Emmy winner and Schitt’s Creek star, Dan Levy, has been preparing for his debut directorial role through his new Netflix film, Good Grief, which includes an incredibly talented cast, as revealed yesterday, October 17.

Levy is writing, directing and starring in the film alongside:

• Ruth Negga (Loving, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Passing)
• Luke Evans (Beauty and the Beast, Dracula Untold, Fast & Furious 6, and High-Rise)
• Celia Imrie (Bridget Jones film series, Better Things, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Nanny McPhee)
  
• Arnaud Valois (BPM, Spring Blossom, My Best Part)
• David Bradley (Game of Thrones, Afterlife, Harry Potter, Hot Fuzz)
• Himesh Patel (Station Eleven, Yesterday, Tenet, and Don’t Look Up)
• Jamael Westman (Identicals, The Essex Serpent, West End’s Hamilton)

While we don’t know the specific details of these actors’ characters, just their names are enough to get audiences excited about the project’s release.

Dan Levy is making his directorial film debut with Good Grief, which he also wrote and will star in alongside Ruth Negga, Himesh Patel, Luke Evans, Celia Imrie, Arnaud Valois, David Bradley and Jamael Westman for Netflix. pic.twitter.com/lvvMAK13Lp

— Netflix (@netflix) October 17, 2022

The film follows protagonist, Marc Dreyfus, played by Levy himself, who tries to avoid dealing with the loss of his mother. After his husband dies unexpectedly, Marc is forced to confront his grief from both of these losses, and he embarks on a Parisian weekend of self-discovery with his two friends.

Dan Levy has said that working on the bittersweet rom-com has helped him work through his own grief. He previously described the film as a love story about friendship and went on to say:

“I love genre and I’m a film student. I love the idea of seeing what I could do with a genre and in this case, I thought, “What would my idea of a rom-com be?” It ended up having more to do with friendships in your 30s than actual romantic relationships. What would a love story look like if it was really about a group of friends in their mid-30s? The clarity that comes with age and the time you’ve spent with these people.”

“Sometimes we have people in our lives, decades-long friendships, but we know very little about them because the closeness and the intimacy of those relationships is so comfortable that we don’t ask the big questions or investigate them in the way that someone that you meet for the first time might feel inclined to. There’s romance in the movie, obviously, but really, it’s a love story about friendship.”

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Good Grief will be the first project under his production company, Not A Real Production Company. Netflix has not announced a release date for the film yet, but there are plenty of other projects Dan Levy is working on right now, including his role in Season Four of Sex Education.