Thomas Haden Church spoke about his onscreen dynamics with Sarah Jessica Parker and his show that analyses divorce and its aftermath
Thomas Haden Church is not only an actor but a director, and writer too. After co-starring in the 1990s sitcom Wings, Church became known for his film roles, including his Academy Award-nominated performance in Sideways and his role as the Sandman in Spider-Man 3.
Divorce revolves around a woman who lives unhappily with her husband and children. She finds courage and decides to start her life afresh and considers divorcing her husband. Starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Thomas Haden Church, this show delves into the gritty tale of a disintegrating marriage with enough comic relief to keep it light-hearted.
It was decided that maybe six months has passed, and that Frances and he have somewhat, apologetically, resolved some of that ugliness of the last few minutes of the last season, when she stuck a knife in my back, financially, and then I retaliate the way that I do, shamefully. And so, the question was, how quickly do we really get to the cuttingIJ And everybody was in agreement: why not make the first five minutes of the new season just getting it doneIJ We thought; let’s just get the ugliness out of the way. It’s a much more hopeful tone. She is determined to be happy; Robert is determined to be happy. Neither one of them wants to wallow in what has defined them for the last year, or couple of years, or even five years. We just wanted to get past that.
As everyone who has ever had a child knows, they observe and report way more than you expect them to. They have a very complex understanding of emotions. There was no shock value to lila and Tom finding out — they already knew; and that’s what we decided. We wanted Tom to be a little more protective of Frances and for lila to swing over more on Robert’s side. I don’t have any real confrontations this season, but there are definitely some sketchy situations that happen with Tom. He becomes involved with a teenage girl, and it is just not political at all. It is shoved into my face, into where I live — I don’t even know her, and they have rounded the bases, in the vernacular.
He and Frances both have been out of that world for 25 years, maybe even 30 years. And while she had the affair with Julian, and I had my dalliance with the school-mom, but also the woman who I had the ‘emotional affair’ with — we have been out of it for so long. She is pushed into taking a shot at Tinder and that ends up hilariously disastrous for Frances. And for Robert, he looks up this mom, who he had a casual affair with. It has to be something with her that is more aggressive or way more liberal-minded than Robert is prepared for. We have never pinned down how old Robert and Frances are, but we have always said in his 50s, and it is a totally different world. You have no idea what the roles are, what diplomacy exists anymore. Some of the writers have Tinder, and we were fooling around with it, swiping through, and literally, women and men on Tinder will talk about all sorts.
The way that we have always built Robert’s back-story is that Robert worked on Wall Street, that he rose to a very comfortable sort of management level. They have a beautiful house in a very affluent area — Hastings, right on the Hudson — and we always figured that he earned well, and she did too, though maybe was not quite as successful as him.And then somebody was like, have you ever tried buying a property and doing investment properties and flippingIJ And so even when he was still working, he took a shot at a couple of houses and did very well and thought he was great at real estate. So he bails on Wall Street and goes all in and has several properties that are in play in terms of cash flow. And that’s where, after 2008, 2009; it was just this slow, not-very-well-hidden decline with Robert and Frances. But she works, and is understanding about it being the housing market, and she just goes along with it, until late last year, when she gets full disclosure, and it’s absolutely devastating. Because of his success 15 years ago, Robert does have a rather outsized ego, and that ego is what really kept all of these plates spinning. Then they start breaking, one by one, and that ego just keeps going and going, until it is finally revealed as being nothing but hot air. What worked for him before doesn’t work for him now. Robert’s decisions now can’t come from the fortitude of who he thinks he is or was. It really has to come from stripping down and starting over — and that’s what he does. He starts working for a construction company.
Yes, I think it’s my favorite episode — the one when I go back to see my dad in Ohio. That was written by Adam Resnick, who was our only returning writer/producer and he just really understood the voices of the character in a sort of preternatural way, in being involved in a show where everybody’s just trying to figure out who they are. He called me, about a month and a half before we started shooting, just to say hi, and he was like: “I have an idea. I pitched it to them and they like it, and…where do you think Robert might be fromIJ” That’s where it was spawned. That episode, I really like it because you also get a glimpse of who he and Frances used to be together.
Yeah. It wasn’t like, we’re here in Ohio together, and why not have a one night stand. I didn’t ever want that dynamics. And there were some lovely moments in that, like the next morning — they’re just sort of collecting themselves, and they just quietly leave the father’s apartment, and go back to their lives in New York.
It was sort of presented to me, story-wise, that this is Robert’s salvation. A woman. A new woman. And I was like, not so fast. I don’t know that he’s ready for that yet. But just because Robert’s not ready for it, doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.
(The show premieres today at 11 pm on Star World and Star World HD.)