The Emmy-nominated Ingram gets about as much screen time as her Oscar-winning costar, and just as many tantalizing dramatic scenes. “When I imagined being an actor, this is the kind of work that I saw myself doing,” Ingram says. She channeled many of the hustling single mothers she knew growing up in Maryland for the part.
Given Ingram had only about two weeks to prepare for the series—and that she was parachuting into a shoot that required incredibly complicated sequencing, “I showed up to work scared every day,” she says. She’d film later scenes without knowing what came before, and had to completely trust Har’el to guide her. “She’d be like, ‘Okay, it’s a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of this.’” When Ingram finally saw the first episode, she says, “I just cried, cried, cried, cried…It’s absolutely the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in my career so far.”
Ingram had never met Portman before the project, but watched her movies “religiously” growing up—and name-checks Where the Heart Is as a particular favorite. (“I was so obsessed with this woman who had her baby in the Walmart,” she laughs.) So it was mind-bending not just to be cast alongside Portman, but to get a letter of support from her.
“When I got the job, she sent me a lovely note welcoming me onto the project and sort of expressing her trust in what I could bring to it. It’s always really amazing when you step into these atmospheres with people that don’t know you, but you know them very well from watching them. But the idea that someone that you respect so much is willing to see you beyond the things she’s already seen you play…” Ingram trails off. “To be seen is nice.”
Given the the length of the shoot and the fact that Maddie and Cleo’s complicated stories involve unspooling past secrets in different timelines, the shoot was “exponentially harder than making a film,” says Portman.
“Crossboarding is probably the biggest mind fuck of television,” adds Har’el of mapping out the show’s 489 scenes. “I came from shooting Honey Boy, where the whole shoot was 19 days. This was 106 days. I was a first-time showrunner, and some scenes were murder mystery, some were dance, some were music performance, and some were just character driven and a deep-dive into a dialogue.” She’s still recovering: “I want to celebrate it because I can’t believe I survived it. It took three and a half years.”
During the course of writing, directing, and showrunning Lady in the Lake, Har’el also became a mother, giving birth to a baby girl, whom she held on her chest as she edited the series. The experience, she says, brought her closer to Maddie and Cleo.
“This show is about two mothers, so I feel like I kind of got to join my characters midway and understand them better,” says Ha’rel. “Things that maybe resonated with me from the outside when I started to work on it…by the time I finished, I saw from a different perspective, which was extremely deepening, the whole experience.”