We’re now five episodes deep in season two of Big Little Lies, and the lies are finally clawing their way to the surface. But you know what didn’t claw its way to the surface? The infamous ice cream cone scene, which was cut from last night’s episode.
Remember last year when photos of Reese Witherspoon launching an ice cream at Meryl Streep’s back tore through the Internet? Who wouldn’t? I mean, when an Academy Award-winning actor throws dessert at another Academy Award-winning actor, the world tunes in. In fact, I shouldn’t be asking if you remember those photos. I should be asking: Where were you when photos of Reese Witherspoon throwing an ice cream cone at Meryl Streep hit the internet?
A masterpiece.
TheImageDirect.com
I was excited to see how it would all unfold on Big Little Lies—but unfortunately, the highly-anticipated scene aired during last night’s episode and ends with Madeline (Witherspoon) simply leering at Mary Louise (Streep) while clutching her cone with a vice-grip. Yes, reader: HBO actually cut the cone throw. And now I have nothing.
I have over a decade left on paying off my student loans. I have a credit card bill that’s skyrocketing with no end in sight. I can barely afford to keep my healthcare. I endured a 6.9 earthquake this weekend that made me slither into my Amazon Prime cart and slam the purchase button on a pair of emergency radios. I’m just about prepped and ready for the apocalypse. In other words, I have one thing that I look forward to every week: watching Academy-Award winning women glare at their onscreen husbands on Sunday nights. I’d hoped the ice cream cone throw could bolster my spirits for at least a month; now, this injustice has made me do a lot of thinking.
“In that moment you see her partner with their kid and it’s like, ‘Jesus, don’t do it,'” Montgomery says. “And she doesn’t, which I think is really redemptive. Because for Billy, he’s not really going out on that much of a limb. He’s a single guy, a young dude. He’s flirting with her—but for her, there’s so much more at stake.”
Buono says the scene wasn’t originally scripted that way, though. Karen was supposed to walk down the stairs and only see her husband, Ted, sleeping in his chair. But Buono felt that actually could have given her more reason to meet up with someone, so she asked co-creators Matt and Ross Duffer to include Holly in the scene. That way Karen would really have motivation to stay.
Netflix
“There are few things that really spark a strong feeling for me, but it was important,” Buono says of her decision to ask the Duffers to alter the scene. “I immediately said to them, you have to put Holly in there. If not, it might give her pause. But to see Ted with their daughter, it’s like, ‘That’s my family.'” Buono points out that Karen is the head of the household, and the Wheelers are a source of stability in Hawkins. “People have family meals there. It’s safe, it’s together, and she realizes she can’t do this to her family. She realizes it’s not about her. She’s the grownup, and she has to make the grownup decision for her and Billy.”
However, Buono says she would have liked a few more flirtatious scenes with Karen and Billy. “That flirtation would have been fun to do,” she says. “Maybe a scene in a diner…you know, not straight into a hotel room. Like, ‘Let’s have a cheeseburger and flirt a little bit more!’ Just a little more courting.”
That said, Buono says she still see Karen turning Billy down in the end. “It’s a different show if it goes in that direction of Karen having an affair, as fun as it would have been to explore.”
And while it seems Karen and Billy’s storyline has ended—although, it’s not called Stranger Things for nothing—Buono hopes her character will get a chance to evolve in season four. “I always thought Karen was someone who would have gone to law school and be a public defender to give people a voice. Or, after everything that happens in Hawkins—because people are moving away and real estate has gone down—she becomes a realtor. Like, ‘I know things seem a little unstable here, but now’s a great time to buy!'”
Jessica Radloff is the West Coast editor at Glamour. Follow her on Twitter @JRadloff and on Instagram @jessicaradloff14.
This post contains spoilers for the final season of Game of Thrones. Consider yourself warned.
Game of Thrones has been over for a month—we’re doing Big Little Lies on Sundays now—but will it ever truly be over? That’s probably a no, and not just because a prequel is in the works. A show like Thrones lends itself to endless speculation, especially considering how unhappy many fans were with how showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss opted to close out the eighth and final season.
New details are still emerging about what could have been for some of our favorite inhabitants of Westeros. According to People, actress Lena Headey recently told the crowd at a German comic book convention about a deleted scene that showed her character, Cersei Lannister, having a miscarriage. “We shot a scene that never made it into season seven, which was where I lose the baby,” she said. “And it was a really traumatic, great moment for Cersei, and it never made it in.”
“I kind of loved doing that because I thought it would’ve served her differently,” she continued. “Of course, we’re not exactly sure what made the show’s creators scrap the scene, but we can’t say it isn’t interesting to at least think about how that moment may have changed things.”
You’ll remember that Cersei told her brother Jaime that she was carrying their child and had also convinced Euron Greyjoy that she was pregnant with his baby. Her other brother, Tyrion, tried to use the unborn baby as a motivation for Cersei to negotiate with him and Daenerys, to no avail. Fans were left to wonder what was really going on with Cersei. Was she ever really pregnant? Why wasn’t she showing more if time was passing?
Now we know that, at some point, the show’s creators had planned to offer an explanation. Also, we agree with Headey that we would have loved to see this sort of pivotal scene from Cersei, who was often underused in season eight. Headey recently told The Guardian that she has a “few of her own gripes” about the way Game of Thrones ended, in general, and that she wanted a better death for Cersei. “I will say I wanted a better death,” she said. “Obviously you dream of your death. You could go in any way on that show. So I was kind of gutted. But I just think they couldn’t have pleased everyone. No matter what they did, I think there was going to be some big comedown from the climb.”
There’s a moment from the new Elton John biopic, Rocketman, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s when Elton (Taron Egerton) comes out to his mother, Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard), via a phone-booth call just minutes before performing at Royal Albert Hall. Sheila’s response is less than enthusiastic: She tells her son—now a global pop icon—that she’s always known his sexuality, and he’s “choosing” a life of loneliness.
As a gay man myself, it’s a hard scene to watch. I was fortunate enough to have a positive coming-out experience, but I know all too well this isn’t the case for everyone. Realizing that even Elton John, someone who paved the way for many LGBTQ+ people, had a painful coming-out journey is a reminder that no one is safe from homophobia. Even now. My friends who have had similar conversations with their families are proof of that.
The weight of this moment wasn’t lost on Bryce Dallas Howard, who talked to several people about their coming-out stories to prepare. And when the scene finally wrapped, she was relieved. “It’s not fun, something like that,” she tells Glamour. “So we did it with just a small number of takes and got that pretty quickly.”
It’s a quick moment, sure, but a powerful one. Not only does it inform so much of what Elton does in the movie; it crystallizes Sheila’s character: This is a woman whose profound unhappiness with her own life prevented her from being the mom she needed to be. That’s Rocketman‘s interpretation, at least. I’m sure the real-life Sheila, who passed away in December 2017, had her own viewpoint on things.
Bryce Dallas Howard as Elton John’s mother, Sheila, in Rocketman
“I feel like sometimes in life—and certainly in movies—we look at people in a very binary way; they’re either good or they’re bad,” Howard says. “And the truth is everyone is normally a little bit of both. And in the case of Sheila, she’s someone who had a very big personality, was extremely charismatic, witty, funny—but then also was a very unhappy person. As a result, she was able to inflict a lot of damage.”
How Sheila reacts to Elton’s sexuality is, hypothetically, enough for viewers to write her off as “bad,” but Howard’s performance ensures this doesn’t happen. “It was important to not just go pure villain and yet also paint a picture of ‘Yeah, this was not a happy childhood.'”
When we meet Sheila, she’s lively and energetic but harboring a lot of frustration. She’s unsatisfied with her marriage to Elton’s father, Stanley, who ultimately leaves her to start another family. Sheila eventually remarries too, but the movie paints her as never fully recovering from Stanley’s indiscretions. That’s why I think she responds to Elton’s coming-out in the way she does: If she doesn’t have a positive outlook on her own relationships, it’d be hard to have one on Elton’s.
This dynamic illuminated something important to Howard about her actual life as a mom. (She has two children with her husband, actor Seth Gabel.) “It’s a healthy reminder, as a parent, to see what the impact can be on a child when the parent is perpetually unhappy and they’re not managing their own mental well-being,” she says. “How that can snowball into a dynamic that is very difficult to extricate yourself from. Kind words—they go far within a family.”
Tom Bennett plays Sheila’s second husband in Rocketman, while Gemma Jones plays her mother.
Kind words and an open mind. Two things Sheila didn’t have with Elton—in this fictionalized version of his life, at least—but Howard has with her kids. “My children get revealed to me over time,” she says. “Just because I’ve happened to know them since they were born doesn’t mean I know everything about them. Make space for that, as well, to be surprised—to be taken on an adventure by your child. To go places and in directions and explore things you never thought you would. But it’s because this person is in your life, and you’re connected to them forever.”
One of Fleabag‘s many charms is how deftly it nails the mortifying, yet strangely beautiful experience that is being a woman in the world. The credit goes to creator, writer, and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge: the Amazon Prime series is based on her one-woman play about a twentysomething (also named Fleabag) who deals with past trauma through sex, alcohol, and banter. Even the smallest comedic moments—feeling embarrassed about buying extra-large tampons, for example—make you think, “Damn, she gets it.”
The weightier topics, like sexual harassment to grief, are heartbreaking and raw without ever losing sight of the show’s comedic roots. Season two, now streaming, drops one of these scenes right in the middle of episode one. It made stomach drop so much I had pause and take a break before I could finish the episode. (Caution: Spoilers start here.)
It all starts with an awkward family dinner to celebrate the impending marriage of Fleabag’s father to her narcissistic stepmother. Fleabag is surprised when her sister, Claire (Sian Clifford), reveals that she and her toad of a husband have been trying for a baby. At one point in the meal, Claire quietly excuses herself and goes to the bathroom. Fleabag joins a few minutes later—where she discovers Claire has just had a miscarriage.
Claire brushes it off at first, insisting she’s fine and doesn’t need to go to a hospital. When Fleabag tries to enter the stall to help, though, she gets emotional. “No, just get your hands off my miscarriage,” she growls. Then anguish: “It’s mine. It’s mine.”
On any other show or movie, this story might have been treated as a Very Special Episode; on Fleabag, Claire cleans herself up and goes back to the dinner table like nothing happened.
While I have not experienced a miscarriage myself, I can recognize how rare it is to see it portrayed this way in pop culture. If a miscarriage is shown at all, it’s often set to sad acoustic music or otherwise overly dramatized. Not something that happens in five-star restaurant’s bathroom. But the truth is that this happens to so many women, anywhere and at any time. So why is it never shown?
“I feel like there’s so many things in the world that people don’t talk about, and a lot of them are women’s experiences. That’s the sad truth,” Waller-Bridge tells Glamour. “I think when it’s been depicted—from friends of mine who have experienced that—it hasn’t felt particularly real.”
Fleabag and Claire later on in season two.
Courtesy of Amazon Prime
Originally, Waller-Bridge says, she planned to write a new character who experiences a miscarriage into the show. As she went deeper into writing the season, though, she realized this was Claire’s story to tell. “It broke my heart when I was writing it,” she explains. “I think it’s the last thing you’d expect Claire to be up to, trying to get pregnant in the first place. It just showed such a deeper level to that character.”
After she finished writing the scene she wondered why it felt so familiar—and then realized a similar experience had happened to a friend and she had subconsciously put it into the show. “I called her and said, ‘Oh my God, I think I’ve taken a part of your life.’ But she was so thrilled that it would be depicted like that,” Waller-Bridge says. “Because the truth of it happening in the middle of a dinner…it’s a very female instinct to just pull yourself back up. Just get on with it. I thought that said so much about how women operate in the world.”
The latest episode of Game of Thrones ended (spoilers ahead) with Daenerys Targaryen dracarys-ing nearly everything and everyone in King’s Landing while the other characters watched in horror. Jon Snow, her lover/nephew, had one of the most pained reactions of all, leading many fans to think a grim confrontation between the two of them is coming. Now a scene from season one has resurfaced depicting an exchange between Jaime Lannister and Jon—and it bolsters the Jon versus Dany theory.
Vanity Fair reminds us that back in the early Game of Thrones days, Jaime and Jon stared each other down during a tense conversation in Winterfell. At the time, Jaime approached Jon mockingly and asked him if he’d ever used a sword on anyone. Then he derisively told him, “Let me thank you ahead of time for guarding us all from the perils beyond the wall—Wildlings and White Walkers and whatnot. We’re grateful to have good strong men like you protecting us.”
[embedded content]
Jon’s contempt for Jaime was written all over his face, and it was clear he felt nothing in common with the guy known for murdering the Mad King, a.k.a. Daenerys Targaryen’s father. But nevertheless they stood parallel to one another for a brief moment. That short connection may reflect how their paths are related now. Jon might finally understand where Jaime was coming from when he killed the Targaryen ruler. Meanwhile, Jaime’s sarcastic words about men like Jon protecting the realm might carry new weight in the next episode, when Jon will surely have to address Daenerys’ merciless turn.
Plus, there was also that time when Jaime confessed how the whole Mad King murder went down to Brienne. He talked about the Mad King’s obsession with fire and destruction in terms similar to Dany’s decision from last week.
[embedded content]
“Have you heard of wildfire? The Mad King was obsessed with it,” Lannister said. “He loved to watch people burn, the way their skin blackened and blistered and melted off their bones. He burned lords he didn’t like. He burned hands who disobeyed him. He burned anyone who was against him. Before long, half the country was against him. Aerys saw traitors everywhere. So he had his pyromancers place caches of wildfire all over the city. Beneath the Sept of Baelor and the slums of Flea Bottom. Under houses, stables, taverns. Even beneath the Red Keep itself.”
Of course, Jon could decide he loves Dany too much to go Kingslayer on her. Some fans think it might actually be Arya who exacts revenge on the Mother of Dragons. Either way, things don’t look too good for Khaleesi heading into the final moments of the show.
