A bold, fact-based character study explores the joys, tragedies and complexities of female desire through a portrait of three intriguingly different characters
In 2019, Lisa Taddeo’s nonfiction tome Three Women intrigued readers with its depiction of sex through the eyes of a select group of American women. These intertwining portraits of the lives led by Lina (Betty Gilpin), a suburban woman struggling in her marriage who seeks out a passionate extramarital affair, Sloane (DeWanda Wise), a married woman who likes to have sex with other people while her husband (Blair Underwood) watches, and Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy), who is dealing with the aftermath of an alleged sexual affair she had with her teacher in high school, were a result of Taddeo’s years-long immersion into their personal lives.
When it was time to adapt the work into a series, bringing their individual stories to the screen required something outside the scope of the book: a fourth woman. In the TV version of Taddeo’s bestseller, we meet Gia, played by Big Little Lies’ Shailene Woodley, a journalist who becomes the connective tissue between the three. “It is one of my favourite parts about it,” says Taddeo. “We were trying to figure out how to make it a united piece, a whole piece — and not an anthology or three different stories. And the uniting piece was a fourth woman, who had been through her own dark spaces that put her in a place that other people would feel comfortable talking about their own deepest, darkest desires — and fears, too.”
While Gia is based on Taddeo, it was important for Woodley to portray the character as someone separate from the author. “It is based on events that Lisa has experienced,” the actress explains. “But Gia is a completely different human being — with her own ways of coping and her own ways of handling situations. We wanted [the character] to feel authentic to who Gia was, instead of trying to fit her in a box of ‘reality.’ And because Lisa isn’t Queen Elizabeth or somebody we know everything about, there was a sense of artistic licence that we could play with, in order to make her feel the most honest possible.”
Much like for Gia herself, it is past trauma that often guides the women she writes about. For Taddeo’s co-showrunner Laura Eason, there was another motivation they shared that she wanted to maintain from the book. “Three Women is an intimate, haunting portrayal of female desire,” she muses. “It’s about unfulfilled desire shaping your life choices — and how these women in the story are really reclaiming what they want. We meet them at that pivot point, where they are able to see that what they have is not all that they want or all that they can be.”
In the case of Maggie, the only woman who appears in the book and series under her real name, the journey is about reclaiming agency after her life stalls in the wake of her high school ordeal. “You get to see how women feel. It’s allowed to be complicated. It’s allowed to be unapologetic,” says Creevy. “By the end of the show, she reclaims her power and her voice. She finds a strength that she’s always had.” Sloane’s trajectory, on the other hand, is more about self-acceptance. “When we start, she is who she is, but there’s still an element of repression — which is wild, because on face value you’re like, ‘What more can you ask for?’” says Wise. “But she’s still seeking her mother’s approval, she’s still seeking her family’s respect. Over the course of the series, not only does she grow more into this radical self-acceptance, but she’s also messy. Knowing that she is enough to contain it all, that’s ultimately her journey.”
The audience finds suburban wife Lina, whose husband of 11 years won’t even kiss her, at a breaking point. “She is someone who has blinked awake in her life and realized, ‘I can’t live like this. I’ll die if things keep going this way,’” says Gilpin. “She has an intense desire to be touched and kissed and loved and seen and celebrated. And she is living a life where she is never kissed, never touched, never looked at — and certainly not celebrated.” Through meeting Gia, and reconnecting with a past love, Lina discovers both freedom and control. “She reaches a point where [there’s] less letting life beat the s*** out of her,” Gilpin chuckles.
In these individual stories, Taddeo discovered universal truths that connect her readers to her subjects and each other. The author, however, believes that what keeps more women from openly sharing stories about their lives is the fear of judgment. “I think the idea of thinking that there might be ‘commentary’ on it is part of what blockades that,” she explains. “I don’t think it’s for any of us to comment on others. I think having judgment about another human being is dangerous and flawed. So, what I hope is that there’s not commentary so much as an absorption and a feeling of, ‘Oh, I understand.’ We weren’t setting out to teach a lesson. If there was any goal, it was ‘Let us let each other feel less alone.’ ”
Three Women airs Friday, October 4 on Starz 1 and Starz 2