Starz’s Three women follows characters on a crash course to radically change their lives. Lina (Betty Gilpin, SHINE) has been in a passionless marriage for a decade when she embarks on an affair that quickly turns devastating and transforms her life, while Sloane (DeWanda Wise, Jurassic World Dominion) enjoys her open, committed marriage to Richard (Blair Underwood) until two sexy new strangers threaten their aspiring love story. Meanwhile, Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy) faces an intense storm after accusing her married English teacher (Jason Ralph) of an inappropriate relationship.
Shailene Woodley (Big little lies) plays writer Gia Lombardi, who connects with the three women to tell their stories, while also dealing with her own pain. Showrunner Laura Eason adapted Lisa Taddeo’s novel of the same name, working closely with the original author to ensure the stories’ authenticity. Although changes inevitably had to be made, Three women is a narrative triumph and is now available to stream on Starz in its entirety.
TelaRant interviewed Laura Eason to analyze the events of Three women. The showrunner shared what she hopes women take away from it now that the finale is out, as well as how certain personal stories shaped the narrative. She also explained the importance of ensuring the sex scenes served a purpose in terms of storytelling.
Laura Eason hopes three women will help others be their authentic selves
“This will encourage them to be a little braver to share parts of themselves that they felt they needed to hide for various reasons.”
Screen Rant: What do you hope the women take away Three women?
Laura Eason: I think all of our characters make a really bold choice to put themselves at the center of their story and prioritize going after what they want and want. We meet all of our characters, all of our three women, at the end of the story – four women, in fact, all in a better place for having done this. Because they pursued what they wanted, even if it was difficult, even if it was challenging, even if there was pain along the way as well as pleasure, they end up in a better place.
I hope this message resonates with people. I also hope that people found things in the show that they really related to, that spoke to them, that made them feel less alone, and that also encouraged them to be a little braver in sharing parts of themselves. that they felt they needed. hide for various reasons. Because I think being able to be yourself more authentically takes you to a better place, and that’s one of the things I really hope the show tells people.
It was important to make the author a character of three women
“I really saw how strongly Lisa’s story had its own arc that resonated against the other women, and that it really had its own truth to tell.”
Screen Rant: In the book, the author is not a character, obviously. Can you talk about the decision to bring in the character Gia?
Laura Eason: It was a big conversation from the early days. I was hired to work with Lisa Taddeo as the creator, and I was the showrunner, and she had an idea from the beginning when she was going to write the pilot, and I came in to oversee the writing of the first episode, before we knew we were going to actually do the whole thing. . It was a notion that she could be a character, not just because of the connective tissue of it, but one of the questions that I asked, and that a lot of people ask, and that the show even references at the end, is why did these three women ? Of all the women you talk to, why these three? But also like these three were my big question. How were you able to speak to them in such a profound way?
When she started telling the story of how she wrote the book, which was an eight-year journey for her. I really saw how strongly Lisa’s story had its own arc that resonated against the other women, and that it really had its own truth to tell. And so it became clear early on that the construction of the character of Gia, which is loosely based on Lisa, and includes very real things that happened to her, and some other things that we’re doing just in the show, that really became the backbone of this season. And not just because it connected the three women, but also because there were really important details we wanted to share, including a really harrowing scene that happens in Episode Five when she suffers a miscarriage.
This was a very ubiquitous experience that Lisa and I said publicly, both Lisa and I experienced, but we never saw it portrayed in a very deep and real way. A true experiential way. And it’s, I think, one of the most difficult moments in the series, but very powerful. So it was these aspects and details that the character Gia was able to bring to the story that seemed really essential and important.
Afterwards there were great conversations. Okay, how are we telling our story? How does this fit in with the whole other story? When are we going to present it? When do we not present it? All of these things were just big conversations that Lisa and I, along with Tori Sampson, Chisa Hutchinson, two writers on staff, worked out in the writers’ room, but it was a big conversation. The structure of the show is very complex and complicated. It’s not very simple. We really tried this structurally. It is very ambitious structurally. So it took a while to figure out how it would all fit together.
Laura Eason on the importance of bringing her experience to the screen in Three Women
“How come I’m so many years old and have lived as a woman in the world, and I’m in this moment and I have no idea what’s happening to me?”
Screen Rant: Speaking about the portrayal of the miscarriage in episode 5, can you talk about the importance of getting the scene right?
Laura Eason: Well, I’ll speak for myself personally. I wasn’t prepared when this happened to me. I wasn’t with my husband because I was traveling. I didn’t know this would happen. I didn’t know it was so painful. I didn’t know about the bleeding. I didn’t know anything. It was the middle of the night and I was alone and I didn’t know what was happening, because every abortion scene I’ve ever seen has been like a sad moment of realization. Cut to the end and she’s like, sadly touching her stomach, looking at the rain through a window, and I’m like, what’s happening to my body?
And no one tells you, you’re basically a mini version of giving birth. This is what is happening to your body. You can have the DNC. What I did was natural, your body going through it. And so, for me, I thought, because I’m so many years old, and I’ve lived as a woman in the world, and I’m in this moment, and I have no idea what’s happening to me. So for me, it felt really important to show this experience as it really is.
And of course, with the caveat, everyone’s situation is unique and different. Women’s bodies are different. It’s going to be different for different people, but there’s one aspect that’s really scary, that’s really painful, that’s really, really sad. Being able to go through all of that and reflect on that experience, because I think a lot of women, you say that and you don’t have the ability to point to something that you didn’t go through and say, that’s a version that resonates for me of what that was like. experience. I’m hopeful that women can now say that this is more how it feels and what it’s like to live, rather than staring sadly out the window.
It’s an experience that you go through and that you live with, and that lives in your body forever, and to really show that in a very real way was really important to us, and honestly, to honor the experience, to honor that experience. that women go through so often, because I don’t know your experience, but when I started talking to my friends, especially my friends who already had kids, and I was like, oh, I had a miscarriage, two actually, but they were like, oh yeah, me too.
For people it can be really sad and painful, and I’ve been on a long fertility journey so it was devastating. It’s hard for people to talk about it, it’s a really difficult thing, and so for people to talk about it and be able to hold the experience together, I think is also really important. Which is another thing I think the series is doing, is offering joyful, sexy, surprising experiences, as well as really difficult, devastating things to overcome, but being able to point to them and say that you’re not alone in this experience.
You are not alone in these feelings. You are not alone in that feeling that you don’t even want to share because you feel embarrassed or sad or something. But we can keep it collective this way, making women feel less isolated. This is very important.
The three women’s intimate scenes were a great collaboration
“We are trying to show a huge variety of intimate experiences that contain very different emotional content.”
Screen Rant: Speaking of sexy, can you talk about the collaboration between you, the actors and the intimacy coordinator?
Laura Eason: It was a great collaboration. I will say that we had a wonderful intimacy coordinator. Her name is Claire Warden and she is a great leader in the field. She was the first intimacy coordinator on Broadway, so she’s on the cutting edge. She achieves this through acting and fight choreography, so she really brings a huge amount of artistic talent. It’s not just about safety, but also what is the story we’re trying to tell in this particular scene? And because we try to show a huge variety of intimate experiences that contain very different emotional content.
So one of the things we talk about a lot is not just, oh, this is a sex scene and let’s make it sexy. Okay, this is an intimate scene. This is a sex scene. But what is really happening? What is the emotional content? In truth? This is truly a moment of betrayal that is happening. So the temperature of the room feels different, because it’s clandestine and there are secrets going on. Or will this be seen, in retrospect, as the moment this woman recovers? And even though she’s having sex with this man, and he’s the object of her desire, she, in a way, is almost like having sex with herself because she’s rediscovering herself.
This emotional content is really different from the relationship between Maggie Wilkin and her teacher, which she will know was a trauma when she is older, but in the moment there was a very mixed sense of emotions, of feeling loved by him and attracted to him, but also without knowing on some level that this was not good for her and all the complexity of this relationship.
So they all carry really different emotions, and even between characters it changes. It’s like life. It’s not always the same. We can feel really different, not just from experience to experience, but even within an experience, you can be super interested in it, and then, for whatever reason, you’re taken away from it. We wanted to capture all of that subtlety, because, again, a lot of what we see is them getting close and kissing, and then you cut to them being under the sheets, and she lifts the sheet up like a top.
The show is about desire. So we, Lisa and I, were very committed to it being appropriately explicit to tell the truth of the story. So we get very detailed. We storyboarded the intimate scenes. The directors met with all the actors. We would do rehearsals outside of filming days, so the actors would really know what was going to happen. Everyone knew that if there was any moment on set where they felt uncomfortable, they didn’t want to do something, they wanted to talk, they needed to take a break. Claire was there for every minute of all those scenes to help support the actors, along with myself as showrunner and our directors, of course.
Claire curated the experience for each of the actors. Then one of the actors said: I want you right there. I want you very close to the camera. I want you to keep the robe on so you can be my first point of contact when we’re done. Others said: I’m great. I am really well. Why don’t you have Laura on the monitor? We also had actors, in terms of choreography, some said I want to know exactly each movement as if it were a dance. Others said: Hey, I know we need to get A, B, and C right, but we can freestyle a little in the middle, and as long as both actors were comfortable with it, we did it.
I think we took a lot of time and a lot of care so that when the actors arrived on set, they knew exactly what was going to happen within the parameters that they felt comfortable with, knowing that if for some reason that day, it wasn’t the right thing for them to do. them, we were all there to defend them and support them through this. It felt very safe, but also very creative, complete and detailed and explored in a very rich way.
I think it ended up, from what the actors told me, that it ended up creating an atmosphere where they felt really free to perform, and that those days on set, which in the past in some situations just weren’t fun or weren’t great, were really good days. on set. Days where that was really rewarding from a creative standpoint. I think this becomes evident when you watch the intimate scenes. I think you feel all of that when you watch it and the last thing I’ll say about it is that it’s very much from the woman’s point of view. Not just her vision, but what she’s seeing, which means there’s a lot of male objectification in male-female relationships, but we’re actually with her emotionally.
So the way the camera is and how it captures her expression, her sensibilities and by her I mean all of our women. We really work with our directors and our DPS, all women, I must say. All the directors, all the DPs, to really get into the emotional experience. I was watching another show recently, and it was really interesting to me, having been so focused on the way we do intimacy on Three Women, it’s a male-female scene, and the man is barely there. You don’t see him at all. It’s all her fault. And it all depends on her in this objectifying way, just in terms of what is being captured in the camera positioning.
We worked hard to get that feeling much more into the experience, so that you experience what our characters are experiencing rather than watching them experience it. The hope is that you feel like you are experiencing this with them.
Laura Eason hopes three women will open the public’s eyes to other experiences
“They feel like they can put themselves in their shoes and get to know someone better that way.”
Screen Rant: It always feels very authentic to the story being told.
Laura Eason: It’s always at the service of the story. And the characters are always different. Something happens in each intimate scene that transforms the character in some way that takes them to the next moment in their journey. But I would say one of the things that’s been really exciting and interesting to me is the different characters that people identify with more strongly, and how some lean towards one or the other, but even if they’re characters that someone doesn’t immediately becomes attached to them.
They can’t immediately find a really strong way in, they feel like they’re being able to put themselves in their shoes and get to know someone like that better, and that also feels really important to be able to open up people’s perspectives on, I haven’t had that experience. , or that woman isn’t exactly like me, but wow, I’m so happy to have been in those rooms and to have seen her experience, and I hope I have more empathy for someone who has gone through the journey that that particular woman went through.
We dare to make them full human beings with all their complexity. There are things like, I love the choice she made, but I don’t love the other one as much, but she still manages to be a full person in her experience. And that’s great. This is how we are as people. We will not, and we do not, condemn them for being human beings who sometimes make mistakes, who sometimes make the wrong choice, and who may also make a better choice next time.
We’re keeping all of that on the show. I think for women there can be a lot of self-criticism, there can be a lot of perfectionism. So to be able to say everything is okay, you become a person. You can make mistakes. You can make some bad choices and then make better ones and learn from that experience. I think it’s very important that women can also see and also make space for other women to do this too.
A lot of thought went into which characters would be in which episodes
“We would have those moments of convergence when all three were having a very similar experience that really resonated with each other in a way that was really helpful and enlightening.”
Screen Rant: How did you decide when an episode would focus on one character or multiple characters?
Laura Eason: Having done a lot of television with multiple stories that you weave together for an episode, oftentimes when you’re building these episodes, you’re building them around one event at the same time. which everyone goes. That’s why the wedding episodes are so popular, because everyone is there, which is fantastic for us. Or are you doing it thematically. One of our concerns was maintaining the complexity that I’m talking about with each of the individual characters who live in three different places and have three very different lives that start to make each episode a woven episode.
Which means that all three or four women’s stories together are built around one theme or one big idea. We were worried that this would start to influence their stories. To conform to the structure, as opposed to the structure that serves the stories. So we found these key moments throughout this season, which is the pilot episode, Episode Six, and the finale, where all the stories are very intertwined, and we wanted to do the early part of the season with what we call standalone episodes.
We would have those moments of convergence when all three of them were having a very similar experience that really resonated with each other in a way that was really helpful and enlightening, and we would still have these isolated episodes where we could just really dive deep into that character and just serve that story. and that tone and that mood and that place. It gets a little more confusing as the story progresses in the second half of the season, but in an organic way, because Gia is more present and is bringing the two together.
But that was really the reason we had both the woven episodes and these singular episodes, honestly, just because it felt like the best way to tell the story we wanted to tell and to honor the complexity of each one. of women.
More About Three Women (2024)
“Three Women” finds three women on an intensive course to radically change their lives. Lina (Betty Gilpin), a housewife in suburban Indiana, has been in a passionless marriage for a decade when she embarks on an affair that quickly becomes intense and transforms her life. Sloane (DeWanda Wise), a glamorous entrepreneur from the Northeast, is in an open, committed marriage to Richard (Blair Underwood), until two sexy new strangers threaten their aspiring love story.
Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy), a student in North Dakota, faces an intense storm after accusing her married English teacher (Jason Ralph) of an inappropriate relationship. Gia (Shailene Woodley), a writer grieving the loss of her family, convinces each of these three spectacular “ordinary” women to tell her their stories, and her relationship with them changes the course of her life forever.
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Three women is currently available to stream on Starz.