‘Shrinking’ star Lukita Maxwell has taken full advantage of the show’s second season
Before Shrinking, Lukita Maxwell had never been on a show that made it past its first season. But the breakout star of the Apple TV+ comedy series quickly found the benefits of having additional time with her character, Alice, a teenager still grieving the death of her mother while also sometimes being forced to act as a parent to her father, Jimmy (Jason Segel).
“I’ve lived with Alice for the longest I’ve ever lived with a character at this point, so I was really excited to figure out how I wanted to keep the core of her. But then I also recognized that she is in her coming-of-age, and she is growing up, and she’s going through different stages of her grief process,” Maxwell tells Gold Derby. “So how do I hold on to who she is, but then let her evolve and grow?”
In Season 2 of the show, co-created by Segel, Bill Lawrence, and Brett Goldstein, Maxwell’s Alice has been a central figure in the story. It’s Alice who chooses to connect with Louis (Goldstein), the man who killed her mother in a drunk-driving accident. It’s Alice who calls out Jimmy as he backslides into bad habits, like being selfish and unavailable for his daughter. And it’s Alice who even has some fun, getting her a new car for her 18th birthday and serving as a deadpan straightwoman to Brian (Michael Urie) during one of the season’s best comedy moments when Brian goes on a motor-mouthed rant about meeting Louis.
“I remember after Season 1, when we were doing press, I was asked who I wanted more scenes with in Season 2, and I had mentioned Michael a couple oftimes. He is just unbelievable,” Maxwell says.
Of the scene, which repeats in some form or another two additional times during the season, Maxwell says it was “electric.”
“Michael came with the text in his bones, and it was a brilliant performance, and a different performance every single time,” she adds. “I was in awe of him. Sometimes on the show, I have a hard time not breaking, because everything is so funny. But I felt like I needed to match the intensity of his commitment. And so there was no second where I was breaking there.”
Maxwell says she has a “front-row seat to some of the best comic performances” on Shrinking, including Urie, Segel, Jessica Williams, and Harrison Ford.
“They’re all so specific with what they do. Jason’s comedy is so different than Jessica’s comedy is so different than Harrison’s comedy. In Season 1, I was focused on developing my character and my relationship with her and her relationship with all the other characters,” Maxwell says. “In Season 2, I felt like I had more freedom because I had such trust in the foundation that we had set in Season 1, but also I was blessed with more jokes and more opportunities from the writers. I think we see Alice take a step back from maybe that more parental role with Jimmy that she definitely assumed in the first season, and we see her be more of a teenager and make more mistakes. In Season 2, that opens up and allows for more comedy.”
Shrinking ended its second season on Christmas Day with an episode that sets the course for every character to experience more forgiveness and understanding in Season 3. Production starts on the third season soon, and Maxwell says she’s excited about “exploring the character” further in the future.
“We are so much closer now than we were at the beginning of the process,” she says of the cast. “And I think I just want to keep exploring Alice’s journey in this next stage in her grief journey, this next stage in her relationship with her dad.”
Shrinking streams on Apple TV+.