This season was supposed to be a complete juxtaposition to the end of season two. We wanted to open up and were in a beautiful, idyllic witchy village; they’ve already gone through the worst of survival, and now the summer’s coming, and things are looking up. A summer solstice ceremony happens in the first episode, putting leaves on their costumes.
I think when you are playing a real person. Trying to work through her in real life in the first trial, her closing argument was 15 hours over three days. I had something like eight pages, which is still an extraordinary amount for a TV show, but it’s not her 15 hours of that. I think the parts of when I felt like I was her defense attorney. You know, It’s an extraordinary piece of work. I wish everyone could watch it. I thought for a minute about doing a one-woman show of 15 hours of her closing because it’s an aria. She’s just really incredible. It was hard not being able to do the whole thing, but wanting to give the spirit of what she did.
It was fairly daunting because the expectations were pretty high. These guys have an incredible body of work. Season one was terrific, not just the story, but the visual standard was set so high, so obviously, we wanna take it to new levels and expand upon what they did for season one
From our perspective, it was mostly about simulating the handheld movement as if the operator was riding on the dragon with a rider or it was shot like a dragon to dragon as you would shoot horses, horse to horse. So that was that was a challenge. We simulated the handheld feel by putting a remote Libra Head on the back of the rig.
There’s sort of this empty liberation that you see throughout episode two that was interesting to explore psychologically. Allowing for those characters to speak to themselves. Then, we asked ourselves what it meant to be the heartbeat underneath what was happening. Some of that was style. Some of that was the hum motif and tapping into a real sense of profound yearning on behalf of these two boys.
I loved the wedding dress. I think it’s super special and custom. I think Alan and I love to play with gender. It’s so cool that on a network show like this, we can have him show up in a traditional men’s suit but then add a wedding dress on the bottom, the red flower details, and his crazy finger wave hairs. I just love how that came out.
I think there’s a parallel. In the show, she’s this mysterious ex-girlfriend character that Joanne (Kristen Bell) wants to know more about. I think, in some ways, that was our experience. We couldn’t figure out who Rebecca was. Is she this type A person? Is she this pushy? Like, who is she? I really couldn’t figure it out for a while. Then, once we got on set and you said the words, it coalesced into something tangible in real-time.
As I mentioned, I can’t emphasize this enough: I must underscore how rare it is to meet an actor like Brian Tyree Henry and have that immediate, instant chemistry. We’re the same kind of actor, we’re both fast, and we’re both a little facile. It was like jumping into extremely familiar territory with someone I’d never seen before. We had a marvelous rapport instantly.
They block-shot the season, so a director would do two episodes and another director the next two. We were editing as the dailies were coming in, and we edited episodes four and five at the same time. So four is the day in the life, and five is the bank heist… It gets a little confusing because you’re trying to focus on the story of both and make sure both feel polished. It was a tight schedule, but it was also interesting doing back-to-back episodes.
Most of it is shot on location, certainly the action sequences. So it’s incredibly complicated in Central London with all the restrictions. We wanna have extremely anarchic scenes but keep everything grounded so you fully believe what’s happening to these characters. Even though they’re shootouts in Central London or King’s Cross Station, you wanna feel this isn’t fantasy land.
