Amy Brenneman on Laurie’s Shocking Decision on Last Night’s ‘The Leftovers’

[SPOILERS for Sunday night’s episode of The Leftovers below.]

Sunday night’s episode of The Leftovers is going to go down as not just the best of its third and final season (so far; two episodes remain before the great flood or whatever is supposed to happen on the seventh anniversary of the Sudden Departure), but as one of the best of the entire series. Titled “Certified,” it pulls its main characters together now that they’ve all ended up in Australia for the home stretch. But undoubtedly, the hour belongs to Laurie Garvey (Amy Brenneman) and serves as a reckoning for all the searching and silent screaming she’s done over the course of the series. It’s a gorgeous final chapter for a character who’s been perhaps the most restless on a show defined by its restless characters, and in the final moments, Laurie decides to put it all away.

The episode begins with a flashback to the period after the Sudden Departure but before the first season began, when Laurie was still a practicing therapist. In a knockout sequence, set to a string quartet version of Metallica’s “Wherever I May Roam,” Laurie is unable to come up with anything to say to the mother of a departed infant, and afterwards, Laurie tries to swallow a bottle of pills and kill herself, before she changes her mind, relents, and then finds the nearest pair of white sweats so she can go pledge the Guilty Remnant (which is where we meet Laurie in season 1). It’s a scene that sets the tone for the rest of the episode and clarifies a lot about Laurie, a woman who is so used to having the answers and knowing more than everyone else. The Departure is the one boulder in the middle of the road she can’t get around. It’s why she and her husband, John, can’t give their fake psychic readings to Departure victims; they can’t figure out what these people want to hear yet.

In Australia, Laurie spends some time in a van with Nora and Matt, stalking the lesbian couple who appear to be in charge of the suicide-device that they say will send people to wherever the Departed went. After a series of wildly tense but amazingly acted scenes with Nora (the final one of which will leave you in tears), Laurie joins the rest of her party on Grace’s ranch, where they’re preparing to drown Kevin (Justin Theroux) and have him visit that great afterlife hotel once again. Laurie looks on disapprovingly, with some judgment, but she doesn’t stand in the way. She waits to speak to Kevin himself, and in the episode’s second knockout scene, the two former husband and wife have a final sweet, sad meeting of the minds.

In the episode’s final moments, in a callback to something Nora had said in the van earlier, Laurie goes out to the ocean to scuba dive. Nora had mentioned earlier that one could commit suicide that way without anyone ever finding out it was on purpose; just turn a dial the wrong way. Laurie fields a phone call from her kids back in Texas, fights back her own tears, and then descends out of frame, the perfectly devastating exit.

This week, we got to speak to Amy Brenneman on Laurie’s phenomenal swan song, how her character changed over the course of the seasons, and what The Leftovers says about the stories we tell ourselves.

Decider.com: After the events of season 2, and knowing you were going into the final season, do you recall the hopes for how Laurie’s final arc would go? Did you have any discussions with Damon Lindelof about where she was headed?

Amy Brenneman: It’s a different process in that way, because they conjure entirely new worlds and new kinds of scenes every season, so it’s almost like I hear where they’re going and then ask questions and graph after that. You know what I love in general in season 2 and season 3 is that I feel that Laurie —well maybe it’s true for all characters but with Laurie it’s particularly true — she starts in season 1 as the most “other” and most extreme that we see her and I feel like she’s taken more and more human form in both terms of why she did what she did that first season and just becoming more and more humane. I think her compassion is what really shines through at the end, which is a really neat thing because you would never think, [given] how she started season 1, that she has all this compassion and forgiveness. It’s pretty neat.

When you got the script for “Certified,” what were your initial thoughts?

You’re so grateful. To the writers, to the directors, to Damon. To have all that focus and detail on your character, it’s just really moving, on the simplest level. I always write the writers and go “Thank you.” And also anything that goes out of that writer’s room is so thought through and vetted. You can only imagine. I’m a lucky, lucky girl. So, then after that, you know that [opening] scene … Damon and I conjured that scene [set] three years ago: she’s in the middle of a therapy session, doing what she always did, and then she realizes that, as I said, I think the words become sand in her mouth. As a therapist, she would say comforting things to people, and they were the things that she’s always said, because they were events that she knew about. And that moment of “I don’t know what I’m talking about, because this has never happened,” — that that would lead to her not speaking made a lot of sense to me. I didn’t know if we’d ever see that scene; there’s a lot of scenes that we have in our back pocket in our history of the characters, and they may or may not make it to film, so that was really cool. It’s like “Ah, great! We get to go back in time.” It’s like a crochet stitch; you get to pick that up. And then the other big question was what [Damon’s] intention was for the very end, because that did take me by surprise, and when I first read it, it didn’t initially track. Which intrigued me — I’m not saying it’s illogical, but he kind of had to walk me through a little bit of what that moment was at the very end.

And did you play that final scuba diving scene as a finality? Or was there even an ambiguity in that, in this world where death may not be what we think?

Right, I pressed him on that. He said, “I think she intends to kill herself, and that’s all you need to know as an actor, because whatever happens after that final frame is another story.” But I think she goes in with that intention.

Is it hard to play a character where so much of the characterization is that she doesn’t always know how she feels? I feel like that’s probably true in a lot of characters on The Leftovers, but for you specifically, did you feel that?

What Damon’s always said, which I love, is that on the psychological framework the Sudden Departure amplified — yes, it was a game-changer in some ways but on a psychological level, one could argue — [but] it amplified who people were. It brought that to extremes. So Laurie, in the flashback in season 1 [“The Garveys at Their Best,” the episode where we see all the characters on the day leading up to the Sudden Departure], was a pretty Type A bossy kind of mama, in a way I really relate to. [laughs] She was the primary bread-winner, she organized all the stuff for school, and she worked. She was a very high-functioning person. And I think that was the seed of the demise of her marriage; that [Kevin] had become this little skulking boy, and she had sort of dis-empowered him. It happens in a long-term dynamic. So I think that those seeds are in there. Laurie thinks she knows what she feels and for season 2 — and a lot of season 2 was trying to get back with her daughter and stay connected to her son — but she’s always had schemes. Everybody has schemes. So her scheme is that she’s so smart about the psychological process that if people are projecting onto Tom, and he gives them a hug and they feel better, that’s what we’ll do. Or if people seem to need to have this psychic arena, we’ll work in that. But I do think she’s like a lot of people that want to help. You can judge them on it, but I think she really does get off on helping people release their pain. I think she really does. But along with that is the bossiness and “You should do it this way; next!” So I think that the wonderful surrender of her in “Certified” is that she acknowledges she doesn’t know what’s best for other people, and probably for herself as well.

There was a scene at the dinner, at the ranch, where Kevin Sr. calls Laurie the Doubting Thomas of the group. I thought that, that had a lot of resonance, because she’s, especially in this last arc, the only person among this group of people who are really believing in this magical thinking of what’s going to happen to Kevin — and even in the Nora scene with the suicide machine, Nora is thinking now on this magical plane — and Laurie is set on being the realist in the midst of that. But then she says she’s not the Thomas, she’s the Judas. Did you feel like that was an important distinction for her in this last?

Yeah. I think both are true. I don’t think Laurie would judge this mob — magical thinking, as you put it — hysteria of the group if it wasn’t going to potentially involve hurting/killing her ex husband who she knows is on a psychotic break. Basically, it’s like they’re taking advantage. Kevin Sr. and Matt in particular are taking advantage of a very fragile psyche for their own needs. I think that’s pretty effed up. It’s like, I have to speak to him — and the scene between the two of them it’s so beautiful — but in terms of Laurie, it’s like, “If you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it, but I don’t want these people to take advantage of you”, which is what I was feeling. Absolutely I am a Doubting Thomas, but the Judas thing is I betrayed the group. I think it’s more of I’m a Judas because I betrayed the group. But I’m pretty true blue with Kevin. I didn’t betray him. I wasn’t a Judas towards Kevin.

Was there a whiplash filming “Certified” directly after the sex-boat episode?

Yeah man, right? You never know what’s going to happen on this show. I love the sex boat. I love that episode. I love when you’re on location; we were already on location in Melbourne, and then we went this awesome town called Queenscliff, [where] it’s all wintry. The whole thing was so dreamy and magical. I love it. There’s always whiplash. I feel like this season, even more, I feel like [Damon] is gaining this way that he likes to work, which is each episode is a film. It’s a whole complete universe. In the first season, we were still in the mode of A story and B story, and we check in with this person. And by the second season, he was like, “Oh, fuck it. I’m just going to do what I want to do”.

Here’s Nora who’s doing her bravura thing, her I’m-a-tough-girl thing, but Laurie can see right through it. She’s like a child. Which is what’s so beautiful, in that scene on the bluff she finally let’s that little child through, and Laurie sees that.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the scene in the van with Laurie and Nora and Matt too, but specifically with Nora. What was it like filming those scenes with Carrie Coon, where you have these two characters with so much history built up between them, but we haven’t really seen them in all that many scenes together across the seasons? Did you two have any discussions about what the relationship between these people would be like, even though we haven’t really seen it?

We loved it. I loved it, I can’t speak for her. It’s like when she sat down with Regina [King, in the season 2 episode “Lens”]. Part of the joy of these entire separate universes, if you will, is what happens when they collide. I’m sure part of the writers room is like, “Oh my god! John Murphy and Laurie Garvey, how great is that?” You sort of put these elements together. I think that arguably, Nora and Laurie are these two female pillars around Kevin, and in the show in general. We didn’t talk that much about it. I think that what’s really awesome about that that moment in the characters’ lives is here’s Nora who’s doing her bravura thing, her I’m-a-tough-girl thing, but Laurie can see right through it. She’s like a child. Which is what’s so beautiful, in that scene on the bluff she finally let’s that little child through, and Laurie sees that. So it doesn’t get to me until … until later, until it does get to me. That’s what Nora does. She’s a provocateur. She’s going to poke until she hits something. They’re these two prize fighters that are sort of sussing each other out.

Speaking of the show in general, because it deals so beautifully in this kind of ambiguity, it ends up being about a lot of things to a lot of different people. I’ve heard some people say it’s a show about grief and loss, some have said it’s a show about depression, and some have said it’s a show about religion and faith. Because it’s such a personal thing, what is The Leftovers about to you?

The Leftovers is about what human beings do in the face of mystery and the systems that they construct and the stories they tell themselves to comfort themselves. I think that that beautiful speech, beautifully performed by Lindsay Duncan at the end of Scott Glenn’s episode, kind of sums it up. She thought this one thing and that fit into her spiritual structure, her religious structure, and then knowing that essentially her children died because of her religious beliefs. She says, “These are just stories that we tell ourselves”. But stories are important. I was a comparative religion major myself, I think myths are important. It’s not like, “Oh they’re silly”; they’re actually the fuel and the construct for us to understand things. Ultimately, and I think this is probably true — I’m not a lot in the final episode, but having read it — it is truly about the yearning for love and to be accepted and known. This episode, for Laurie, is about getting out of judgment, and people should do this, people should do that, and just sitting and listening. I said to Damon, “Laurie’s sitting with all these characters, and perhaps the world, and it’s like everybody’s on hospice, and she’s just sitting with them. That is a loving act”.

Where to stream The Leftovers