Janney and Rannells Can't Stand Each Other in ‘Miss You, Love You'

In an entertainment landscape filled with franchises and special effects, sometimes it’s easy to forget just how powerful a great group of actors can be when they’re given a perfect script to work with. That’s the experience watching Oscar-winner Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells in the new HBO film Miss You, Love You, written and directed by Oscar-winner Jim Rash. Janney plays Diane, a grieving widow forced to share her husband’s funeral with a stranger: Jamie, played by Rannells, her estranged son’s personal assistant. Set over the course of just a few days, the two take out their frustrations in sometimes darkly comical ways, culminating in a way that makes both realize that despite their differences, they end up being exactly what each other needs to cope.

The film began, like so many of the best stories do, with something real. Rash’s father passed away from Parkinson’s about eight years ago, and at the funeral, his sister’s work obligations meant her assistant showed up in her place. “I didn’t know him, no one knew him,” Rash recalls to Newsweek‘s Parting Shot Podcast. “And so I just thought that lens is interesting to me. It’s when we’re at our most conflicting. We’re everything, all at once.” From that kernel grew a script that pulls from lived experience in small, precise ways. His father did fall once and get picked up by a neighbor who called him Prince Charming. “When things happen in life, you’re like, I need to use that,” Rash says. “Because I think that’s interesting.”

What he built from those ingredients is a film that feels, as Rash puts it, “lived in.” There’s no CGI, nothing exploding. It’s just two people in a house working through a mountain of grief, resentment and unspoken love. For Janney, the script’s pull was immediate. She had read an earlier version as a play years ago and passed, convinced it was too terrifying to take on. But when the screenplay arrived, something shifted. “I was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable,” she told Newsweek. “This would be a real amazing journey to go on, to do this role and go through everything she gets to go through.” Rannells had a simpler explanation for why he said yes: the role simply doesn’t exist for actors like him very often. “I don’t get offered parts like this,” he tells Newsweek. “They don’t really exist for me. So that Jim came to us and said, I want you to, I trust you with this material. That was huge for me.”

To prepare for a shoot that Janney notes was only 17 days, the two actors made a decision that set the entire production’s tone. They memorized the entire script before day one. “We decided we were gonna memorize the entire thing so we didn’t have to worry about that,” Janney explains. The payoff, Rannells says, was freedom. “We got to rehearse it like a play so that when we showed up on set, we weren’t panicked or white-knuckling what those lines were going to be. We could just trust that we knew it and we could just figure it out.”

Both Janney and Rannells have deep theater roots, and for two Tony-nominated actors who came up on stage, the film’s theatrical DNA was part of its appeal. Rannells describes the experience with a theater nerd’s particular joy. “Just getting to be on set and running lines like as a little theater nerd,” he says. “We were just in this house and we had one little holding room where we were together. And we just spent a lot of time doing that, rehearsing and figuring out how that was going to work. And it was really probably the most satisfying thing I’ve ever gotten to do.” Janney calls it one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of her career.

Diane arrives on screen with a ferocity that leaves the audience, and Jamie, no time to breathe. Rash knew exactly what he had in Janney, and the directing process became about exploring the full range of how that ferocity could land. “We can try different levels of Diane,” he says. “We can do a take that is like prickly and assertive. And then there’s one through a smile, which is sometimes more damaging.” The key to understanding Diane’s combustible energy, Rash explains, is a single text message: her son isn’t coming. And it's a text message he sent to someone who is a stranger to his mother. “She has so much power and agitation at this stranger who she has not met,” Rash says. “And so I feel like, in our lives when we meet somebody who might rub us the wrong way, and once we learn context or we learn something about them, it takes this release that you’re like, ah. I feel for them.”

That context, when it finally comes, is what makes the film work. Janney traces Diane’s transformation with precision. “She realizes that he actually still is the lovely, anxious, scared boy she saw trying to come out to her as a child and he’s still that way,” she says. “He [her son] has been damaged by the first marriage [between Diane and his father], and there are lots of unhealed wounds.” The character’s controlling nature, Janney notes, comes from a place of love that simply doesn’t know how to be flexible. “She wants her son to behave the way she wants him to behave and she wants that love to come at the time it needs to be there.”

On the other side of that dynamic is Jamie, a man who, at 47, is still catching up to a version of himself that circumstance kept on hold. Rannells describes the character as someone whose coming out, dating life and sense of self were all delayed because he was too busy taking care of his sick parents. “Everything gets delayed because of massive life events,” Rannells says. “So he, in this moment, really doesn’t know who he is or what he wants or how to be in a relationship.” Rash, who says Jamie is a lot of himself, connects the character’s stalled emotional life to something universal. “He’s also like many of us, putting our love towards someone who doesn’t reciprocate that, but yet we grab them and hold on for dear life.”

What the film does quietly and remarkably is treat Jamie’s queerness as one thread in a more complicated tapestry rather than the whole story. Rannells, who says he has played his share of coming-out scenes, finds that approach both refreshing and necessary. “It feels like the next sort of logical step is not talking about it all the time,” he says. “It’s a piece of him. It’s a part of him. Jamie’s sexuality is a piece of what makes him complicated, but it’s not the thing that makes him the most complicated.” Rash agrees, noting that he wanted to write a queer character whose struggles are human first. “It’s just a complicated story about two people who have a lot of issues to work through.”

The result is a dark comedy that earns both its darkness and its laughs without cheating on either. Rash, who knows something about balancing those tones after years of doing exactly that in films like Downhill and the Oscar-winning The Descendants, describes the formula simply. “In these movies, when you’re dealing with grief, it’s kind of how we operate when we are in a place of uncomfortable grief. We’re just waiting to literally exhale with some laughter.”

The dark comedy in Miss You, Love You doesn’t deflate the emotion. It breathes alongside it, which is exactly what grief, at its most honest, tends to do.

Miss You, Love You streams on HBO Max starting May 29.

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This story was originally published May 26, 2026 at 12:37 PM.