How “Tuesday” brings death to life with heart, humor and a giant bird

For Julia Louis-Dreyfus, funerals can be a great place to laugh – “maybe one of the best laughs you'll ever have,” she says. “In dark times, a good laugh is almost like a drug. It collides with something it is the opposite of, which makes it all the more necessary.”

The ability to find humor and absurdity amid deep pain is at the heart of Louis Dreyfus' latest film, the dark comedyTuesday (in theaters now). Louis-Dreyfus plays Zora, a mother who struggles to accept the fate of her sick daughter, the punishing Tuesday (Lola Petticrew). Written and directed by Croatian filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusic, the A24-produced film uses a great deal of magical realism to bring lightness and whimsy to the weighty subject matter: Death takes the form of a macaw — sometimes tiny, sometimes giant — that visits humans in their last moments on Earth. But when the bird prepares to take 15-year-old Tuesday's life, Zora makes a deal with it to buy her daughter some time.

The movie draws inspiration from one of Oniunas-Pusic's friends, who died of a degenerative disease while Oniunas-Pusic was a teenager. Tuesday — who says Oniunas-Pusic suffers from neuroblastoma, although this is not explicitly mentioned in the film – he is confined to a wheelchair and must use a ventilator. In many ways, Pusic says making this story helped her heal the deep loss she suffered when she was younger: “The selfish part of art or filmmaking is that a lot of times, its private function is to help you process things and look at them from every possible angle, and then get over them, put that chapter of your life behind you and move on.”

When she brought Death to life, Oniunas-Pusic knew she wanted a creature that could talk, dance and tell jokes. People felt too mortal, he says, and puppets felt too childish. Once he settled on a parrot, he pored over 17th-century Flemish paintings as well as Ornithomimus dinosaurs to figure out what the film's computer-generated bird should look like — bright red plumage, soot and scars from its dirty work — and to is moving. Casting was the final step: Actor Arinzé Kene voices Death in a hard, harsh baritone.

“One of the things that informed my decision not to be a puppet was to avoid that possibility of people thinking, 'Oh, it's a Tuesday fantasy,' or it's not real,” Oniunas-Pusic says.

In fact, bringing this supernatural element to the fore somehow only grounds the story. In Oniunas-Pusic's imagination, Death is troubled by the cacophony of voices calling on him to put the dying out of their misery. When the bird flies onto Tuesday's back porch, he instinctively makes a joke about penguins heading for the beach. The pair become fast friends: She offers him a bath, jams to Ice Cube's “It Was a Good Day” and puffs-puffs-passes a pen. For the Oniunas-Pusic, the normality of their connection is part of the point: Yes, death is an inevitable reality, but we shouldn't fear it or try to escape it. It is neither positive nor negative. rather, it is a driving force to live life to the fullest.

“It just comes as a fact of life,” Oniunas-Pusic says. “If I were to say something about what the film says about life and death, I would say that life takes on its meaning and weight and wonder because of the fact that it has an expiration date.”

For Louis-Dreyfus's Zora, however, death is very much a threat. Before Zora makes a deal with the bird, she tries to destroy Death to keep her daughter alive: by hitting the bird with a textbook, setting it on fire, and then swallowing its charred remains. As a mother of two grown children, Louis-Dreyfus says she wouldn't have handled things any differently. Reflecting on the strength mothers can muster when their children are in danger — like those stories of women who can lift a car that falls on top of one of their children — she says she approached the scene with a similar zest.

“It was very satisfying, setting him on fire and beating him to death,” says Louis-Dreyfus. “I mean, just talking about it makes me so happy.”

Although in the film Zora does her first dance with death, Louis-Dreyfus has faced it several times and has drawn on those experiences as well. Her father, Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, died in 2016. The following year, she was diagnosed with stage II breast cancer and underwent six rounds of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy.

“When you're dealing with something as critical as a cancer diagnosis, you definitely consider mortality in a way that you might not have before,” she says. “And so I am acutely aware of how fleeting this beautiful life can be. So I brought that to the film.”

After being declared cancer-free in 2018, she had returned to work Veep, Emma's half-sister died of a seizure while camping in the Sierra Nevada. Over time, Louis-Dreyfus says she learned that when a person dies, our relationship with them does not end. It just takes a new shape.

“If we're lucky enough to live long enough, we're all going to suffer some loss,” he says. “I've had a few in the last 10 years, more than I really thought [or] I was thinking about it, but it happened. Thus I am acquainted with sorrow and the anticipation of sorrow.'

For Petticrew, 28, working alongside Louis-Dreyfus was a “pressured moment” — though not without problems. Filming began in the summer of 2021 amid mask and social distancing orders, and Louis-Dreyfus had to quarantine in London for two weeks before arriving on set, which made building the close mother-daughter bond a challenge. Ultimately, however, says Petticrew, the experience produced “a great kinship and admiration and love on both sides.”

The actor, who uses their/their pronouns, appreciates how kind the film is to all its characters — especially Tuesday's grieving mother. “What's really great about it is the light it shines on motherhood and the fact that there's no manual,” they say. “The love you have is so great that sometimes it's actually quite blind. That's what's really great about this movie is that no one is bad. Everyone is doing their best.”

Born in Belfast, Petticrew's ideas about death come from Irish tradition and Catholic ritual – open coffin vigils and three-day vigils. Although he's now an atheist, the actor echoes Oniunas-Pusic in the film's key takeaway, which they hope will resonate with believers and non-believers alike: “If you spend too much time focusing on what's going to happen to you, you forget to enjoy what is happening to you at this moment.”