Paul Rust Breaks Down the Series Finale of 'Love'
Spoilers ahead for the series finale of Love.
Maybe you think Mickey and Gus are a terrible match - they fight a lot, they're wrestling with personal demons. Maybe you think they're just two damaged people trying to make love work, and they deserve happiness as much as anyone else. Whatever your opinion, Mickey and Gus get married in Love's series finale, and you probably have some complicated feelings. Here, Paul Rust, who stars as Gus and co-created the show with his wife, Lesley Arfin, and Judd Apatow, talks to Cosmopolitan.com about why the show ended the way it did, and whether there's really hope for Mickey and Gus.
An early premise of the show was that these were two people who would definitely break up. How did that evolve?
Before Lesley and I got involved, Judd had this notion of a show [where] an actual title card would come up and say, “By the end of this show, these two people will be broken up.” There exists a screenplay of Reservoir Dogs where the first page says that a card’s gonna come up and say, “By the end of this movie, all the characters will be dead,” or something like that. And I was like, Oh, these are two great minds, just in different fields. Tarantino’s is, “Hey, just so you know, this will end in a bloodbath,” and for Judd it’s like, “Just so you know, this’ll end in heartbreak.”
And then I think once we started working on season 1, we started thinking it doesn’t have to be that way, and what became exciting was not knowing how it was gonna end, and being able to be a little more organic with it, like, Hey, as we’re making these episodes, how are we feeling about the characters and the relationships and the experiences, and where do we want it to go?
How big of a debate was it in the writers’ room? Were there people who didn’t want them to end up together and people who did?
There was never a debate - everyone was in agreement we wanted to have an ending that felt complicated or felt like, if you watched it, one person could have one feeling and another person could have a different feeling. So if we were trying to figure anything out in the writers’ room, it was that: How do we make this have as many layers as we can squeeze in?
There are definitely firm camps of “they should be together” and “they shouldn’t be together,” and I say this in the least snotty way possible, but a lot of times it really is a Rorschach test of how they view relationships and themselves.
I was re-reading some recaps and reviews, and there are a lot of holier-than-thou people who act like they know exactly what it means to be in a 'healthy' relationship and, I don’t know - I like Mickey and Gus together.
Yeah, and the more somebody gets outraged about a choice that somebody made, I kinda go, “Uhhh... well... this seems like maybe this is about you.” It’s not really about these fictional characters who don’t exist in real life. To have such an opinion on what you think love and romance should be based on these fictional characters...Me and Lesley and Judd all like TV shows and movies where there are not really clear-cut villains. Usually the villain is yourself and how you keep getting in the way. It’s much easier to watch a show where you’re going like, “Hey, I’m nothing like... ” Or, “I’m like these people when they’re valiant and doing the right thing.” For some people, "Wait, how am I a fuck-up?" is just not a groove they like to rest in.
Gus and Mickey first say I love you after a fight, which feels intentional. Why not make it a more romantic moment?
In my mind, I wanted it to be the most romantic pinnacle of the series, when they said I love you, and have that be without tension. And then we had this idea of like, What if it came out of the end of a day where they were both sick and they were so depleted and no longer had the energy to keep up this wall, and it took this mental and physical exhaustion for them to finally get them to say it? And now I really prefer it to be that way, because it sucks to be sick and it sucks to struggle and be in tough places, but usually when you come out the other side of that, it does mean, “Hey, I’m connected more to you now.” There’s some romantic notion in there.
But it’s not staged in a typical rom-com way.
Right. It’s not like I was standing outside a restaurant holding a sign that said “I love you.”
They don’t get married until the very end of the final episode, and most of the finale is about everyone questioning their decision. Why did you write it that way?
We wanted to make sure in some way that the voice or the feelings of the audience were on display, or even ourselves as creators. Is this moving too fast? And that question kind of became the engine for the whole episode, which was having friends - slash, the TV audience - saying to these characters over and over again, “Have you thought this through? Do you think this is right?”
Going to back to something that happened earlier in the season: I was so mad when Gus left Mickey at the wedding to go help his ex, Sarah. I thought the next episode would pick up where that left off, with some big fight. But it didn't, and that felt like a really good sign, like maybe they've matured as a couple. Is that what you were going for?
You want it to feel like, with each episode, they’re changing... that you feel some sense of development going on. It has to feel significant enough that it was worth watching, but not so significant that you made everything simple now. So a lot of times it ends up being a micro-step. We talk about these in the writers’ room a lot. With that episode it was exactly what you said, which was, “Could we do an episode where who Mickey was in season 1 would have blown up about this and caused a scene?” We talked about, “What if this is the episode where Mickey was able to bear tough feelings and not act on them?” And for Gus it was, “Can he be direct with Mickey and share what he really wants to say, which is, ‘If you want to come with me you can, if you don’t, then don’t.’”
And I’ll be honest - that was the number-one most difficult scene for me to act and we had to do multiple takes, and I could see the crew slowly being like, “When is this fucker gonna nail this?” Judd wasn’t on the set that day but he called me up and was like, “Hey, how’d it go last night?” And I was like, “Welp! The thing that’s toughest for me to do as a person in life is also the toughest thing for me to act,” which is just being direct about my feelings and saying what I want.
Why did you decide not to have Gus find out that Mickey cheated [in season 2]?
That came out of [thinking], Man, it really sucks that for a century of movies and half a century of TV, men can cheat and get away with it. Why do we need to have the justice of Mickey being found out and having to atone for it?
In real life there are some times where a partner has cheated on somebody and that person never found out about it. I have to imagine that that’s happened before. It’s a thing we don’t really want to think about, because it’s maybe the most painful thing to think about in a relationship - What if I’ve been cheated on and never knew? So for me, what got me excited about it was, for somebody who’s maybe been in that situation - on either side of it, having been cheated on and never finding out, or having cheated and never coming out - they could watch that and take some comfort in [knowing], “Oh, that’s a thing that happens and I don’t have to feel like a piece of shit.”
Do you think Mickey and Gus will be happily married forever?
I don’t know. I really don’t know. I think the show is a little bit about [the fact that] nothing’s permanent. Things are constantly in flux and changing, and as crazy-making as that can be, it’s also the thing that can get you through tough times - “Well, things change.” So I might be happy and that could change, but I might be sad and that might change, too. So maybe they stay together and they’re happy, but what if they got divorced and that was good for them and it was the thing that needed to happen?
Should we walk away feeling hopeful for Mickey and Gus?
My sweet spot, the stuff I like the most, is hopeful melancholy. Optimistic melancholy. I would hope when people watch the show they would feel some hope. Just some!
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