The Dead To Me series finale was full of twists, tears, and laughs. Judy lost her battle with cancer and had heartfelt goodbyes with Jen and Charlie. Jen found out she was pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl she named Joey. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with Sam McCarthy about how he reacted to Judy’s death.
“It’s hard to really put that into words. I was a bit surprised and a bit sad,” Sam said. “I think there’s something beautiful about things being temporary in a kind of melancholic way. Speaking as someone involved in the show, however this might sound, I think it’s a better ending than if she hadn’t lived as much as I love Judy as a person. I was a bit like, whoa, and that’s kind of what I have to say about it. It was emotional. I remember shooting the last scene I had with Judy. It was really kind of quite sad. I remember Linda [Cardellini] in some of the takes was waving at the door, and I remember feeling like that was very poetic and sweet and sad.”
Before heading out to Mexico with Jen for one last getaway, Judy bid farewell to Charlie in one of the show’s most poignant scenes. Judy urged Charlie to not be too hard on his mom. Sam revealed whether or not Charlie knew in that moment that he was saying goodbye to Judy for good.
“I think he did. Yeah, he did. It’s not naive optimism, but there’s something… Yes, he knew. He knew. I’m not sure the reality of it had set in with him the way it set in with Jen but, yes, he knew,” Sam said.
Judy’s death wouldn’t be Charlie’s first experience with death. Dead To Me began in the wake of Charlie’s dad dying because of Judy in a hit-and-run. “Experience is a great and brutal teacher that way. The only real difference is when Charlie’s father died, it was very much a shock and completely unexpected, and this one was a bit of a painful, slow, ripping off of the Band-Aid,” Sam told HollywoodLife.
The final moments of the show dropped one last twist. It appeared that Jen was about to tell Ben that she killed his brother, Steve. Sam admitted that he believes Jen would end up revealing the truth to Beth.
“Well, if we were to assume that Jen and Ben were to be in a long-term relationship after this, I would have a hard time imagining that that relationship could survive on Jen’s side for a very long time with such a secret on her shoulders,” the actor said. “If I were her, I think it would get to a point where it would get impossible to continue and impossible to continue getting closer to someone without speaking about that. So I really don’t know. But I would have to assume probably, but then again, maybe not.”
When Sam began his run as Charlie in the show, he was just 16 years old. Now 20, Sam reflected on what he learned from co-stars Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini.
“I mean, you just kind of absorb osmosis a lot from your environment about being around such professionals who’ve made this their life,” Sam said. “I suppose that’s kind of the obvious answer to that, but maybe not. Obviously, Christina has really helped me a lot, and she was so wonderful to me on set and treated me with such love. I remember there was one time halfway through shooting season 3, I was feeling a bit low on confidence. I wasn’t maybe so proud of something or I was doubting myself. She gave me this very long talk about how putting that kind of pressure on yourself is constructing creatively, and a whole bunch of other things really just about how one deserves to trust themselves and the importance of that. If I had to say one particular thing it was probably that talk we had that was really transformative for me.”
The young actor is currently studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Insitute in New York City. His goal post-Dead To Me? “To be honest, I just want to continue to act,” Sam revealed. “Really, in the past year, I’ve really kind of fallen in love with acting in a deeper way than I really had before. I’d love to continue working right now. I’m studying theater in school and, frankly, the only thing that I really want to be able to do is to work on material that I think is provoking and exciting to me like the show was. Whether that’s on the stage or in TV and film and whatever it is, to be honest, I just want to be active.”