If you’ve just finished Voicemails for Isabelle and are wondering who hurt writer and director, Leah McKendrick, enough to come up with that premise… the answer is: life, mostly.
The Netflix rom-com follows Jill (Zoey Deutch), a novice baker in San Francisco who shares a tight, long-distance bond with her younger sister Isabelle, who lives in Austin and later dies after a battle with cystic fibrosis.
To cope, Jill keeps calling Isabelle’s old number and leaving long, emotional voicemails about her day, her grief and the general chaos of staying afloat — not realising the number has been reassigned to Wes (Nick Robinson), a realtor who ends up falling for the girl on the other end of the line.
McKendrick told PEOPLE that the first spark for Voicemails for Isabelle actually hit her years ago at a comedy club. Her roommate did a set about her dad’s long, rambling voicemails, followed by another comedian who cracked, “It’s so nice that your dad calls you. My dad hasn’t called me in three years”, before landing the punchline: “He’s dead”.
McKendrick admitted she was the only one in the room who laughed and said it “really got the wheels turning”, making her think about “this idea of a girl who keeps waiting for her dad to call her back”.
From there, her brain went straight to the person she’s closest to. She told the publication that she thought, if her sister died, she wouldn’t just be waiting for a call, she’d “just keep calling her”.
That thought collided with real life when her own sister moved to New York for college and McKendrick started leaving “long rambling voicemails” about “how hard it was to make it in Hollywood and how this town didn’t want me”, often while crying over bad dates and career setbacks.
“I would just let it all hang out,” she said, adding that it would be a “horror story” if someone ever heard her “most unfiltered self”, but that if someone fell in love with that version of you, “it would be real”.
That rawness is what drew Zoey Deutch back to the genre after Set It Up. She told PEOPLE she’d been “very hesitant” to return to rom-coms, but that she said yes to this one because it felt “deep and about grief and about love after loss and about sisters”, adding, “I feel super grateful and couldn’t love this movie more”.
When PEDESTRIAN.TV asked her how she personally thinks about the huge lie Wes is sitting on, she leaned into nuance: “I think in general, like with everything, there’s so much like nuance… I believe in forgiveness and I believe in change… but, yeah, I think it just depends.”
Nick Robinson was a bit more brutal about Wes’ choices when we chatted. He told P.TV “it would be a hard one to come back from”, and said what makes their dynamic work is that Wes “is not actually asking for forgiveness… he just wants Jill to be okay and he just wants to try to offer whatever he can do to make that happen”.
In his eyes, Wes has accepted that what he’s done might be “unforgivable”, and it’s “really a credit to Jill” that she finds it in herself “to forgive him and to allow that”, because that’s how “you go through things together and you forgive, and you grow.”
Somewhere between all that grief, emotional growth and wrong-number fate, I had the very grim realisation that I basically never check my voicemail. So if there is someone out there sending me chaotic rambles, I’ve almost certainly missed my meet-cute and may need to rethink every life choice I’ve ever made.
Lead image: Getty
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