Sofia Black-D’Elia was anxious about turning 30. That was until she met her Single Drunk Female character Samantha Fink. “It was like, ‘Well, I’m not this bad!’” she laughs, alluding to the onslaught of cringe-worthy choices Samantha makes throughout the show. The Freeform comedy about a 28-year-old woman coming to terms with her alcohol abuse and navigating sobriety back home is a refreshing depiction of addiction, grief, and complicated family relationships. But perhaps what the show does best is bring a more honest lightness to the serious subject matter. After all, it’s not only dark times. There are joyful moments in the recovery process too.

Despite the positive response to the show’s first two episodes, Black-D’Elia is still feeling the pressure of starring in a comedy about such heavy topics. “You can tell by my babbling I’m still freaked out by it,” she says. To be fair, the actress is still somewhat new to the world of comedy. While evidence of her ability to bring the funny is on display in the Fox series The Mick, the majority of her work has consisted of bad-girl types in dramas such as Skins and The Night Of, so naturally, she had some nerves going in. “I think it’s a really fine line to me,” she says of creating a dark comedy like Single Drunk Female. “Especially first seasons of a comedy, you’re finding [your footing] regardless of the topic or the tone. … From the second I read the pilot, I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be tough.’” Continue reading

The 30-year-old actress stars in “Single Drunk Female,” a comedic series created by Simone Finch and produced by Jenni Konner.

Freeform’s new series, “Single Drunk Female,” starts with its main character hitting rock bottom. Samantha is in her late 20s and living in New York, where she works at a clickbait news website named Bzzz — both a nod toward BuzzFeed and the character’s tendency to show up to work buzzed. After a drunken incident on the job, Sam is forced to move home and recalibrate her life.

The series — which counts “Girls” alum Jenni Konner as an executive producer — is an unlikely comedy about the journey toward sobriety. For lead actress Sofia Black-D’Elia, balancing the heaviness of the subject matter with a comedic tone proved the biggest challenge of making sure the premise landed.

“[That challenge] is also the thing that’s most rewarding,” says the Brooklyn-based actress, whose previous credits include “The Mick” and the original “Gossip Girl.” “The material that I’m most drawn to as an audience member, as an actor, are things that are reflective of the human experience — which I think is often very funny and very sad at the same time,” she adds.

Black-D’Elia credits series creator and writer Simone Finch (who formerly worked on “The Conners”) for the nuanced portrayal of the relationships and situations that surround AA. Sam navigates new dynamics with her sponsor, fellow group members, childhood friends, and mother, a role played by Ally Sheedy. “I was surprised at how well [Finch] was able to tell this story of recovery in a half hour comedy format,” says Black-D’Elia.

Finch based the series on her own experiences, and was an invaluable resource for Black-D’Elia and the rest of the cast throughout filming. “Simone was so generous, and continues to be so generous, with all of us about her life and her journey through recovery,” she says. “As an actor, I don’t really like to play myself — I want to play a character that’s unfamiliar to me and dive headfirst into a world that I don’t know as well as my own,” she continues. “I was really excited to investigate Simone’s experience and understand that better.”

The pilot filmed at the end of 2020, and the full series was filmed in Atlanta this past summer. While a second season hasn’t yet been announced, Black-D’Elia is hopeful.

“I have no control over what happens next and I’m not very good at predicting the future, but I hope that audiences connect to [the show],” she says. “And especially those that might relate to Sam for Anonymous reasons, I hope that they find hope and joy in the show. And hopefully we get to do it again — I think there’s a lot left in these relationships to explore.”

SOURCE WWD

Sofia Black-D’Elia Has No Problem Taking Her Time

Gen-Z may be dominating your screen every which way, but Millennials are still having their moment, too—albeit a less dazzling, more pared down, and, dare we say, realistic one. Anxieties about entering your thirties and figuring out what kind of mark you’re going to leave seem to be at an all time high—just look at Tick, Tick… Boom!, The Worst Person in the World, or even Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You if you need proof. The upward trend in addiction narratives is worth noting, too—Euphoria has been both lauded and criticized for its raw, and at times over-the-top depictions of a teen struggling through Narcotics Anonymous meetings between (sometimes attending) high school classes. It’s been compared to the after-school special Canadian drama Degrassi (which will be rebooted for the fifth time next year), and, more accurately, has drawn comparisons to the U.K. series Skins.

Ironically, Sofia Black-D’Elia also starred on the short-lived American remake of the latter, a beloved British drama—she was Tea, the bisexual bad-girl high school cheerleader. The actress returns to the small screen in January—but this time, she plays Sam, another bisexual “bad girl,” though much more realistic in her struggle with alcoholism and crisis about nearing 30, in Single Drunk Female.

Black-D’Elia, who also recently turned 30, can relate to some of Sam’s antics on display in Single Drunk Female. “You tell yourself in your early twenties that you know exactly who you are, and you project it really loudly into the world,” the actress says with a laugh when she meets me via Zoom, flanked by a calendar and a portrait of a cat hanging on the wall behind her in her Brooklyn home. “Then you start to realize you don’t know as much as you thought you did and you have to rebuild. It was nice to play somebody who’s at the same part of their life and journey as I am, even though the things we struggle with and our vices are very different.”

Created by Simone Finch and produced by Jenni Konner and Leslye Headland, the series also stars Rebecca Henderson, Madeline Wise, Garrick Bernard, and Ally Sheedy. Black-D’Elia says it was the team of women behind Single Drunk Female that drew her to the project. “It’s a very bizarre time to be making things,” she says of the series, which was filmed during the pandemic, between Chicago and Atlanta. When she first took a look at Finch’s script, she thought it was so specific—which meant to her that it had to be grounded in some truth, and couldn’t have just been some abstract idea of what sobriety might look like. “Tonally, it was a really interesting challenge,” she adds. “It’s a half-hour comedy, but it’s about something really serious and difficult that a lot of young people go through.”

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