Linda Lavin’s final moments influenced ‘Mid-Century Modern’ character’s death

When Linda Lavin died on Dec. 29, there were still three episodes left to film of Mid-Century Modern, the new Hulu sitcom starring Nathan Lane as her son and Matt Bomer and Nathan Lee Graham as his longtime friends.

It’s a situation no showrunner or costar wants to think about in advance, but Lavin had an idea.

“She was very clear with us about making sure that we wrote everything that was going on with her into the show,” series co-creator Max Mutchnick tells Entertainment Weekly of conversations he and his producing partner David Kohan had with the Tony-winning actress in her final week. “It gave us a freedom that we never thought we were going to have to use in the way that we wrote that final episode.”

“It gave us a directive,” Kohan interjects, explaining Lavin’s wishes. “‘What happens to me should happen to the character.'”

So they did just that. In episode 9 (“Here’s to you, Mrs. Schneiderman”) of the series, streaming now, Lane’s Bunny reveals to Bomer’s Jerry and Graham’s Arthur that his mother, Sybil, died in the car as he was rushing her to the hospital — insisting along the way that he be careful and “don’t get a ticket.” Similar to the conversation Lavin had with her husband, Steve Bakunas, en route to the hospital, Bunny explains to his best friends/roommates how Sybil was having trouble breathing, so he rolled down the car window to get her some extra air. “Then,” Bunny explains, Sybil grabbed his hand and looked at him before saying, “If I die, I love you.” After speeding up — “I must’ve been doing 90,” he recalls — Sybil, he realized, had stopped warning him about getting pulled over.

“We were still kind of reeling just from hearing that she had died. So we were still processing that and grieving that,” Lane recalls of filming the scene “a couple weeks after Lavin’s death. Upon their return, rather than filming episode 8, which they were supposed to film next, producers decided to jump ahead to episode 9.

“It was so jarring,” Mutchnick recalls of her sudden and quick illness (Lavin’s cause of death was cardiac arrest from complications from lung cancer), “and we thought it would be the healthiest way for all of us to deal with it.”

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Lane recalls it being “really upsetting” upon returning to work and Lavin not being there. Revealing Sybil’s death, he says, “was overwhelmingly emotional” because of his monologue including some of the real conversation between Lavin and her husband. “All of that was really, really difficult, but in some way, it was cathartic as well,” Lane shares. “It’s something we never wanted or expected to do and there we were, doing it. But it was very bonding and it’s a way of paying tribute to her, which they did in the writing and hopefully we did in our performances.”