Goodbye to New Girl, hello to a new gig
Canadian Hannah Simone trades loft life for reboot of ‘The Greatest American Hero’
After seven seasons, Hannah Simone is saying goodbye to loft life in “New Girl.”
The final season began Tuesday, and the Canadian actress who plays the cynical model Cece shared some key behind-thescenes moments from the final eight episodes.
“It was really very emotional,” Simone said in an interview. “It was an interesting thing to be on a show to know when the end is coming. A lot of times you’re on a show and then you find you’re cancelled. Because we knew it really was the final season, every moment was precious.
“There were a lot of lasts. The last time at the bar. The last time with Rob Reiner guest starring. The last time we’re in the loft. There were so many emotional moments.”
The series finale was shot in sequence and ended up having a significant poignancy as the final moments were captured, says Simone, a Ryerson University graduate who got her start hosting HGTV’s “Space for Living” before spending three seasons as a MuchMusic VJ.
“It was very smart, how they shot the final episode. The last shot is the entire cast standing in an empty lot saying our goodbyes. So that was really an artimitating -life-imitating -art kind of moment. We were truly really saying goodbye to each other as friends. We knew at that moment and, just like the characters did, we were all not going to be working together every day like that.
It was a big moment that I’ll never forget.”
Simone’s co-stars include Zooey Deschanel as the “adorkable” girl of the title, Max Greenfield, Jake Johnson and Lamorne Morris.
Creator Liz Meriwether told television critics that the show will feature a time jump of three years when it resumes for the final season.
“We were lucky enough to get these last eight episodes to really have a chance to finish it the way that we wanted to,” Meriwether said. “So we decided to jump forward in time three years to
kind of just, sort of, throw in some new storylines and kind of move things forward.”
Meriwether wrote the finale of Season 6 as a kind of series finale in case it wasn’t renewed for a seventh season. At the end of that season, Cece was pregnant with the child of husband Schmidt (Greenfield).
Coincidentally, Simone, 37, gave birth to a son last August.
In the new episodes of “New Girl,” she is portrayed as a working mother in yet another artimitating- life moment.
“It was exciting we got to work with beautiful twin girls; it was a nice thing to change up our season,” says Simone, who was born to an Indian father and a mother with Greek, German and Italian roots.
“I think my character is so different from me. So it was cool to see how Cece would be a mom. It was also nice to play a working mom on the show that’s empowered, with Schmidt wanting to be the stay-at-home dad. We’re a comedy, but we also deal with real-life situations that people face and I think that’s why we’ve been around so long.”
A lot has changed in the TV landscape since “New Girl” debuted in 2011, Meriwether says.
“I was 29 when the show premièred and I was like, ‘Why is it a story that I’m a woman and I’m running a show?’ Kind of amazing thing is I think, seven years later, I don’t think that’s the story. I think it would be an odd story to write: there’s a woman showrunner,” she said. “It’s interesting for me to just look at in some ways how, at least the television world, has grown in that way.”
Simone, meanwhile, might be busier than she’s ever been since she’s was chosen to star in an ABC pilot remake of the 1980s comedy “The Greatest American Hero” that originally starred William Katt. That would make her the first female superhero of South Asian descent on primetime TV.
Last year, she shot actioncomedy “Killing Gunther” with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Taran Killam and fellow Canadian Cobie Smulders in Vancouver.
“Things have been happening so fast, just as one thing ends,” Simone says. “But it’s all been life-changing. The crazy thing when you start is that you don’t know it’s going to be seven seasons. Every season you say, ‘I can’t believe they’re letting us do this’ and seven years go by. So much happens in your own personal life.
“It’s been wild to have this show be this one common thread as my own personal life has gone through many changes. And now there’s this excitement because it’s not another season of “New Girl,” but for me it’s a new beginning.”