that it has an expiration date.”

For Louis-Dreyfus’ Zora, however, death is a great threat. Before making a pact with the bird, Zora tries to destroy death in order to keep her daughter alive: she hits the bird with a schoolbook, sets it on fire, and then swallows its charred remains. As a mother of two grown children, Louis-Dreyfus says she wouldn’t have handled things any differently herself. Reflecting on the strength mothers can muster when their children are in danger – as in the stories of women who can pick up a car that has run over one of their children – she says she approached this scene with similar enthusiasm.

“It was very satisfying to set him on fire and beat him to death,” says Louis-Dreyfus. “I mean, just talking about it makes me very happy.”

Although Zora dances with death for the first time in the film, Louis-Dreyfus has faced it on several occasions and drew on those experiences as well. Her father, Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, died in 2016. The following year, she was diagnosed with stage II breast cancer and underwent six rounds of chemotherapy and a bilateral mastectomy.

“When you’re faced with a situation as critical as a cancer diagnosis, you certainly think about mortality in a way that you may not have before,” she says. “And so I’m very aware of how fleeting this beautiful life can be. So I incorporated that into the film.”

After being declared cancer-free in 2018 and VeepHer half-sister Emma died of a stroke while camping in the Sierra Nevada. Louis-Dreyfus says she learned over time that our relationship with a person doesn’t end when they die. It just takes on a new form.

“If we’re lucky enough to live long enough, we’re all going to experience some loss,” she says. “I’ve experienced a few in the last 10 years, more than I really considered (or) thought about, but it happened. So I’m familiar with grief and the anticipation of grief.”

For 28-year-old Petticrew, working with Louis-Dreyfus was a “pinch-me moment” – even if it wasn’t without its problems. Filming began in the summer of 2021, with masks and social distancing required, and Louis-Dreyfus had to quarantine in London for two weeks before arriving on set, making building the intimate mother-daughter bond a challenge. Ultimately, though, says Petticrew, the experience fostered “a great bond and admiration and love from both sides.”

The actor, who uses they/them pronouns, appreciates how kind the film is to all of its characters — especially Tuesday’s grief-stricken mother. “What’s really beautiful about it is the light it shines on motherhood and the fact that there’s no manual,” he says. “The love you have is so great that it’s actually quite blinding at times. That’s the really beautiful thing about this film: Nobody’s a bad person. Everyone’s just trying their best.”

Petticrew was born in Belfast, and his ideas about death come from Irish tradition and Catholic rituals – open-casket wakes and three-day vigils. Although the actor is now an atheist, he agrees with Oniunas-Pusic on the film’s core message, which he hopes will resonate with believers and non-believers alike: “If you focus too much on what’s going to happen to you, you forget to enjoy what’s happening to you.”