After dealing with her own mental health, Kate Purdy decided to channel her experiences through animation for Amazon Prime’s Undone. Along with fellow co-creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Purdy created a story of generational trauma and redemption.
Undone follows Alma (Rosa Salazar), a woman who survives a near-fatal car crash and discovers she has the ability to manipulate time and reality. Season 1 focuses on Alma trying to find the truth behind her father Jacob’s (Bob Odenkirk) death and save him. Season 2 takes place in a new timeline after she succeeds, and now finds that her sister Becca (Angelique Cabral) has a similar ability. Together they try to help their mother Camila (Constance Marie) who is hiding something from them.
DEADLINE: Where did the idea for Undone come from?
KATE PURDY: I had a mental breakdown in 2012. I was in a really difficult marriage and was trying to figure out my way through it and did a lot of soul searching and self-realization to come to understand myself better and how I was contributing to the difficulties in the marriage. A lot of that happened because I actually had physical manifestations and I saw many different doctors, but it was a woman in the Palisades who was an Ayurvedic practitioner that helped. I found that the treatments were healing me physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. I kind of felt like I was receiving guidance from an unseen world, from an ancestry, from a grandmother coming through and saying like, “The greatest gift we can give you is to break you down in this way and set you on a better path in this lifetime, and we’re here to help even though it feels like suffering.”
I had been a TV writer for many years before that happened and I took time off from writing and decided to not go back. I spent a year actually practicing Ayurveda in the clinic, treating people, learning about herbs and medicine, and then traveling around the world to India to further study and practice Ayurveda. I also went to other places with like Mexico, Hawaii, Central America, where I met other kinds of shamans and healers who used ancient wisdom and traditions, along with different medicinal herbs and meditation practices and prayer, and found all of it really helpful and insightful. Then, of course, even in reading Carl Jung since he references his meditative states and what he realized from the unseen world and how he kind of reformed where psychology was in terms of his perception and his experiences. And I also read about physics and just started finding all kinds of lenses of understanding and all modalities.
I eventually went back into television and worked on BoJack Horseman with Raphael [Bob-Waksberg]. Raphael and I started talking about our life experiences and we would take walks and discuss our philosophies, where our ideas overlapped and where they were very different, and that became the central tension of Undone. Like, is this A Beautiful Mind or is this The Matrix? What is really real? And so those were some of the central themes that we explore in the show about reality; perceptions of different perspectives of what might be happening and how those play off of each other.
DEADLINE: How do you toe the line between giving a mystical explanation for something like schizophrenia without dismissing it?
PURDY: We are very careful to make sure that we’re not being didactic and saying, “This is what reality is.” We want to make sure that every scene in the show, and the show in it’s totality, presents questions and presents the ideas, because we don’t know. My grandmother was schizophrenic, so there is schizophrenia in the family and I have had the fear of losing my mind, and then I did. In that moment, it was a gift and I was able to find my way through it and end up better for it. But I don’t know, was that a schizophrenic break or was I actually experiencing an unseen world that was reaching through to me? I think we don’t know exactly what’s happening and there are lots of theories and lots of experiences. Ultimately, the show wants to explore that without dismissing any kind of idea or lens of what might be happening, but presenting all of them.
DEADLINE: The first season focuses mostly on Alma, with her goal of getting her father back. What was the reasoning behind branching out into different family members, like Becca and Camila, for season 2?
PURDY: Well, I think we have such great actors and we wanted to explore them and get deeper into their stories. We also wanted to explore the idea of generational trauma and this kind of mystery in the family. And that definitely comes from, I think, both Raphael and I having some mysteries in our families. For me with my grandmother, the schizophrenia is very much a mystery because she died before I was born. I’ve heard little details, but there’s not a lot of information forthcoming because people don’t really wanna talk about it. So, we have these sisters working together to uncover the past and realize that both their lineages are at play in terms of defining who they are. They have a choice in how they shape themselves by having those realizations of where they come from, and the pain and suffering that’s come through both lineages.
There’s an empowerment in self-realization, and that became what we wanted to explore in the second season. I wanted to show that it can exist within everyone and for Alma to not feel alone. I wanted Alma to feel like she’s in a universe where other people understand her and work together with her. The important messaging of it is that each of us has a little piece of wisdom and it takes all of us working together to create something better.
