Mind the gap
Is it ever OK to date your friend’s daughter? Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement star in the new “anti rom-com” Alice and Steve
Disney
- Laura Rutkowski
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Writer Sophie Goodhart, best known for her work on Rivals and Sex Education, got the idea for her new Disney+ series Alice and Steve while talking to one of her male friends, who was dating progressively younger women. He threw out an idea: “Can you imagine if I went out with your daughter?” “I was repulsed – and thought that would be a good idea for a show,” she recalls.
Now, Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement play Alice and Steve, who have been best friends for more than 30 years. But their relationship is tested when 50-year-old Steve starts dating Alice’s 26-year-old daughter, Izzy. Although Alice’s husband, Izzy’s stepfather Daniel, is about a decade younger than her, she’s furious at the pairing.
“I think if a male had written this, I would read it as a fantasy,” Clement muses. “But a woman has written it – it’s a mother’s nightmare. It’s a different angle for this situation.”
Writer Sophie Goodhart. Getty
“It’s hard to describe the tone of this series,” adds Walker, who compares Alice to a “smiling assassin”. “It’s funny, but then it goes sad, and it’s also sometimes brutally honest and vicious.”
The story is also true to life, as Goodhart is in an age-gap relationship herself. She met her husband when he was 27 and she was 40. “As a woman in a relationship with someone younger, everyone’s like, ‘Yay!’, but if you’re a man, it’s like, ‘How could you?’” she says. “I wanted to look at the hypocrisy. We shouldn’t use blanket judgment about age-gap relationships. Some are healthy, some are not.”
She remembers one of her early dates with her husband, where she met his friends and they went to an off-licence. “They said, ‘Haven’t you got a generous mum?’ I thought, ‘This is going to go great!’ But if you meet mentally and your personalities work and you enjoy each other, then it doesn’t matter what age you are.”
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Alice and Steve is on Disney+ from 8 June
Authors
Laura Rutkowski
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