This interview contains spoilers for the Fleishman Is in Trouble finale, “The Liver.â€
The final episode of Fleishman Is in Trouble confirms something readers of the novel it’s based on already know: This story is not really about Toby, played by Jesse Eisenberg, or Rachel Fleishman, a.k.a. Claire Danes. It’s actually about Libby Epstein, who’s been narrating the entire saga of the Fleishmans’ divorce and Rachel’s disappearance in what the finale reveals is a book she’s writing.
Turns out Libby is in all kinds of trouble, too. She’s questioning her marriage, nostalgic for her youth, and not certain she’s made the right choices in life. As the story closes for Toby and Rachel, Libby herself has a lot of stuff to sort out, and Lizzy Caplan, the actress who plays her, understands that. As she puts it, narrating and speaking the dialogue written by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of the book and creator of this series, felt as if she was giving voice to her own thoughts. And there are a lot of thoughts — about aging, mental health, misogyny, and divorce — to process.
Taffy has said your character is partly based on her. Did you discuss that with her?Â
We did talk about it. Even though Libby was inspired by Taffy, it’s not completely Taffy, and I wasn’t being asked to do an impression of Taffy. It was a unique task: Libby narrates the show, but she’s narrating it from a position of “this has already happened.†She’s looking back, she’s reflecting on things.
There are a few moments where she seems to be commenting on things in real time, but for the most part, this is her take on things after the fact. This voice-over also plays over the scenes I had on-camera as Libby in the present day, which occurred before the voice-over. It confused me before we started shooting, and I didn’t know how to tackle it. Knowing how verbal, for lack of a better word, Libby was, there were some scenes in the early episodes where I asked Taffy to explain why Libby, who’s by far the most talkative character in this piece, would be chiming in every so often but not really a full participant in these scenes. She assured me it would not feel like that when you watched the show, partly because of the voice-over, and partly because of Libby’s arc. I trusted her and she was correct.
In the book, we don’t even know who the narrator is for a while, a device that’s hard to replicate in a TV show where we know your voice. As the narrator, were you trying to mask that you were Libby, or did you throw that concept out the window?
That’s one of the things you lose when you’re adapting something like this to the screen. Maybe Taffy had a moment of thinking that reveal was a big loss, but it never felt like it to me.
Did you think of your narrator in any way different from Libby the person?Â
In my mind, there was one way to skin that cat, and it’s so much to do with how I heard Taffy’s writing in my own head and how brilliant her dialogue is. A lot of this voice-over was lifted from the book. Her prose is so impressive, and for whatever reason, it felt like how I think.
I did a lot of the voice-over in my apartment alone in New York because they needed to have scratch tracks to play over the scenes when the other actors were there, for timing purposes. So much of that scratch track ended up being tonally exactly the same as the finished product in the show. I was doing that without a director, without any notes, just alone in a room in a total vacuum.
I loved those nights when I would just hole up for an hour and do three takes of every line. Occasionally I’d be asked to redo it or there’d be a major enough rewrite that I’d have to redo big chunks of it. Then there was a whole process of recording the final version in the actual sound booth. I’ve said these lines and these words so many times at this point; still, by the end, I was like, “Do you need me to read the audiobook? Because I’d very, very happily read the audiobook.†It was sad, the thought of never getting to say this stuff again.
You recently told Vanity Fair that you identify with Libby more than any other character you’ve played. Why is that?
I very much identify with her upbringing, where she comes from, the cultural tenants of her life. I was raised Jewish, but Los Angeles Jewish, which is kind of a similar thing to this big-city Jewish upbringing — a not particularly religious upbringing, far more cultural. I had a bat mitzvah. I went to Hebrew school. I went to Israel for two months. I’m friends with my Jewish-summer-camp friends. I’ve played Jewish characters before, but I don’t know if they were written by Jewish people. There was something so lived-in about Libby.
The flip side of it was that Libby is trapped in what she views as this humdrum suburban existence, and that is opposite to how I feel about my own life. Libby has been married a very long time. She got married young. She has two kids who are somewhat older. I had my first baby three-and-a-half months before we started shooting, so I was in the, Oh my God, this is the most spectacular, mind-blowing, amazing thing. I have a baby! We’re parents! None of it felt stale, stifling, suffocating. It was a very strange dichotomy.
I was really moved by the last two episodes of the series. Because I saw it in this post-COVID-ish environment, I could relate to Rachel having no sense of time. Then the issues your character’s dealing with: How do you find your way back to yourself?
There haven’t been many shows recently that explore these feelings. Claire’s character, Rachel, is objectively not okay. She is not doing well. And Libby’s character, on the surface, is kind of doing okay — she’s not having a full breakdown, her family is intact, all of her basic needs are met, her mental health is fine — yet both of these women bond with each other.
Postpartum stories still feel like something people don’t want to touch. It’s something so ugly. And I suppose people are probably afraid of it because anything that resembles a mother being anything other than completely besotted by her own children is viewed with a really, really harsh degree of judgment. Even now, I remember reading some spec script for a pilot that was an exploration of postpartum depression. It was a comedy, and it was hilarious and so true, and nobody wanted to look twice at it because it was some mother being selfish instead of putting everything aside to help her babies.
The number of people who text me, “God, Rachel Fleishman. What a bitch, how could she be such an asshole?â€Â It’s perfect. I’m like, Uh-huh, yeah, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to think of her. Just you wait. The harsh judgment about even the Fleishmans’ daughter is wild to me. “Oh, she’s such a bitch.†It’s crazy the way that Taffy has succeeded in Trojan-horsing these inherent, misogynistic things we all share.
When we first learn that Rachel had an encounter with the doctor in the delivery room, it comes across as this minor thing. Then you see it from her perspective: Oh, that was abuse.
If you go back and watch it, it’s so crazy that you could have had those thoughts about Rachel, even in the early episodes. All of the clues are there. You’re just completely ignoring them. The Libby side of it has less fireworks. These are not huge emergencies for her, and yet they feel like emergencies. Her body doesn’t know the difference. We can all relate to that. With the pandemic and with everything going on in the world, so many people are like, “But I don’t really have actual problems. These are first-world problems.â€
We love to sweep how we’re feeling under the rug. I don’t think that works for humans in the long run, and it leaves no space for this kind of material. Yeah, she’s probably not going to die from this, but why can’t we talk about it if these feelings are such a universal experience? And how isolating it is to be in a quote-unquote good life, a successful life, and still feel so unhappy.
The thing that gutted me the most is this idea of divorce. I’m 40 now. Some of my friends are starting to get divorced. It really is what she says in the show: You point at this one person for all your other failures. If you just get rid of your husband, then you get to be yourself again. It’s not true because what you really want is to be young again. And that is a gut punch. I hate an unsolvable problem, and it is fully that. This is why this show is important, I think: This is a universal feeling, and it does suck, but doesn’t it make you feel slightly less alone that other people also think this sucks?
I want to ask you about Libby’s confrontation of Toby. She says, “Hey, I found your wife, and she’s had a nervous breakdown.†And he’s like, “That’s not my problem.†How did you decide to play that?Â
Libby’s so caught up in the adventure; she has this new chapter of this story that has completely consumed her all summer, and she races to tell him. In that moment, Libby thinks he’s going to be as scared as she was when she heard all of this and rush to help Rachel. And he doesn’t. There’s a real heartbreak in that for Libby. She’s really seeing the limitations of her friend. It forces her to reexamine her allegiances. This guy that she loves, who is one of her best friends in the world, is actually kind of a dick.
It’s interesting because I felt that more reading the book than watching the show. Toby’s definitely a dick, but you also see him being a wonderful father to his children and great at his job. I wouldn’t describe him completely as an asshole.
No, I wouldn’t either. He’s very hurt as well. He’s going through his life with a set of promises that were bestowed upon him since birth — that if he was a good boy and became a doctor and did everything right, then everything would be perfect in his life. He’s mourning the loss of that promise.
Even in the arguments between Rachel and Toby, they both have salient points. The arguments feel so real. Both people feel right and want to feel vindicated by the other person. That’s another testament to the writing. It’s another Libby line: “There aren’t people who are all bad or all good.†But I do think the Toby character is allowed to throw his toys out of the pram over not getting what he wants in a way that’s not available to the female characters.
At the engagement party, Libby has this heart-to-heart with Toby and starts describing the book she wants to write. You both start crying. Was it in the script that it should get to that point, or did that just happen naturally?
It was in the script, but there was never pressure to get emotional when the script asked. It was all, You guys take this and do it how you want to do it. Even now, if I reread it, I’d start to cry. It’s a killer. She’s speaking these truths that feel bad and have no solution.
Another killer line that gets repeated in the finale is: “You are right now as young as you will ever be. And now. And now.†In that montage, there are some flashbacks, some of which are from the show. But there are some photos that look like they might have been your personal photos.
Yes, they are. I have this box of photos — oftentimes on shows or films, you’re asked to bring in some personal photos because they like to have them in the background of shots. I’ve dug through this box many times over the years; I have, I don’t know, 12 rolls of developed film from my trip to Israel when I was 16. I hadn’t really looked through those.
Every time I open up the box, it’s like this flood of nostalgia, some of it positive, some of it a bit gut-wrenching. They’re all very authentic Jewish-girl-getting-older shots. A lot of my friends who are my personal Toby and Seth are in those photos.
There was one that looks like it was taken in a photo booth with two guys, and I was wondering if that was your Toby and Seth.
My friends have been friends since we were little kids. We’ve all known each other our entire lives and are just as close as we were 30 years ago. I recognize how rare that is. It’s something I’m very grateful exists in my life
Let’s talk about the ending of the series. We see Rachel walk in the door exactly as Libby describes how she’s going to write it in the book. My interpretation was that this is what happens in Libby’s version of the story, but in real life, that would not have happened. What is your take on that?
I don’t really know. It’s so open-ended. It drove people crazy in the novel. They really wanted to know did they get back together. I don’t think it really matters. I think your take is right: It ends exactly how Libby describes it, and she has no idea; she says something like, “I don’t have the imagination for what happens next.†And it’s strange — it feels like none of my business if those two end up back together or not. Obviously Libby would be all up in both of their business if that did happen, but it doesn’t matter. Some of the bigger plot points in the show are not the things that necessarily resonate with me. They’re just things that happen so we could get these ideas out.
There’s a way to extend that thought, too: If that part is Libby imagining what happened, are other aspects of the story she’s narrating also not quite what happened?
It ends up being this weird puzzle box.
Even if you’re not sure whether she was telling the truth, the ambiguity emphasizes that everyone is an unreliable narrator of their own story. What really happened is not the point.
If the whole purpose of the show is that things happened, but it’s how these characters are interpreting it, digesting it, and how it’s holding up a mirror to their own experience — that’s what it’s all for. It’s less about this 100 percent airtight, accurate retelling of what went down.
At the end, we see Libby come home and apologize to her husband. She tells him she loves him. Do you think she can rebound and reinvest in her marriage?
She can no longer subjugate who she is as a writer in order to be this wife and mother. But that would be, in my estimation, the next chapters. If the book continued or the show continued, it would be literally figuring out how to make it work, knowing she really doesn’t want to leave her husband, she doesn’t want to break up her family, and she is essentially happy. So how does she make her day-to-day life more tolerable? This is something people really struggle with, even once they get that information and they know, “Okay, I need to make this change or I’m just going to feel like this again in two weeks or whatever.â€
That’s probably one of the hardest things to do. I don’t know how people work that out. I definitely have friends that ask themselves these questions and we talk about it. I don’t know if there is a solution.
Maybe this is my own bias as a writer, but I think the writing will help her.
And she could do the writing in her house. It’s perfect. She’ll be fine.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.