Rashida Jones The multihyphenate creator on her new dark comedy Sunny, the complexity of grief, and whether a robot can find its motivation

In Sunny, you play an American woman in Kyoto, reluctantly bonding with a "homebot" gifted to her by her husband's company after he and their son disappear following a plane crash. What about grief were you hoping to explore in this story?

- ELIZA BERMAN

When you grieve, there is this sense that there's so much left unsaid. There's regret and confusion, this lens looking backwards at your entire relationship. I lost my mom a couple years ago, and it was the most complex emotional experience I've ever had. I had a baby, and then seven months later, my mom passed away. There's the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, but it's not cyclical. It's not linear. It's just chaotic.

Was the parallel cathartic, or do you draw a line between your experience and the character you're playing?

I'm not the kind of actor who's like, "I want to go and leave it all on the field." But I think there is something I wanted to process, or else I wouldn't have picked it. It's not the easiest thing to show up every day and scream and cry and have to access that place in real time. But there was probably something in me that wanted to sit in it a little bit more.