“His Three Daughters” stars on their sibling strife and discovering the end of the movie as it happened

Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen play sisters at odds as their dad nears death.

Natasha Lyonne and Carrie Coon are quietly giggling on a sofa, seated next to Elizabeth Olsen, who's giving a thoughtful answer to a question about her character in their new Netflix movie, His Three Daughters.

"Are you making fun of me?" Olsen wonders. Turns out, Lyonne's back just cracked while she was shifting around in her seat: "I've been trying to have good posture for nine hours."

It's one of a few times the trio break from the task at hand, truly sounding more like siblings than people who spent a few weeks together filming a movie. The film (streaming now on Netflix) from writer-director Azazel Jacobs is set over the course of a few days, as sisters Katie (Coon) and Christina (Olsen) join their longtime stepsister, Rachel (Lyonne), at their dad Vincent's house as he nears the end of life. Each woman could not be more different: Katie, who still lives nearby in Brooklyn, is controlling to the point that she's driving away her own teen daughter; Grateful Dead-loving Christina has a more zen, free-spirit approach to life and motherhood; and stoner Rachel, who still lives with their dad and has been his sole caretaker, enjoys sports gambling with Vincent.

Their three unique personalities have created animosity, jealousy, hurt, and division among them — but now, there's nowhere to hide as they live in close quarters, waiting for the inevitable. As grief starts to settle in, tensions rise, and the three have to figure out how — if at all — they fix their relationship.

Below, Coon, Lyonne, and Olsen chat with Entertainment Weekly about the complexities of their characters and relationship, how that small apartment altered the dynamic, filming their climactic argument, and the performances and movies that have inspired them.

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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Azazel has said that he wrote these characters with each of you in mind.

NATASHA LYONNE: It was very flattering.

Flattering, for sure, but is there also a pressure that comes with that, hoping you do his work justice after he put all of that time and thought into you?

ELIZABETH OLSEN: Well, I think there's always a sense of pressure when you say yes to something, to show up and rise to the occasion, and especially when you have the opportunity to get to work with such heavy hitters as Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne. There was this feeling that I had in prepping for it of really wanting to be as prepared and flexible, and luckily, we got to have this week of playtime together. We got to work through a lot of the language to make sure that we had the rhythm and the pacing that Aza had in his brain, and then also to sound similar, to feel related, to spend the time talking about our backstories, the ones that are at least very important to us and how we view one another. And so that time was really, really special. I guess there's always a sense of pressure to rise to an occasion, but I mean, God, what would the world be if we didn't have that? [Laughs]

As you were diving into this script, what did each of you feel like you innately understood about your character?

LYONNE: I understood who Rachel was but was a little bit reluctant to play her for fear that I would be one more time the bad boy of Lady Cinema. And I guess I began to question, how deep can you go? What would happen if you stripped away everything you thought you knew about — even when I'm writing my own version of a bad boy on Russian Doll — what's at the back of all that, when you get to the grief, when you get to the nitty gritty, and there's nowhere to hide? Knowing that it was going to be with these two powerhouses, it became a much deeper, almost softer question. It's sad in a way that you have to put on all this shell just to endure the elements because, of course, we're only tough guys because we're so sensitive to the elements. So it was really healing on some level because it was a safe place to do it.

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CARRIE COON: I'm the middle of five in my family, but I behave a lot more like an older sister. My sister's adopted and sometimes seems a little bit younger than me, but...

OLSEN: Don't tell her that. [Laughs]

COON: Yeah, don't watch this interview — [but] I think she knows that. So I take a lot of responsibility for my siblings, and because I've achieved some success in my life, I have a real moral high ground to give them unsolicited advice all the time, which would make their lives better, but they never listen to. [Laughs] So I relate to that about Katie. I also come from Ohio, where there's a lot of alcoholism. That's a real disease of despair, and that's a real disease of stunted growth. After they've had the big blowup, when Katie says to Rachel something like, "But you already had a dad and that was our dad," it's so childish, but it broke my heart. Katie broke my heart because it's such a sign of her stuntedness, and I think we all have those parts of us, those childlike parts of us that haven't grown out of the storytelling of the family. I felt for Katie's lack of growth, and I so appreciated the honesty with which Aza wrote her attempts to apologize and her attempts to sort of communicate herself to her sisters when things start to get a little bit more complicated.

OLSEN: The first thing I really understood with Christina was the desire and the need to take up less space and make yourself small. As much as I was a very obnoxious ham as a child, begging for anyone to laugh or clap [laughs], there is that element of, as I've gotten older — and whether it's a result of this job or something else — but there is something that I understood with Christina of wanting to take up as little space as possible and deny herself a voice in a way that everything becomes so overwhelming that it's emotional. That was kind of the first access. And I just finished Love and Death not too long before we started shooting this, and that was a very different kind of a woman, transitioning from that to this...

LYONNE: They're so different, and neither of them are you in such a dramatic way.

OLSEN: But there's this temptation of that tender small feeling that feels safe and private and quiet that reminds me of Dianne Wiest in September or something. There's this real quietness to her that I was excited to explore, and I don't think I've really had an opportunity to do in a character, even though it potentially could feel inactive or less flashy or something of a skill. It was something that was fun to begin from.

LYONNE: Oh, I'm only remembering now, actually, that when I read the script, one of my favorite things about it was that Rachel didn't talk that much. Because I was coming off of 10 episodes of Poker Face, and prior to that, a full season of Russian Doll, which is pretty much like you got to memorize 60 pages a week, or on Russian Doll, I'm holding the thing. And I remember thinking, "God, it would be so interesting to spend a movie listening for a change instead of just like jibber jabber motor mouth over here." And it actually was wild that thing happens where it cracks you open — only because talking about wanting to be inside the wall and make yourself small — it's like Rachel was not small yet the desire was to not talk.

I thought it was such a smart choice for Dad not to be in a hospice facility or in a hospital but at home, where it's easier for the focus to actually be on his three daughters — a movie called Our Dying Dad would've been the opposite. How did you take advantage of the confines of this apartment and the setting to amplify the dysfunction between the three of them?

COON: Aza was so good at reminding us; we would be practicing a scene or getting ready to do a take, and he would say — they'd have the heart monitor beeping sometimes in the background so we could hear it — and he would sometimes remind us that he was back in that room. And it was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're waiting for somebody to die.

OLSEN: Yeah, he's right there, and so are the sounds.

COON: Yeah. I remember sometimes, actually, weirdly realizing we lost touch with that thing that's happening with time and getting reminded and it shifting.

OLSEN: We were like, "Oh! Right! Thank you. That's why we're here." But then I also loved that when you watch this film — without wanting to give anything away — it is this linear, grounded story until it's not. And I think the "until it's not" is what makes it specific to Aza, and I do think it's what makes it specific to something that's written in, which is this depiction of death and grief in film and how it's almost impossible to capture. And what he gets to explore is what makes it so specific to his voice.

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I'm glad you mentioned that because it's something I've been thinking about a lot, about how there's this lingering countdown of sorts to their father's death. We, of course, know how it's going to end, but what we don't know is how or if things will be resolved between them. So, what was most important for each of you to convey about Katie, Christina, and Rachel as they face where they will go from here?

OLSEN: I think what was lovely about Aza's goal of wanting to film as much in order as possible was because when he wrote the script, he didn't actually know what he wanted his ending to be. He didn't have an agenda, but he started somewhere and ended somewhere that surprised him. And I think we also started somewhere and ended somewhere that surprised us. It wasn't written that we would have specific reactions when we sit on the sofa after sitting on the chair. It was truly just the end of shooting; we all went through this experience, and we were, in real-time, figuring out where we ended. I think we were surprised to make the discoveries that we all did about the characters and what their arcs ultimately ended up being. I think we never actually had a very clear intention of how we would end.

COON: Do you know what I just remembered? I remember when we were doing that scene, the only thing he did tell us was where we would sit on the couch, and he put you in the middle. And so I just feel like Aza, on some level, did know where we would end up, but when you were talking about it earlier today, about the surprise of where we actually ended up, there was some part of it that knew to put you there, but we didn't know. It was very revealing for all of us really.

LYONNE: Well, it's because we have to take care of her. That's kind of the responsibility forever. But she's taking care of us.

COON: Then she was there with such confidence and singing the song. So anyway, we were surprised a lot.

When it came to that big, explosive fight, I'm so curious with those kinds of scenes — because there's a lot to get right with timing and what's being said when and all that — but are those lines all scripted, or do you approach it knowing what these people are feeling and what needs to be said and then you just ad lib and spew grievances from there?

LYONNE: We rehearsed it maybe more than most of the scenes, just because of the physicality and the risk and how narrow those halls are to get cameras in, but also just to figure out the pacing.

COON: It was all scripted. We didn't improvise.

LYONNE: Yeah, yeah. The writing is so gorgeous in this film, but it was the one scene that didn't have a clear subtext built in. So, in a weird way, I think that you extra rehearse just to fill in each "no," "stop it," or whatever with the weird switches that have to happen in between as the stakes are escalated.

OLSEN: Yeah, it's really hard to get on a rhythm when so much of the film is such longer phrasing, and then that scene was so many quick interruptions that you have to rehearse it as much as possible, and we wanted to stay as true to how he wrote every dash for an interruption.

This is a movie that I feel like other actress will watch and hope that someday they get to play a role like one of these. What was that movie or TV show or play for you?

OLSEN: Opening Night. Easy.

COON: Oh, good one. An Unmarried Woman — Jill Clayburgh. Really great performance.

OLSEN: That's so funny; that's on my list.

LYONNE: Most of them are men, but I do remember in between viewings of Rocky and Scarface — I did want to be Stallone; I feel like I did a pretty decent job of that...closer every day — but I was also really obsessed as a kid with Jessica Lange in Frances. What a journey movie. I could never get over it.

OLSEN: I've been on a big Bette Davis kick. She created acting, in my opinion.

LYONNE: It's pretty shocking — what Bette Davis does is bananas. There are others that you might think of — Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Harlow — but...

OLSEN: To me, it's Bette.

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LYONNE: I love Gena Rowlands [in Opening Night], but what about Peter Falk's part? What about Seymour Cassel's part? I was always like, I don't think I'll ever get those parts.

COON: I was raised on all those classic films with my grandpa, so I love Katharine Hepburn. I found my way to Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis later, but it was like Audrey and Katharine. And there's that poster in our movie. I always felt like I would never be that kind of woman, but Katharine Hepburn was a little closer to me than Audrey Hepburn.

LYONNE: My house was so Pacino, De Niro.

OLSEN: Bette truly believed that she had neither youth nor beauty when she got into film, so she just acted the s--- out of everything. Every single character that she created was so different from the next, and so melodramatic and so Fassbender-y. So she would be in her own world, and maybe it's nuts to watch, but she's doing something, and it feels fun.

LYONNE: It is a lost art form. Jack Nicholson is a great example of when actors used to do something. For example, in The Last Detail or Five Easy Pieces, he's not doing the most — he's not doing The Shining — but he's so alive and electric. To your point about Bette Davis, it's become almost a disease of modern cinema that great acting is considered not blinking.

OLSEN: Which is why I'm so excited to see Sean Baker's next film, [Anora], because it seems like [Mikey Madison] is f---ing acting. I love watching actors act.

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