The cast of “Everything I Know About Love” is the first to admit they still don’t know everything — or much at all — about love. But that’s the whole point.
“That moment when you feel like you’re in love, and not just romantic love, but when it comes to friends and when it comes to passion and jobs, it all comes with discovery,” Aliyah Odoffin, making her TV debut as Amara, told the Daily News.
“Everything I Know About Love,” which premiered Thursday on Peacock and is based on Dolly Alderton’s memoir of the same name, follows a group of four college friends-turned-roommates in London, working their way through mindless jobs and relationships that never feel quite right. It’s “Sex and the City” for the early-20s girlies who can’t afford a Manhattan one-bedroom on a freelancer journalist’s salary, but it’s normal.
“It’s the banality of us just all sitting around eating pizza and watching our favorite show,” 30-year-old actress Emma Appleton, who plays Maggie, told The News.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, you can’t put that in the script,’ but that’s where the interesting conversations happen. That’s what people can relate to. That’s normal life. And there’s magical things that come out of that.”
The foursome — Maggie (Appleton), an aspiring writer; Birdy (“The Morning Show” alum Bel Powley), Maggie’s fiercely loyal best friend since they were 12; Nell, a teacher stuck in a monotonous long-term relationship (Marli Siu); and Amara (Odoffin), who is stuck in the corporate world but dreams of being a dancer — weave in and out of each other’s worlds, stopping by mostly for advice on boys, but also for movie nights and to choreograph silly dances in the living room. “The mundaneness of being in your 20s and things not being that glamorous,” Odoffin called it.
That’s not to say it’s all dinner on the table at 6 and bed at 10, of course. Maggie, in particular, is still trying to live out her dreams of partying her way through London and being the most interesting girl in every room.
But while the four women are figuring out what they want and how to get there, men keep getting in their way, the ones in suits in the skyscrapers who won’t hire them or the scruffy ones with a cigarette tucked behind their ear and a guitar in the corner. The ones who need you, now, no matter what, and then forget your name as soon as you’re gone.
“There’s been so many portrayals of rom-coms and Disney fairy tales that have given us such unrealistic expectations of romantic relationships of men. And then we meet men and we’re like, ‘oh,’” said Siu, the 29-year-old actress playing Nell as she navigates her stale relationship.
“What Dolly’s done is write men quite realistically with all their flaws. All the male characters — and the female characters — just kind of fall short of all of the expectations and fantasies.”
That, the cast said, is the most realistic aspect of “Everything I Know About Love” — real life almost never lives up to the fantasy. The boys are never that cute. The parties are never that exciting. But you keep striving because “Sex and the City” taught you that it’s out there; you’re just not trying hard enough.
“Our generation, we were brought up on a diet of romantic love as the No. 1 love and everything else is second best. That’s definitely not the case,” Appleton said. “All the types of love in your life are just as important as each other and you have to nurture all of it.”
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