Rashida Jones has opened up about her "painful" experience living in a world without her parents Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton.
In her new movie, In the Blink of an Eye, the Parks and Recreation actress plays Claire, an anthropologist who has to pause her research at a university to move home to be with her sick mother.
During a post-screening Q&A in London on Thursday night, Jones opened up about her own experience of grieving her parents and admitted it was "cathartic" to act out those emotions in the film.
"There's a lot of this movie that's informed by grief and I've had a lot of grief in my life because I lost both my parents in the last six years," she told the audience. "I'm living in a post-parent world, which I know that's the right way around and that's the good version, but it's still so painful.
"The opportunity to do that on-screen and be able to act those beats of finding out that a parent's sick and taking care of the parent and sort of trying to figure out how to move on from that, it was a very nice, cathartic thing for me to do."
Rashida noted that she had to do multiple takes of the scene where her mother dies, and had to "keep crying" over and over again.
"I feel lucky in a way, I get the full range of emotion which helps me process, selfishly, in my own life," she added.
Famed music producer and composer Quincy died in November 2024 at the age of 93, while The Mod Squad actress Peggy died in April 2019 at the age of 72.
Rashida, 50, said that she hopes the film inspires people to talk about death and grief, topics she feels aren't addressed enough.
"Having gone through it twice now, I kind of only want to talk about death. It's the one thing we never talk about and it's coming for us all. Literally, 100% success rate," she continued. "It's so weird that we have so much fear and tension around it and then it happens to you or somebody you love dies, and you feel completely rudderless. You have so many logistics to take care of and you have all these feelings you never got to talk about."
Elsewhere in the conversation, The Office star shared the favourite piece of advice she received from her father: "Make decisions based on love and not fear", and explained that it was "so dynamic and applicable to everything (she) did".
In the Blink of an Eye, also starring Kate McKinnon and Daveed Diggs, is now streaming on Hulu/Disney+.
