Big Little Lies’s Jeffrey Nordling Was Also Confused by Gordon Klein’s Midlife Crisis

Big Little Lies viewers, an important public service announcement: If you were shocked by the season two trajectory of Gordon Klein, husband of Laura Dern’s character Renata—and there’s a lot to be shocked about, between the $30,000 train set, reckless gambling, and cheating reveals—you are not alone. Jeffrey Nordling (24, Desperate Housewives), who plays the proud transition glasses-wearing spouse of “the Medusa of Monterey,” was also thrown when he heard that Gordon—a seemingly chill, supportive husband in season one—was going to have a whiskey-swilling, man cave-skulking, fortune-losing midlife crisis in season two.

“I protested for quite awhile” after learning of Gordon’s shocking story pivot, Nordling told Vanity Fair, revealing that he spoke to both series creator David E. Kelley and season two director Andrea Arnold. He had played and understood the character one way during the show’s first season, once intended to be its only season. But, when HBO picked up a second year of the Emmy-sweeping series, Big Little Lies was out of source material; Liane Moriarty, who had written the 2014 novel on which the season was based, had not written a sequel.

So the premium-cable channel tapped Moriarty to come up with a new story, on which Kelley based the new episodes. But in his conversations with the show’s creatives, Nordling essentially argued that his character’s shift from decent husband to hall-of-fame dirtbag seemed to come from left field.

“That was one of my complaints: This is not Gordon,” explained Nordling. He also found it weird that “this season, my character is just along for the ride—and Renata made all the money. That was definitely not the case in season one.” But most crucially, “I felt really protective of [Gordon and Renata’s] marriage…. I knew that it meant the marriage is going south, and it is the only good marriage in the show in season one.”

Eventually, though, the show’s creator convinced Nordling that the midlife crisis needed to happen. “I just had to wrap my head around it after a few conversations—and think, Fine, Gordon’s just going through a bitch of a midlife crisis. There you have it. We’re all only one phone call from our lives being ruined,” he said.

Just like Big Little Lies viewers, Nordling had no clue during the show’s first season that Gordon possessed the man cave of premium cable’s seediest dreams—full of artifacts so confounding (the planes, the old-timey vault door, the baseball bat!) that the Ringer published a piece titled “66 Questions About Gordon’s Man Cave in Big Little Lies.” The first time he realized Gordon had this secret hideaway, Nordling laughed, was when “I read it in the script. The trains were definitely part of David’s description…and the ones on set blow out real steam…. He mentioned the memorabilia, and also the vintage planes that are hanging from the ceiling—all very expensive stuff. A baseball bat that was Ted Williams’s actual bat that he hit the final hit to get to the highest-of-all time batting average. Everything, of course, is really expensive, so the Kleins really are bankrupt.”

As for the reason why Gordon snapped? “Mostly, look what Gordon has: the house, this beautiful wife, this gorgeous daughter. And it’s not enough. There’s something—whether it’s greed or someone looking for something higher, material-wise, like the jet. So he gambles. And I get the feeling this is not the first time he has. He probably did a little bit of it before. But yeah, he bet everything.”

Source: Vanityfair.com

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