This story about André Holland and “The Eddy” first appeared in the Limited Series & Movies issue of TheWrap’s Emmy magazine.
He was required to not only speak but also act (and occasionally improvise) in French, a language he hadn’t spoken since high school. He had to be convincing on screen as a great piano player, even though his skill on the instrument was “pretty much nonexistent.” And he had to play a character who was closed-off and often uncommunicative, who carried the weight of a tragedy but tried to never show it.
“I tend to choose things that are frightening and on the verge of being impossible, and this definitely ticked both of those boxes,” André Holland said of playing Elliot Udo in “The Eddy,” the Netflix limited series about an American jazz pianist struggling to hold onto the club he owns in Paris and to repair a thorny relationship with his daughter, who’s arrived from the U.S.