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Of all the characters Jessica Lange has played throughout her illustrious career, it’s Mary Tyrone, the restless, morphine-addicted mother of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, that has been her favorite.
“She’s the character that has touched me more deeply than any role that I’ve ever played,” says Lange. “You never get to the bottom of Mary Tyrone and I’ve played her hundreds of times on stage in London and New York. She’s written with such beauty and love and truth and intensity that you never complete her. I could keep on playing her for the rest of my life.”
After Lange completed her run on the 2016 Broadway revival of the play with prolific British theatre director Jonathan Kent, which won her a Tony Award, the pair were keen to immortalize the epic story as a feature film.
“It happened very organically,” Kent tells Deadline. “I’d never directed a film before but my knowledge of the material and having worked with Jessica before on the play, it meant that I wasn’t swimming out in an alien sea.”
Set across a single day in August 1912 at the Tyrone family’s Connecticut seaside home, the story follows the four members of the family – Mary, her husband James, and their two sons Jamie and Edmund – as they face the dual looming spectres of Edmund’s potentially fatal consumption diagnosis alongside his mother Mary’s increasingly fragile and anxious state of mind. The family knows that the situation threatens to return Mary to her severe morphine addiction that was only recently overcome.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abiare was brought aboard to adapt the project for the big screen and condense what is a four-hour play into 109-minute feature film.
“It was a struggle to shorten it, but David achieved this so brilliantly by keeping the narrative flowing and also allowing its tragedy,” says Kent. “In the theater, after nearly four hours, it’s like you’re being run over very slowly, and it has this sort of steamroller effect on you and you feel drained at the end. But it’s different with the film because we can get close to this tragic family and see them in a way that you obviously cannot on stage.”
The project soon attached Ed Harris to play James, a celebrated actor but failed property magnate. It marked the first time Lange and Harris would share a screen in nearly 40 years after both starring in Patsy Cline biopic Sweet Dreams. Ben Foster and Colin Morgan also star in the film, playing Jamie and Edmund respectively.
“The film is a curious hybrid because it needs people who are at home in the language in a way that film doesn’t always demand,” says Kent. “But this demanded people in charge of the text and that’s what the rehearsals helped with. It also helped that they are all experienced stage actors. I don’t believe that these are theatrical performances in the film, but they are adroit at the language.”
Kent admits the project had “endless bumps along the way.” After a few weeks of rehearsals, filming initially started in September 2023 in County Wicklow, Ireland. After one day of shooting, financing fell through for the project and producer Gabrielle Tana had to step in and shut production down.
“We had been rehearsing it as though it was a play and playing scenes on the most beautiful set and everybody was excited and thrilled to be doing this project,” says Lange. “We shot one day and came back for a second day of shooting, and they told us that they were shutting down and the financing had fallen through.”
Shortly afterwards, the late film and theatre producer Bill Kenwright was contacted by Foster’s agent and stepped into save the production. Lange had worked a number of times with Kenwright on stage productions such as The Glass Menagerie. But Lange says that it had been a number of years since the two had spoken as she and Kenwright had had a rift on a previous project that resulted in Lange being “pushed out”.
“There was a misunderstanding and Bill and I never really got it straightened out,” Lange says. “He was a great friend and a great champion, but this was unfortunate that this thing happened on this separate project. But just the other day one of his associates told me that not long before the situation with our film Long Day’s Journey Into Night that Bill had said, ‘If there’s ever anything for Jessica Lange, we’ll do it so keep an eye out.’”
It marked a nice full circle moment for Lange when Kenwright’s BKStudios boarded the project. The company financed the project with Magnoliamae Films, Brouhaha Entertainment and Fetisoff Illusion. Tana, Kenwright and Gleb Fetisov produced the film and while Kenwright sadly passed away before the final version of the film, Kent says he saw “an early version.”
“He was so generous, not only with the financing, but also with his support and encouragement,” says Kent.
After a three-and-a-half-week delay, production recommenced in Ireland and Lange says the experience ultimately “bonded us together in a way that added to the family dynamic.”
“Once we came back and started shooting, we felt like we were connected and close,” she says. “I wouldn’t recommend it ever, but it was a whole adventure.”
Kent admits that the weather had been “perfect” for the weeks that production was delayed but “the minute we started shooting, we had hurricanes and turbulent weather.”
“The garage at the side of the house blew into the sea,” he recalls. “Everything had to be shrouded and the roof, the upstairs, was declared dangerous at some point. It was a fight – an absolute fight. But, in curious way, as Jessica says, it was a life experience, and it’s etched on the film on their faces. In a way, sometimes the struggle is helpful.”
Long Day’s Journey Into Night screened at the Glasgow Film Festival on Friday night at the Glasgow Film Theatre. Blue Fox is repping international rights to the project.
