We're back with Ricky.
Hey, congratulations on-- the "After Life"
has been picked up.
And I'm so excited for the third season.
I can't wait to see it.
And you executive produce.
You write.
You star in it.
You're a beautiful actor.
You're funny.
And yet there's so much just moving moments that--
I mean, it's beautiful.
I mean, congratulations.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, that was the--
after series 1, I've never had a reaction like it.
I just don't mean the size of the reaction.
That's a reflection of Netflix having 190 million subscribers
or whatever.
But I meant the emotional response,
people coming up to me on the street saying,
oh, I lost my brother three weeks ago before I watched it,
or I lost my mom.
And we had letters.
No one writes letters anymore.
But my agent got about 300 letters.
And you realize that everyone's grieving.
Ricky, tell everyone what it's about
so they know what we're talking about, if they haven't seen it.
Tell everyone what it's about.
So I play a man who loses the love of his life, his wife.
He's absolutely besotted with her.
He didn't care about anything else,
except that he had the perfect marriage and relationship.
And it starts-- series 1, ep 1, starts.
You can see that she's going through chemotherapy.
And it hasn't worked.
And she knows she's dying.
And she leaves a little video diary for him.
And it's all quite sweet because she's saying things
like, you know, you have to fill the dishwasher and all
this sort of stuff.
And then obviously, as it goes on,
you see that she's leaving more heartfelt messages about it.
And he watches these videos.
So you see the life they had.
And he's suicidal and he nearly kills himself.
But he doesn't because the dog's hungry.
And he thinks, OK, if I'm gonna--
I'll stick around, and I'll punish the world.
I'll have one last hurrah.
And when it gets too much, I'm could always kill myself.
Because he thinks it's like a superpower.
And in series 2, he's trying a different tactic.
Now, he's going through negotiation.
He's trying-- OK, if I'm going to stick around,
what is there for me to stick around?
What's the point of life?
He asks the big question, if you lose everything,
is life still worth living?
And it's about one man's journey and all the people around him
and all the people he meets.
And that sounds like it's the most depressing show ever.
But it really isn't.
It's honestly uplifting, seeing this man try things,
and his network of friends, and the funny things
he has to go through.
And this show's about that, how normal things,
they create a life.
They create a life.
It is so-- you know, you are fantastic in it.
All of the characters are hilarious.
The job that you have and the people
that you visit for the stories are hilarious.
And it--
You know, Portia and I were--
because, you know, I--
she is the love of my life.
She is my everything.
And I just can't imagine losing her and you know, that to me.
So it touched me in a way that I could
understand that character.
Like, how do you when you lose everything?
That's exactly right.
And when I was--
the first idea I came up with was, if you lose everything,
and you nearly kill yourself but you don't, you
know, what do you do then?
And then I have to think, well, what's losing everything?
And the same.
For me, it's your life partner.
And I want to go first.
And there's a funny--
but that's selfish.
And there's a funny line in it where
Anne, the lady on the bench, she lost her husband.
And she says, I'd rather live missing him
than have him live missing me.
And that's such a beautiful thing.
But I want to--
Yeah.
I definitely want to go first.
So yeah.
And that's selfish.
But that's the way it is.
[LAUGHS]
I understand.
That relationship between the two of you in the cemetery
is also beautiful.
I know, Andy.
We're going to take a break.
And then we're going to come back.
More with Ricky after this.