“Succession” duo Peter Friedman and David Rasche, who played Logan Roy loyalists Frank Vernon and Karl Muller on the HBO drama, reunite in the upcoming short “Elderwood.”
From director Luke Gardiner, the 15-minute film also stars Laura Esterman (“Addams Family Values,” “I Know This Much Is True”). It follows Atticus, “a reserved widower whose quiet routine is disrupted when a free‑spirited couple moves in next door, leading him into an unexpected late‑life coming‑of‑age,” per the logline.
The short was co-written by Gardiner and Lucia Perri, and filmed at the Drum Hill Senior Living facility in Peekskill, New York.
Esterman praised Gardiner as a director with an “obviously clear vision of the world” and said of the project, “To play such an original and fresh characters like this, with two actors whose work I love was a joy.”
“It’s a very unusual script, very interesting and moving, and I thought Peter and Laura were absolutely wonderful,” Rasche added. “I think everyone had a wonderful time doing it — certainly the actors have.”
And Friedman said, “I hadn’t seen a story like that before.”
Gardiner said in a statement: “Throughout my teenage years, I watched my grandparents navigate the messy, complicated romances that so often emerge in senior living communities. Oddly enough, it felt like we were living parallel lives as I experienced my own emotional turbulence during those coming-of-age years. With ‘Elderwood,’ I wanted to explore that parallel by projecting the well-established visual language of coming-of-age films onto an unfamiliar canvas: senior living.”
He continued, “Central to that process was finding an active community like Drum Hill Senior Living, whose residents and atmosphere we continually learned from, and assembling a remarkable cast like Peter, David, and Laura. Despite their decades of experience, they embraced the long days of independent filmmaking and placed their trust in a filmmaker roughly quarter of their age.”
“Elderwood” was produced by Oliver Schneider and Casey Friedman’s February Problem Films, a new independent production company out of New York, alongside Jack Levine, Haiba Khan and Joe Meyer. Isaac F. Davis’s IACON Pictures provided production services.