She wants full control next time.
Lucie Arnaz set the record straight on Aaron Sorkin’s 2021 biopic about her parents, Being the Ricardos.
During a June 2025 Q&A following a screening of her 1994 documentary, Lucy & Desi: A Home Movie, on the Paramount Studios lot, Arnaz, 73, revealed that Sorkin didn’t get everything right when producing the movie about her parents, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz—despite her feedback during the filming process.
“I was involved, and I tried to work on it and correct the incorrect parts, especially her relationship with the writers,” Arnaz said during the discussion. “Totally wrong. She adored those people. They got along so well, none of that backstabbing, crazy, insulting stuff. That was such a crock of poop. It was so wrong.”
She also said the tense, on-set dynamic between Vivian Vance and William Frawley was “overly done” in the film.
“But, you know, you can’t talk to Aaron. He’s Aaron Sorkin,” she added. “He would listen… ‘a meaningful consultation.’ He would listen, but then he would say, ‘Well, what do you know? You were 15 months old.’”
“What do I know?” Arnaz asked. “Well, how they shot the show. I thought, if ever do this, I’m gonna tell it like it really was because somebody might actually care.”
Being the Ricardos starred Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz. Lucie Arnaz previously praised the film, which received three Oscar nominations, but admitted there were some scenes she didn’t approve.
Speaking to Palm Springs Life in 2021, Arnaz claimed certain scenes in the film “never happened’ in real life. “I mean, there are certain scenes that I wished hadn’t been in the feature film. I couldn’t get my way and have them taken out, but they weren’t accurate,” she said. “I thought, ‘That shouldn’t be in there, because that never happened. That’s not true.’ And it’s not just theatrical license, it just wasn’t true.”
During the 2025 Q&A, Arnaz revealed that she had originally talked to Sorkin about doing a 10-part miniseries about her parents, but he wanted to do a movie instead. But in the past year, a high-powered studio executive has approached Arnaz to produce a series that will tell the whole story of Lucy and Desi.
“Only in the last 10 months or so, he’s been talking to me, and that’s what we’re gonna do,” Arnaz said. “You can’t do it in two hours. It has to be a big miniseries, and it can’t be one of those things that you start and it gets canceled after the first season, because you didn’t finish telling the story. So, they have to commit to maybe three seasons, maybe 30 episodes. So, we’re in the process of doing that.”
“I won’t have ‘meaningful consultation,’ I will have full control,” she added.
