CONNIE BRITTON

The Nashville, Friday Night Lights and The White Lotus star, 55, faces a major tragedy in her latest role for TV. In Dear Edward (Feb. 3 on Apple TV+), Britton plays Dee Dee, a woman whose husband died in a plane crash that killed all aboard except for a 12-year-old boy named Edward. In an examination of the human spirit, the story follows Edward and the relatives of those lost as they come together after the crash.

This is a story about unexpected loss. Did you learn something about grief playing Dee Dee?

I did. Grief is such a profound and organic topic. It really is something that we all deal with and it’s fundamentally human. Yet it’s something that feels so elusive, particularly in the American culture. I find having gone through grief in my own life that a lot of times we don’t have ways to work through it and to handle it. We’re not given the tools or the language for it. This was really a wonderful opportunity to explore that. I really learned playing Dee Dee that grief comes in many forms. It can certainly come from the loss of a loved one, but also from the loss of your own sense of self or your own sense of what you know or what you perceive your life to be.

What was it about Dee Dee that spoke to you?

This character represents a woman that we could see from a distance, and we’d have all these ideas of who she is, all these perceptions of who she is. Frankly, she has all those perceptions and projections about herself.

What’s really fun is to dismantle and unpack that. It was a wonderful opportunity to explore this woman who grew up thinking that she had a certain set of values and then realizes that her values are something else entirely and her life is something else entirely, and she grows from that.

Do you think, as the show demonstrates, that we don’t always fully know the people we loved?

The show explores how truly difficult and complicated intimacy is. Even in the midst of intimacy in love and in life, we have closed doors and dark rooms. Sometimes it is hard, even with those we love, to be our whole selves and to show our whole selves. I like the way the show explores that fully.

Jason Katims, the showrunner for Dear Edward, also worked on Friday Night Lights. Was that show a turning point in your career?

Oh, absolutely. It did change my life. It was the first time that I did a show that really got into the zeitgeist and was really beloved. Because of the way modern media is, people have continued to discover Friday Night Lights over the years, which is so great.

There were just so many things that I learned from doing that show that have held true for me going forward in my career and I always refer back to: Yeah, those are my values, that’s my goal, that’s what I’m going for. It was really a joy to find that again working with Jason.

What can you tell us about your next project, Winner, about a whistleblower? It’s a movie about Reality Winner, a

young decorated veteran, 26, who ended up working at the NSA [National Security Agency] in 2016. She saw classified documents that said that the government was basically covering up the fact that the Russians had meddled in the 2016 election. She anonymously sent the document to journalists, but was immediately discovered and the FBI locked her up. I play her mother, Billie Winner, who became her greatest advocate. It’s a fascinating story and I think a really important story for us to see as Americans, because she was such a patriot, as are her mother and her family. I want more people to know about her and how she was treated.