Marisa Coughlan Unpacks Her Personal Connection to Blue Eyed Girl

Perhaps best known for playing Ursula Hanson in the Super Troopers movies and Boston Legal’s Melissa Hughes, Marisa Coughlan’s lived experience illustrates how creativity can spring from moments of personal growth.

Her most recent film project, Blue Eyed Girl, which she wrote, produced, and stars in, considers the idea that “Sometimes you have to go back to where it started to find out how it ends.” She describes the film as “a love letter to the place she calls home, and the father she lost too soon, whom she loved dearly.”

Speaking with TV Fanatic via Zoom from Minneapolis, where she grew up and her home for the last ten years, as well as the setting of Blue Eyed Girl, Marisa takes us through the inspiration for the movie. The interview below has been edited for clarity.

Marisa Coughlan as Jane Messina in Blue Eyed Girl

Tell us about Blue Eyed Girl and how it came to be.

I like to think of it as an adult coming-of-age story. It’s not exactly my life story, but it’s very personal to me. I lost my dad — I can’t believe it — 20 years ago now, and we came back to Minneapolis, where I was raised.

Being home, being in the places I used to go when I was 16, 17, and also when my dad was around, it stirred up all sorts of things for me. And so I wrote the script as an exercise, just personally, to purge the things I was thinking and feeling.

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I was fortunate enough to end up getting it made, but I think there are a lot of people who hit 35, 40, 45, 50… It doesn’t necessarily have to be the sort of cliched midlife crisis where you go buy a Porsche and dump your spouse and go find a 25-year-old model.

But that doesn’t mean that people don’t come to a point midlife where you’re like “Okay, let’s stop and assess where I am and where I thought I’d be and where I want to go.” That’s why I wrote it.

Being here and remembering where I thought my career would be and my life would be when I was 16, 17. Coming back and being like, “Okay, well, this is where it is,” and deciding where I wanted it to go. That’s the origin of the movie.

That’s an incredibly healthy way to approach that midlife re-evaluation experience.

[laughs] I have low moments, too. Don’t get me wrong.

Finding Jack

Did you and Beau Bridges, who plays Jane’s father, Jack, have a connection before this project?

I worked with his son, Jordan, on a little independent movie in my 20s. It was a fantastically fun movie about Hollywood. And so, I knew Jordan. He had spoken so highly of his dad. I knew, obviously, of his dad. Who doesn’t?

So when we were casting this, he was kind of the dream cast for me for this role because he just fits it so perfectly. Thank god I sent it to him and wrote him a letter, and he said, “Yes,” so we got lucky with him. He’s just as wonderful off-camera as he is on-camera.

Sisters

At the heart of the film, it is a family story as much as it is about Jane, the main character. Can you speak to how the cast gelled as a family in making the movie?

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Well, Eliza Coupe, specifically, I would say… I cast her off of Zoom. It was just post-COVID when we shot it. Everything was Zoom. I had long admired her for her comedic sensibility. She is so unbelievably funny. I think funnier than most everyone. So she signed on to do it. I was elated.

And then we met and the two of us… everyone around us, they were like, “I can’t believe you haven’t met before,” because we were just in our own little bubble. We had a real synergy. We still do. Thankfully, it comes across on camera and it makes it so we feel like we’ve been two sisters for forty years.

Then Bridey came along. Bridey is so quirky and funny, too. She has her whole brand of stuff that she does on her own that’s really unique and really funny. But it was a good dynamic because she came in and she fit in with us the same way as she does in the movie.

She sort of was one of us, but then we were in our own little orbit so much that she did her own thing sometimes, too, which is exactly how these three sisters are. It worked out well for us.

The Heart of the Matter

And then Beau. We all orbit around Beau in the movie. I certainly have the closest relationship with him in the movie, and I think also off-camera because he flew to Minnesota. He’s 80 years old and flew to Minnesota to do this thing for me. I have a lot of love for him.

And we had a lot of Minnesota crew and a lot of people that I really love came on board to do the movie. They acted in the movie. They did all sorts of things for the movie. So it was, definitely, a family vibe.

The Power Of Coming Home

Where has Jane been that her return home sparks such a moment of re-evaluation?

In the movie, she leaves Minnesota for L.A. to become an actress. Our business is like [a rollercoaster]: You have a good year and then you have a bad year.

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So a lot of my friends have made a living doing Loop Group. Basically, you go into a soundstage and make all the background noises of a scene. On a show, background players are in the background mouthing conversations.

But you obviously can’t be talking when the actors are talking, so in post-production, you bring in a roomful of people and they pretend like they’re at a club. They pretend like they’re clapping and laughing at a joke.

I have friends who do that for a living. In my mind, I was always struck by how it’s kind of some weird form of torture.

You move to L.A. You dream of being in movies. But you end up being — as I call it in the movie — “dream adjacent.” You’re so close, you can taste it, but you’re still not doing the version of it you want to be doing. You’re still supporting the people who maybe hit their stride and achieved their dreams.

That’s where Jane’s coming from when she comes home.

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My first guest star role on a TV show, I was in the teaser of a murder mystery and they killed me in the first ten seconds. My best friend’s dad got up to go get a Coke and came back and I was already dead. [laughs]

I think Jane comes back to Minnesota and she runs into people who are like, “Oh, I saw you on this thing and I think you were like a ghost…” Y’know, there’s something demoralizing about some of this stuff you end up doing along the way. That’s where she is.

She’s like, “I had big dreams. Am I standing squarely where I thought I would be? How do I respond to that? Do I just keep muddling through this sort of mediocre version of what I want to be doing or is there something I could do to change it?”

A Bit of Everything

What do you hope the audience’s prime takeaway will be from Blue Eyed Girl?

It’s so interesting because it depends on who I talk to. Some people are really focused on the romantic triangle of it, and some people are so focused on the sisters and their relationship, and coming back home.

Mostly, I hope they come away with a refreshed take on where they can go, where they can personally have a sense of agency and move forward, whether it’s in their romantic relationship or in their career.

My idea was to get out of a place of complacency for my character and to give her some place to have a fresh perspective on her life and see it with a bird’s eye view.

I hope they laugh. And I hope they cry. I hope they get a little bit of everything.

Blue Eyed Girl is available on November 21 on digital and on demand.

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