“Living with your friends is a sacred and special moment that can never be forgotten.” So says actor Bel Powley, who spent most of his 20 years living with his best friend Lola, telling many “terrible stories” before buying a house with her boyfriend and deciding, “No. I could bear to say goodbye to Lola. ”“ So I took her with me.
This is exactly the right attitude for one of the protagonists of Everything I Know About Love, the long-awaited BBC One adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s memoirs of the same name. Alderton was already known as a chronicler of the experience of the female millennium, as a columnist for the Sunday Times and co-presenter of the success of the podcast High Low, when she published her story about coming of age in 2018. Warm , fun and for many women. the definition of #relatable, Everything I Know About Love was a publishing phenomenon, selling over 300,000 copies in the UK, mainly through word of mouth. Alderton’s long-hearted, sometimes hard-earned appetite for wisdom was such that a later edition was published with an additional chapter of “All I Know at 30.”
The BBC program is joined by Powley Emma Appleton (The Witcher), Marli Siu (Run) and newcomer Aliyah Odoffin. Only Powley and Siu had read All I Know About Love before auditioning for the show. It was the first book Siu read during the early 2020 confinement, and the celebration of Alderton’s friendship struck a chord in isolation: “I absolutely loved it, I emphasized a lot of things,” he says.
Besties … Bel Powley as Birdy and Emma Appleton as Maggie in Everything I Know About Love. Photography: Matthew Squire / BBC / Universal
Powley, on the other hand, was a “big fan” of Alderton’s writing and had already set out to play Farly, Alderton’s lifelong friend and main love experience. “I felt a real connection to this character just from reading the book,” he says. “I think Dolly is right about the young female experience of finding your place in the world: finding out who you are in terms of your career, your love life, your sexuality, your friends.”
For television, Dolly and Farly become Maggie (Appleton) and Birdy (Powley): beasts of childhood, dizzy from their first shared home in Camden with Nell (Siu) and Amara (Odoffin), even when a hipster with a trilby smiles. about them “who moved to Camden in 2012”: “What you’re looking for is gone.”
Alderton adapted his own life story for the screen, fine-tuning his themes — of friendship, growth, and the tensions that arise between the two — into a seven-part narrative. Like her memoirs, the show delights in the nostalgia of the recent past, with the girls choreographing dance routines at 5ive, Jessie J and Kylie Minogue, storming each other’s Topshop closets and enjoying what we now call “indie sleaze” at night. the pub.
For Powley, zooming in with her starring companions on a five-way call with the wild energy of a girls night out, the memories were painfully fresh. “All cultural references are very deep to me,” she says, sprinkled. “I like it. I found these dresses really exciting.”
“All MSN mentions,” Siu reads. “Didn’t that give you all the flashbacks?” Every face seems to grimace, including mine (dumped with a wilted rose emoji at 14).
Beyond the peplums and waist belts, the series resonates with its depiction of the roller coaster of early adulthood. “The reality of living with friends is that the ups and downs are mixed in one,” says Odoffin, 22, the youngest of four actors. “It’s really true in that sense.”
Four plays … (from left) Marli Siu, Emma Appleton, Bel Powley and Aliyah Odoffin in Everything I Know About Love. Photo: BBC / PA
Every woman has her own growing pains to deal with. Odoffin’s Amara, a social media superdetector with a long-standing passion for astrology, has abandoned her dream of becoming a professional dancer for a more stable career in property. worries that he resigned too soon.
“Feeling that you have to know exactly what your next step is, how you’re going to go about your life, that you have to have it all together; there are a lot of people I know who feel that way, so it was fun to explore. says Odoffin.
The other girls also strive to strike a balance between stability and opportunity. Anxious and hesitant Birdy trusts Maggie to get her out of her shell. Meanwhile, Nell, in a relationship with a man more concerned with the delivery of the burrito than with his pleasure, wonders what is being lost. “Nell’s relationship doesn’t seem like much fun,” says Siu. “But, you know, it’s very realistic.”
The pressure that each character feels to live their best lives is cleverly incorporated into a later episode through an alcohol ad at a bus stop urging them to “GO LOOKING FOR THE RIGHT TIME.” But for Maggie, an aspiring writer and a staunch romantic, and Alderton’s replacement, at least in her fondness for jackets and the joy of living, the stakes seem especially high.
“He definitely has the main character syndrome,” Appleton says. “She lives in her own movie, which I can understand. She wants romance and excitement, and she always dreams bigger … It’s like a runaway train.”
‘Like a runaway train’ … Emma Appleton a Everything I Know About Love. Photo: BBC / PA
This intensity is often trained in their friendships. For Maggie, Birdy is her trusted partner in crime, and her life together is a big pajama party with alcohol, until Birdy’s new boyfriend gets in the way. A dinner party where the two friends play to grow up with a beef stroganoff by Jamie Oliver captures the miserable fear of being left behind in life by the people you’ve relied on to overcome it.
“That dinner is where the cracks start to show,” Powley says. “They’re so scared to move the ship of that perfect friendship that they have to have that they don’t communicate with each other when it starts to go wrong.”
But what sets All I Know About Love apart from other treatments for millennial anxiety is that it gives the same weight to joy, especially drugs, alcohol, and (most notably in these abstinence times) cigarettes. .
Even dating apps, now a trope of an isolated and disgruntled generation, are not treated as a harbinger of the end of romance, but as a shortcut. A montage showing Amara and Maggie sliding and happily making their way through London is startling for the lack of moral instruction.
Odoffin says it reflects the adventures of many modern women: “The reality is that it can be dark too, but the truth for these girls was different.”
“It’s so liberating, this montage,” Appleton says. When I first read it in the script, it says, “I thought it had the potential to be quite complete or free, but I trusted Dolly and it turned out to be so light and fun … It’s a joy to see it, and also it was so much fun! ” (Odoffin adds, with an ironic emphasis, “Intimacy coordinators are GREAT.”) It’s a stark contrast to Lena Dunham’s Girls sex, I say, where even good sex was often gloomy.
Powley agrees. “Thinking of the girls, all the sex scenes are very heavy and dark, and this montage is very hilarious,” she says. “You’re like, ‘Yeah, go girls!’ It is explained from their point of view, enjoying them ”.
But while the pursuit of self-knowledge and satisfaction are themes of Everything I Know About Love, it is basically a show about friendship. It is more generous – and perhaps more realistic – than other representations of millennial experience. Both Girls and Industry did not represent a relationship so valued that it could not be thrown for something better, while in the work of Sally Rooney, even best friends behave in a cold way.
Sex and the City is an obvious inspiration, with Appleton speaking out on an occasional voiceover and her heroine an aspiring Carrie Bradshaw from blogs. (“I want to be amazing with the comments,” says Maggie, “and the wit.”)
But Everything I Know About Love shares more DNA with Derry Girls and Pen15 – affectionate shows that celebrate friendship as the main way younger generations get richer than previous generations. Birdy and Maggie are stuck to a point that some psychologists might call co-dependent, but more viewers might call friendship goals.
For example, the metaphorical “vault” – within which they seal their most embarrassing confessions (and some of the funniest lines of the show: Beatles fans and Australians, are preparing to be outraged) – is symbolic of his unconditional trust. “It’s like a free therapy session,” Odoffin says.
And friendship is more than a deep screen, says Powley. “The dream is to work with people you really like, who you like to hang out with; that’s what we have on this show.” She adds, “And that’s weird.” Odoffin agrees, without a doubt, “I definitely recommend having to dance in front of your co-workers the first day you meet. Do something for morale.”
Appleton notes that all four exchanged career tips while doing the show, supporting each other to grow as their characters do. “Aliyah has been to RADA and she’s had a workout I’ve never had, so I chose her brain, while I worked with cameras and on TV … I found it very collaborative.”
She hopes Everything I Know About Love will help the twenty-three to accept the uncertainty of those years: “It’s a messy time, and that’s a good thing: find out the mess.”
Now, however, at 30, Appleton and Powley feel out of the woods. Powley says that, starting a new decade, he had this cliché, “Oh, THIS is me!” “When you’re 20 you’re looking for a little, or definitely …