Yahoo Lifestyle Stephanie Hsu and ‘Laid’ Producers Break Down Ruby’s Shocking Decision and Why She Had to ‘Do Something Unforgivable So Early On’
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers from Season 1 of “Laid,” now streaming on Peacock.
Are your former lovers dying in increasingly mysterious and confounding ways?
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For Ruby (Stephanie Hsu), the lead character on the new Peacock dark comedy “Laid,” life becomes messy when her exes start dying, one-by-one. Sometimes she witnesses it in the background of a news broadcast, or sometimes it’s right in front of her own eyes. And to make matters more confusing, they start dying in the exact order she slept with them.
It’s a concept that Hsu herself describes as “redonculous,” even though it’s based on a hit Australian show that ran for two seasons.
Co-showrunners and executive producers Nahnatchka Khan (“Fresh Off the Boat”) and Sally Bradford McKenna (“Will & Grace”) say they saw the potential to take the premise of the Australian version in different directions. Khan says she liked the idea that “this woman in the middle of it all has a love triangle brewing in the present while this past thing is happening,” while also dealing with the potential fallout that comes with betraying her female best friend.
Following her Oscar-nominated breakout in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Hsu once again portrays a character dealing with the consequences of a certain shift in the universe’s timeline. In “Laid,” Ruby’s life becomes disrupted while she’s still figuring her life trajectory, and wondering whether her “kissing in the rain” idea of true love will become reality.
In the firsy episode, Ruby pulls over to the side of the road to Zoom with her therapist, blares her music once it ends and doesn’t think about their conversation ever again. Khan describes Ruby as somebody who “wants to appear to be self aware and appear that she’s doing the work on herself. But she’s not really doing it.”
It’s that kind of self-contradiction that attracted Hsu to the “Laid” role. She tells Variety how there is solace found in “seeing characters who are inherently just a little bit flawed and trying to do the very best that they can, getting into all sorts of messes, but also trying to break through themselves. Maybe just artistically, those are the stories that feel like there’s a lot to chew on.”
Early in the episodes, Ruby and AJ’s boyfriend, Zack (Andre Hyland), unexpectedly connect at a wedding and have sex. Ruby and AJ’s friendship is what grounds the story as AJ keeps the investigation moving forward, desperately wanting to figure out the cause of all these deaths. Naturally, Ruby becomes riddled with guilt over what she did with her BFF’s boyfriend.
“Still to this day, I’m so disappointed in [Ruby],” Hsu says. “But I’m grateful that a lot of people who’ve watched it don’t hate her for it. They somehow know it’s bad but they can understand, given who she is. It’s a moment of bad judgement that she has to rectify throughout the season. I mean, I’ve never done anything like that. But I certainly know that people make mistakes when they’re impaired and lost.”
That plot point is also in the Australian version of the show. “I think it’s such a bold move to have a character do something so fucked up and unforgivable so early on in the series,” Bradford McKenna says. “This all ties into casting and knowing that we needed someone like Stephanie [Hsu] who you instantly like and root for.”
After realizing they wanted to carry over that plot point to their American adaptation, Khan explains that “our inclination was like, ‘How do we make it even messier?’ Then when Ruby has ‘Cyrano’ sex in the middle of the season, that was something where I was like, ‘I don’t know. Is that too far?’ And Sally was like, ‘I love it.’”
Speaking of the “Cyrano” sex that Khan is referring to, Ruby discovers a sex loophole after Richie (Michael Angarano), one of her most forgettable exes, doesn’t die. The death timeline mysteriously skips over him. In order to protect the life of Isaac (Tommy Martinez), who Ruby slowly falls in love with, she sleeps with an invincible Richie but projects Isaac’s face onto him.
“It’s such a crazy thing for Ruby to rationalize but you can see how she got there,” Khan says. “I like that she’s making questionable decisions throughout [the show]. That to me feels like, ‘Oh, this character is who she said she was.’ We didn’t try to sell her as bad and then made her good. She is who she is.”
By the finale, Ruby gets her classic rom-com moment with Isaac, cementing that — at least for now — she has found her idea of true love. All seems well as Ruby has supposedly put an end to the deaths. But a major cliffhanger leaves the question of what may come next.
As audiences learn halfway through the season when Ruby’s therapist goes off on her, Ruby’s mother died and her father abandoned her. At the very end of Season 1, Ruby’s estranged father appears at her doorstep, teasing that he knows why her former partners started dying off.
Khan explains how the writers played into the curse and hex theories as a “red herring” when it’s really related to “intergenerational trauma. It also opens up stories for us in season two. If season one was about her going back through her adulthood by revisiting her past, like her sexual partners, who she was back then and all that, season two is more formative.”
All eight episodes of “Laid” are currently streaming on Peacock. While a second season hasn’t officially been announced, the way season one ends certainly teases more.
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