Entertainment
The 'Modern Love' Cast Has So Many Celebs, It's Basically A Who's Who Of Hollywood
If the prospect of watching a number of real and widely varied love stories come to life onscreen wasn't enough to entice you to watch Amazon's Modern Love, the cast likely will be. Among the anthology series' star-studded lineup of actors are one Oscar, three Emmy, one Tony, one Grammy, and two Golden Globe winners (plus many more nominees). They're spread out among the individual narratives of each episode, but whichever one you happen to hit play on, there's at least one A-list celebrity to be found.
For John Carney, who co-wrote, directed, and executive-produced the show — an adaptation of the popular New York Times column of the same name — it was a dream come true. He called the cast "an embarrassment of riches" in a press release for Modern Love, explaining that, "Literally every actor you see onscreen was a first choice. Not one person we approached turned us down."
With the episodes clocking in at roughly 30 minutes each, the actors featured in Modern Love won't be on your screen for long. But here's who you can expect to pop up as you make your way through Modern Love's first season, arriving on Amazon Oct. 18.
Anne Hathaway
Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway brings Terri Cheney's story, "Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am," to life as Lexi, a woman with bipolar disorder. Hathaway told W magazine that she spoke to Cheney to prepare for the role, and that "she was incredible and invaluable." She also said she was "really humbled" to be able to tell Cheney's story during the Television Critics Association's Modern Love panel, per Entertainment Weekly.
Gary Carr
Gary Carr plays a man who makes a connection with Hathway's Lexi at the grocery store. Previously, the actor appeared as Jack Ross on Downton Abbey and C.C. on The Deuce — a latter of which is what made Carney want to cast him. "Gary Carr is someone I've been dying to work with ever since I first saw him on HBO's The Deuce," he said in the aforementioned press release.
Tina Fey
Fey brings to life Ann Leary's 2013 essay "Rallying To Keep the Game Alive," about her marriage to actor Denis Leary. "It was very exciting to hear that Tina Fey was going to be playing the character loosely based on me," Ann told an audience after a viewing of the episode hosted by the Modern Love podcast's home NPR station WBUR.
The story follows a couple considering divorce, but expect there to be some laughs, too. Catastrophe's Sharon Horgan, who directed and wrote the episode, told the Independent Fey and her costar John Slattery were "the funniest f*ckers."
John Slattery
After his hilarious appearance on 30 Rock as unhinged congressional candidate Steven Austin, Slattery reunites with Fey to play a loose interpretation of Leary.
Dev Patel
The Slumdog Millionaire, Lion, and Newsroom star plays a version of Justin McLeod — the founder of the dating app Hinge — in his episode. Like the essay that inspired it, "When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist" tells the story of a young dating app founder who recounts an epic past romance when asked by a journalist if he's ever been in love.
Catherine Keener
The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Get Out star plays the journalist opposite Patel, who has a love story of her own to share.
Andy Garcia
Andy Garcia (The Godfather Part III, Ocean's Eleven) plays a role in Keener's character's love story.
Julia Garner
Garner, who recently won an Emmy for her work in Ozark, stars as a woman who begins an unconventional relationship with an older man (played by Joker's Shea Whigham) that reminds her of her father. The episode, titled "So He Looked Like Dad. It Was Just Dinner, Right?" is directed by another A-lister, Emmy Rossum, who's a documented fan of the original NYT column.
James Saito
James Saito has been working consistently since the late 1970s, but with turns in The Terror: Infamy, Always Be My Maybe, and the final season of Broad City, 2019 has been a big year for him. He appears in the final episode of Modern Love's first season, "The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap," alongside Kramer vs. Kramer's Jane Alexander.
Cristin Milioti
Milioti (How I Met Your Mother, Fargo) appeared in the Broadway version of Carney's movie-musical Once, for which she was nominated for a Tony and won a Grammy for the soundtrack. "She was amazing and I knew I wanted to work with her again," Carney said in the Amazon release. "The five days we spent making this episode of Modern Love were some of [the] most memorable I've ever had in my career."
Sofia Boutella
Model, dancer, and actor Sofia Boutella has taken on action roles in movies like Kingsman: The Secret Service, Atomic Blonde, and Hotel Artemis, but the biggest action she'll see in "At the Hospital, an Interlude of Clarity," is when a man she is newly dating (John Gallagher Jr. — Patel's costar in The Newsroom) sustains an injury during sex and they are rushed to the ER.
Andrew Scott
The Hot Priest from Fleabag is getting romantic again for Modern Love. His episode is based on "DJ's Homeless Mommy" Dan Savage's essay about he and his husband adopting their son through open adoption. This is the only Modern Love story to showcase a same-gender relationship, something Scott (who is gay) noted during a BUILD Series interview.
"It's an interracial couple that we play and it's a gay couple that we play," Scott said. "I like the fact that that's the biographical nature of the character, but that's not what the story is about. The story is about a family and how you make a new family. It was [a] really sweet thing to do."
With hundreds more essays from the Modern Love column to pull from, a whole lot more A-listers could be heading to Amazon for a potential Season 2.
This article was originally published on
