“The idea really came from my own life because I am a person who had a lot of very close male friends in college and remained close to a lot of them,” says Francesca Delbanco, “but a moment happened when people started getting married and coupling up and having children, when I noticed I was getting becoming closer friends with my friend’s wives and Nick was becoming close to my friends and the world was calcifying into men being together and women being together.”

Francesca noticed this in all of her worlds, such as the gym, the children’s school, or even dinner parties. “Men would be talking to men and women would be talking to women. I started wondering why it had to be that way. When I looked around me, it wasn’t just me. It was happening everywhere. If you did a survey in any given room, that’s how it was broken up.”

This all led to the idea for the series Platonic. Rose Byrne stars as Sylvia, a stay-at-home mom of three who is married to Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), a lawyer. She reconnects with her old friend Will, played by Seth Rogen, who is recently divorced and works at a brewery that he also partially owns. They haven’t been close since college.

“Why is it hard to maintain platonic friendships of the opposite gender as life goes along?” asks Francesca. “Is that inevitable or is it something in society or something each person determines for themselves and is there any fighting against it?” Nicholas adds, “And, there’s something special about a male-female platonic friendship, so what do you lose when you don’t have that?”

Listen to my first interview with Nicholas Stoller for Bros back in Episode 367. We also mentioned my conversation with Dan Levy in Episode 506.

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