The first Being the Ricardos teaser trailer has been released, and it gives fans a glimpse of Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz in the forthcoming drama movie. In the new clip, we get a good look at Bardem as the famed singer, actor, and dancer, but just a quick peek at Kidman in action as the world’s most famous redheaded comedy icon. We also get a good look at J.K. Simmons and Nina Arianda as William Frawley and Vivian Vance, respectively. Frawley and Vance are the actors who played Ethel and Fred Mertz, Lucy and Ricky’s best friends.
The film “takes place over the course of a week” during the production of the couple’s classic sitcom, I Love Lucy. It focuses on Ball and Arnaz encountering multiple crises “that could jeopardize their careers and marriage,” including an investigation into Ball by the House of Un-American Activities Committee for alleged ties to Communism. The couple also had to navigate through a controversial cover story on Arnaz, titled “Desi’s Wild Night Out,” which was featured in the tabloid magazine Confidential. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Being the Ricards writer-director Aaron Sorkin said of the film, “The only thing better than a story people don’t know is a story that people think they know but they’re wrong.”
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Elaborating, Sorkin explained, “The producer Todd Black spent over a year having meetings with me to tell me stories about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz that I’d never heard. For instance, that Lucy was accused of being a Communist. There were plenty of points of friction, and that’s what I look for when I want to tell a story. I had this structural idea that appealed to me. I like claustrophobic spaces; I like claustrophobic segments of time. So I thought if I could tell the story during one production week of — Monday table read through Friday audience taping — and tell it mostly on that soundstage, that there might be something good there. So I tried writing it.”
Going on to share what surprised him most to learn about Ball and Arnaz while making the movie, Sorkin shared, “Very early on, I had a chance to talk to Lucie Arnaz, Lucy and Desi’s daughter. And she encouraged me to really take the gloves off. Lucy wasn’t an easy person. Their marriage, Lucy and Desi’s, wasn’t the same as Lucy and Ricky. It was considerably more complicated. These were two people passionately in love with each other who just couldn’t make it work for interesting reasons.” Being the Ricardos opens in theaters on Dec. 10. It will make its Amazon Prime debut just 11 days later, on Dec. 21.
