Bringing Joy to Grief in Apple TV+'s The Sky Is Everywhere

Jacques Colimon turned heads over Valentine's weekend as one of the romantic leads of the strange and luscious new drama The Sky Is Everywhere. But for Austin audiences, he's recognizable as a regular of the local stage, and a small screen and shot film veteran from projects he shot while he was an undergrad at UT-Austin. Before entering the magically realistic world of Josephine Decker's adaptation of Jandy Nelson's 2010 YA novel, he turned up in shorts like "Slow Creep" and series like Rooster Teeth's Day 5, and those days and roles are still dear to him. "Man, I'm getting teary-eyed just thinking about it," he said.

In The Sky Is Everywhere, the 2016 B. Iden Payne Award winner for lead actor in a drama plays Joe Fontaine, a young musician who enters the orbit of Lennie (Grace Kaufman) as she untangles all the complicated emotions of grief when her twin suddenly drops dead of a heart disorder. But while she finds release from her grief with Joe, she also finds the warm comfort of shared sorrow as she becomes closer with her twin's boyfriend, Toby (Pico Alexander). However, this isn't a dark and dour story. Colimon explained that it's really about "the celebration of life in reaction to deep grief and loss," one that's being released at the perfect time, with the Valentine's Day glow still present. "There's all kinds of love in the air," he said. "People coming together and celebrating love in a time when we really need love. You see this coming from a mile away in this movie."

As an actor, he had the rare opportunity to work closely with Nelson, who also adapted her book for the screen and was a constant presence on set. When they discussed his character, Colimon said, the writer would tell him, "'Joe's the sun,' and I think there's a lot of truth to that. He is the sun, and Toby is the moon in contrast, and you need to sit in the moonlight to know what the sunlight feels like. You need to really, truly, deeply feel grief, and mourning of death and loss, in order to really deeply embrace the celebration of life."

It was also an opportunity to work with director Decker, whom he called "the indie champion" and with whom he resonated creatively. "There's a certain level of theatricality that is her signature as a director, which I think is speaking to her experiences as a theatre artist." That's deeply expressed in The Sky Is Everywhere, which is set in the same kind of teen creative maelstrom as her 2018 breakthrough critical smash, Madeline's Madeline. However, where that earlier film folded its characters into the world of experimental theatre, The Sky Is Everywhere slides gracefully between film, theatre, dance, musicals, and even puppetry. Lying somewhere between La La Land and Labyrinth, Colimon said that it "speaks to all the things that I love, whether it's the immediacy of theatrical performance, or the music in it, or the dancing in it that were choreographed, and all of these disciplines coming together."

The Sky Is Everywhere is available on Apple TV+ now.