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The guest on today’s episode is Griffin Dunne, and a lot of the questions I asked Griffin from my Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That master list were focused on self-reflection, death and regret. I’ll explain why in just a little bit.
As for the reason I was talking to Dunne, he is currently starring in writer-director Noah Pritzker’s poignant and beautifully rendered family drama Ex-Husbands, opposite James Norton, Miles Heizer and Rosanna Arquette. The film is out now on digital and is highly recommended.
I was excited to sit down with Dunne, as some years back, I set up a Talkhouse Podcast conversation between him and the Australian actor-turned-writer-director Simon Baker, and was struck by Dunne’s wisdom and generosity as a conversationalist.
He had also just directed a documentary portrait of his aunt, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, which added a new facet to his already diverse creative resume.
Dunne has always been hard to pin down. He is, of course, a veteran actor best known for After Hours, An American Werewolf in London and countless other movies and TV shows, but he’s also the director of Hollywood movies such as Practical Magic and Addicted to Love, and the producer of indie classics like Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter and John Sayles’ Baby, It’s You.
What’s more, Dunne also comes from literary roots: not only was Joan Didion his aunt, but his father was the novelist and Vanity Fair reporter Dominick Dunne and his uncle was the journalist, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne.
In 2024, Griffin published a memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, which looks back on his family and their often dark and difficult history. Beautifully written, it is as unwaveringly honest as the work of his eminent relatives.
The book readily and sometimes even gleefully embraces the aspects of his family’s past that most people would choose to withhold, deftly balancing light and dark as it tackles addiction, divorce and sexuality head-on.
The biggest motif in The Friday Afternoon Club, though, is death, with the latter part of the book dominated by the tragic murder of Dunne’s younger sister, Dominique, and its incredibly painful aftermath.
Reading The Friday Afternoon Club gave me a deep insight into Dunne, but, maybe predictably, learning so much about him only led to more questions.
In our conversation, we talked about uncertainty, mortality, the complex nature of grief, driving cross country at times of great change, that time he scared the living daylights out of Neil Simon, my idea for a secret eighth day of the week, how Chekhov changed the course of Dunne’s life and career, and much more. — N.D.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range.
