While making the recent hit biopic, “Being the Ricardos,” Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem dealt with some heavy pressure to portray legendary comic couple, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
And now comes Amy Poehler’s deep dive documentary, “Lucy and Desi.”
But for their real life daughter, Lucie Arnaz, keeping mom and dad’s legend in check has been a lifelong process.
When Entertainment Tonight caught up with Arnaz at the Los Angeles premiere of the documentary recently, she fully embraced the recently revitalized interest in her parents.
"How can it get better than this?" she excitedly asked. "I mean, 70 years after their show went off the air and hundreds of years after they were born, to suddenly be, I don't want to say reinvented, they're not reinvented, but rediscovered and re-appreciated and used to teach and to find a better way to live our life [is amazing]."
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Lucy and Desi were only married for 20 years – 1940-1960. But in that brief span, their iconic relationship created two pop cultural templates – the domestic sitcom, and the concept of the Hollywood power couple.
They also found time to have two children together – Lucie, 70, and son Desi Arnaz Jr., 69.
"That's one good way to look at it, you know,” said Arnaz. “You gotta look at that and that's what they did. They chose to go head-on into that. And the relationship didn't last as long as their children might have wanted it to, but in reality their love for each other lasted forever. So you don't get better than that really."
As opposed to the compressed, somewhat fictionalized storyline of “Being the Ricardos,” Poehler’s doc explores a fuller timeline of the duo’s “unlikely partnership and enduring legacy, as they risked everything to be together to create their empire.”
"It's raining Lucy and Desi right now and it just feels great!” she admitted. “The TCM podcast, then we found the old “Let's Talk to Lucy” radio shows, and the picture. Only the radio shows came from us. I found those and wanted to put them out, everything else came to us, and I just think it was the right time. It's a time to celebrate unconditional love and it's a time to explore relationships deeper, and they're very good subjects to use for that."
33 years have passed since Lucille Ball died, while Desi Arnaz passed in 1986. As she has aged herself, Arnaz has come to understand the tough times her parents went through, and how that shaped them -- while also being able to face them when put up there on the big screen.
"The older you get…” she says, “the older your children get, the longer you're married, the more you understand what people go through in order to try to stay together and have relationships and raise their children and stay working in this business. And it's not easy. And they did it really well and still didn't really succeed on some levels. But it's a great thing to look at and say, 'Well, would I have made those choices? Would I have done it differently? Would I have succeeded?' You never know."
In fact, Arnaz hasn’t just been a spectator to this revived interest – she was a consultant in the making of “Being the Ricardos,” a film that has now garnered three Academy Award nominations: Best Actress (Kidman), Best Actor (Bardem), and Best Supporting Actor for J.K. Simmons as William Frawley.
The documentary, “Lucy and Desi,” will stream on Prime Video starting March 4th.
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