While Netflix’s “Grace and Frankie” prepares to wrap up its final series on April 29, one of its stars, actor and screenwriter June Diane Raphael, is not ready to say goodbye just yet. According to an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, during a hiatus on the show, she co-wrote the pilot for a potential spinoff series for her character, Brianna Hanson, after speaking with producers about her desire to say more with the role.
“It was actually around season four or five that I started thinking of these other stories for Brianna and really itching for more,” she explained. “I’m so happy with everything I got to do on ‘Grace and Frankie,’ but I just kept thinking that her story wouldn’t be done.”
Drawing attention to her character’s child-free status and the importance of such portrayals, she added, “There’s still a stigma around women who do not have kids and it brings up a lot for people.”
With the blessing of the show’s producers, Raphael and “Grace and Frankie” co-creator Howard Morris worked remotely on crafting a pilot script based on her idea, before developing a wider season narrative. They have pitched the series to Netflix, though there’s no word yet on whether it will be greenlit.
She makes a salient point about representation — or lack thereof — of female characters, and particularly older ones, without children. Even in 2022 it’s still relatively rare to see female characters in their 40s or older whose narratives are not informed in some way by their status as a mother. It’s why characters such as Eve (Sandra Oh) in the recently concluded “Killing Eve” can be so refreshing: the series, created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, notably had such a casual disinterest in ever even addressing parenthood, let alone exploring it. There’s certainly plenty of space — including in comedy — for telling more of these stories.
Explaining that she explored screenwriting earlier in her career because she saw it as the path to getting a start in the industry, Raphael also commented that while she enjoys working with a co-writer and “laughed all day long” while working with Morris, she finds writing solo “lonely” and “grueling.” Among her writing credits, she is best known for the screenplay for “Bride Wars.” She has also written a number of shorts, and co-wrote the feature “Ass Backwards,” in which she also starred. In front of the camera, she has also appeared in TV’s “New Girl,” and opposite Charlize Theron in feature “Long Shot.”
