Ally Sheedy, Sofia Black D’Elia chronicle the mother/daughter pull in ‘Single Drunk Female’

“It’s very fluid and messy,” Sheedy says. Her character – Carol – understands that her daughter is going to move back in with her, but she doesn’t want it to affect her life. “I don’t want it to be, ‘I can’t have wine in the house. She’s not going to come change my life and my habits.’”

Sheedy says there are many aspects to her character that she understands. “I’m a mother,” the 59-year-old says. “And, yes, my mother shows up in Carol. It’s got to come from a real place. And, believe me, my mother is nothing but rich material. I also know the kinds of places I’ve had to go being a mother and making a lot of mistakes. It feels grounded.”

Carol, she says, is skeptical of her daughter’s goals: “I just got my house back to myself. I don’t want to take care of anybody anymore.”

Sam, according to Black-D’Elia, is the kind of person who has a hard time taking a lot of things seriously. She doesn’t blame her mother for her alcoholism but “she probably blames her for a lot of other stuff that is not Carol’s fault.” The series, she says, is “complicated and funny and weird and nuanced in a way that any girl with a mother can understand and relate to. And it’s really fun doing that with Ally.”

Sheedy, who started dancing with the American Ballet Theatre when she was 6 before segueing into acting, says D’Elia-Black’s role may well have been one she could have played in her early days. “A whole bunch of dimensions in the writing gave me different textures for Carol,” she says. “I’m drawing on real, true life.”