Broadway star Linda Lavin died in December at age 87 – and she planned how her death would play out onscreen for her posthumous role in “Mid-Century Modern.”
The Hulu show stars Lavin, Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, and Nathan Lee Graham. The latter three play gay best friends who move in with Sybil Schneiderman (Lavin), Lane’s character’s mother.
There were still three episodes left to film when Lavin died after suffering cardiopulmonary arrest, with lung cancer listed as the underlying cause.
“She was very clear with us about making sure that we wrote everything that was going on with her into the show,” series co-creator Max Mutchnick told Entertainment Weekly.
He added, “It gave us a freedom that we never thought we were going to have to use in the way that we wrote that final episode.”
Co-creator David Kohan said “it gave us a directive,” and explained that Lavin’s wishes were, “‘What happens to me should happen to the character.’”
In the ninth episode of the show, called “Here’s to you, Mrs. Schneiderman,” Lane’s character, Bunny, tells his friends and roommates Jerry (Bomer) and Arthur (Graham) that his mom died in the car while he was driving her to the hospital.
Along the way, he said that she told him to drive carefully and “don’t get a ticket.”
Bunny tells his friends that he rolled down the window to get her air, as she was having trouble breathing.
She told him, “If I die, I love you,” and he eventually realized she had grown quiet.
This is similar to Lavin’s experience with her husband, Steve Bakunas, as he drove her to the hospital, per EW.
A fixture of the New York stage for six decades, the Tony Award-winning actress was also known for the sitcom “Alice,” which ran from 1976 to 1985.
She earned a Tony nomination in Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” in 1969, and won a Tony in 1987 for Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound.”
“She was several women in one fragile body,” playwright Charles Busch, whose Broadway play “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” starred Lavin in 2000, told The Post.
“To be able to conjure forth such sharp wit, comic invention and intense emotion, she had to be a woman of great complexity.”
Lane told EW that when they filmed the onscreen scene about her character’s death in “Mid-Century Modern,” they were, “still kind of reeling just from hearing that she had died.”
“So we were still processing that and grieving that,” Lane explained, adding that they filmed the scene “a couple weeks” after her passing.
They were supposed to film the eighth episode, but skipped ahead to film the ninth to address her death.
“It was so jarring,” Mutchnick said, “and we thought it would be the healthiest way for all of us to deal with it.”
