HBO’s original film “Miss You, Love You” will debut at 8 p.m. May 29 on HBO Max, bringing Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells together in a dark comedy about grief, family and the things people hide from one another.
Janney plays Diane Patterson, a widow who has to plan her husband’s funeral with a total stranger. Rannells plays Jamie Simms, the estranged son’s assistant, in a story that turns an ordinary family ritual into something far more uneasy and personal.
Jim Rash wrote and directed the film after drawing the basic idea from his father’s funeral over eight years ago. Rash said his father had Parkinson’s, and that his sister arrived with her assistant, a man nobody at the service knew. From that detail, he said, he began building the character of Diane and the world around her.
Francesca Orsi described the film as a masterful navigation through grief, family and buried trauma with comedic lightness. That tone is central to the project, which Rash said was shaped not only by that funeral but also by little things from his own life. The result is a film that moves between sorrow and humor without trying to flatten either one.
Janney said she had never been offered a role of this size and scope. The two-time Tony nominee and winner of seven Primetime Emmy Awards said Diane’s journey is quite extraordinary, calling the role intimidating and exciting. She said she liked doing it with Andrew Rannells, and praised Rash’s writing as so precise that there was “not any fat in there anywhere.”
She said Diane is built on resentment and anger underneath, and that getting to explore those feelings opposite a “perfect stranger” was heaven. Rannells said the part was one of the most complicated he has played across stage, screen and television, and that he knew it would be a very unique challenge. When Rash named Janney, Rannells said, his response was simple: “Well, yeah. Well, yes.”
Rash and Rannells first connected in a dance class, a small detail that now sits behind a film that spent an entire month in script memorization before cameras rolled. The production then shot in Albuquerque, giving the project a long runway before it reached the screen.
Janney’s casting carries its own weight. From 1999 to 2006, she was a fixture on “The West Wing,” and in 2012 Rash earned a Critics’ Choice Television Award nomination for “Community.” In “Miss You, Love You,” their paths meet in a story built on awkward intimacy, grief and the strain of family ties, with a cast led by two performers comfortable carrying complicated material.
The film’s central question is whether a family can face its own fracture while arranging a funeral, and Rash’s answer appears to be yes, but only by letting the discomfort stay in the room. “Miss You, Love You” arrives May 29 with that unease intact, and with Janney and Rannells at the center of it.
