When Maggie Gyllenhaal first reached out to Olivia Colman about starring as Leda in her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, she had no idea who might play the other crucial role in the film, the young version of Leda who appears in flashbacks. So, she consulted with Colman herself. 

The pair met for lunch, and Colman happily accepted the role. But the conversation soon turned to which actor should take on the much angrier, younger Leda: not Colman’s Leda, on vacation in Greece, but the one struggling to care for two daughters in an unhappy marriage. “During that lunch, she was saying, ‘If you have any ideas about the young Leda,’” Colman told Netflix’s Queue. “I said, ‘I do actually. Do you know Jessie Buckley? She’s incredible.’” (The pair told Vanity Fair that they had met at a festival’s karaoke night the summer before.)

Buckley was cast, but she and Colman wouldn’t have much opportunity to discuss their shared role for a while. As the film moved toward production, COVID struck, and the team’s preparation moved online. Colman and Buckley did some intermittent texting, but Gyllenhaal encouraged them not to spend too much energy consulting each other on the part. Each actor was to make their iterations of the characters their own; Buckley wouldn’t do an impression of Colman, and vice versa. “A woman in her twenties is different than she is in her forties, so we will be different,” Colman said of the situation. The actresses agreed on an accent, but that was it.

But once they were finally on set, that didn’t mean they couldn’t spend some quality time together as older self and younger self. After wrapping, the pair would occasionally take a dip in the Aegean Sea together. (The two obviously don’t share any scenes in the film; this isn’t The Adam Project.) 

A little more than a year later, both Colman and Buckley are nominated for Oscars (best actress and best supporting actress, respectively) for their parts in the film. Colman’s lunchtime casting gambit seems to have paid off. “I feel pretty pleased with myself about that,” she said.