Skye (Elsie Fisher) and Aunt Julia (Kyra Sedgwick) ultimately save the sale of the house in “The Summer I Turned Pretty” once Skye helps their mom see reason.
It all comes down to the relationship between the two, which stretches beyond mother and child, since they are all each other really has.
“I thought of them as friends who never, ever ever fought. That just never happened. So when they go to this place and they start to fight, it’s like, I have absolutely no tools whatsoever to deal with that,” Sedgwick told TheWrap in an interview before the beginning of the SAG-AFTRA Strike. “We’ve always sort of been best friends and I’ve always been their biggest supporter and vice versa. They’re sort of inappropriate, in my mind, ‘I’m not your mom, I’m your friend,’ and when that falls apart, I think it’s pretty heartbreaking. But then she sees that her child is blossoming and she can’t deny that like, this is a good thing for both of us, ultimately, even when it’s painful.”
Julia inherited the Cousins Beach house from her half-sister Susannah (Rachel Blanchard) after she died of cancer. She wants to sell it for some form of closure around painful childhood memories she associates with the house as well as her complex relationship with her half-sister.
“She loved me and I loved her and when we were little when I was like her pretend mommy kind of thing. It was great. And then it shifted. She just became one of the children everyone wanted to be around and that became more and more painful for Julia,” Sedgwick said. “Her life with her mom was really not great. Her mother wasn’t a happy person. They had no money. She really grew up pretty poor.”
“[The] opportunity comes along to get rid of this house that has always caused her so much agony. She’s a single mother. The father’s not in the picture. She really needs the money, and her kid wants to go to college. They’re a superstar. They want to code and they want to go learn, go to a very expensive school,” Sedgwick explained about her nonbinary child. “[So Julia] decides that no matter what she’s gonna have to sell this house and then comes up against all these old feelings, being estranged and very sad. For everybody else, it’s this joyful place and for her, it’s ‘Heartbreak House.’”
Skye boldly stands up to their mother when Julia sells her the house. They refuse to leave with their mom to finalize the paperwork, and the kids throw a big bash at the house for a last hurrah when they fear that they have lost it for good.
“They probably haven’t really had many disagreements ever with their mom,” Fisher said. “So it feels like such a huge, insurmountable task to like, stand up to them.”
But Skye’s decision leads to the arrival of Belly and Steven’s mother Laurel (Jackie Chung), who convinces Julia to back out of the sale. The two women then team up to convince Adam Fisher (Tom Everett Scott) to buy the house and secure Cousins summers for the rest of their lives.
“Elsie as an actor is just so fun. They have a lightness of being that I think Julia inherently had as a child but lost as life got hard. That’s something that Elsie’s character Skye can always ignite in her mother. You get that in the last scene with the two of them — they’re laughing together and it’s lovely.”
Julia’s decision to sell the beach house drives the plot of Season 2, reuniting Skye with their cousins after a long period apart. Not only do they mend their bond with their cousins, but they impress Belly (Lola Tung) and Taylor (Rain Spencer) with their dance machine skills and overall eclectic personality.
“For Skye, there were a lot of crumbs and things in there and — because their story revolves around so much lost time — putting the pieces together, coming up with playlists, projecting, all those things,” Fisher said. “It was like a really weird mix. It’s been like a hot minute since I’ve listened to it, but I for sure had Skyline Pigeon by Elton John — the original harpsichord version — because that just felt correct. And then there’s this weird cover of “Margaritaville.” It was so weird. I had Sydney Gish, too, really talented artist.”
Episodes of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” are streaming on Prime Video now.