"Television is a goddamned amusement park."
Mr. Robot season two is upon us. The heavily Emmy-buzzed drama might help the USA Network break out of the awards jail it’s been in for years. After recognition from multiple guilds, Mr. Robot season two appears to amp up the action after the thrilling season one finale. Rami Malek (a surefire Emmy nominee for Best Actor) returns as Elliot Alderson along with the hactivist collective.
You have plenty of time to binge right now. Mr. Robot season two arrives July 13.
If you’re not watching the critically acclaimed miniseries The Night Manager, then AMC is where you need to be spending your Tuesday nights. Starring Tom Hiddleston (I Saw the Light) and Hugh Laurie (House), The Night Manager is based on the John Le Carré novel. It deals with an undercover agent’s (Hiddleston) attempts to bring down an arms dealer (Laurie). Directed by Susanne Bier (In a Better World), the 6-part miniseries has received widespread praise for its direction, timely adaptation of the source material, and memorable lead performance by Hiddleston.
I recently caught up with executive producer Stephen Garrett to discuss casting and the challenges of modernizing The Night Manager.
ADTV: It’s a pleasure speaking to you! A fellow Brit is always fun. I want to congratulate you on a great miniseries. I saw the billboard a few months ago on Fairfax and I was so excited. Were you always a fan of [John] Le Carré and his work?
SG: I don’t know how much you know, if anything, about my career. There’s no reason why you should know anything [laughs], but back in the UK, I founded a company called Kudos and the first series with which we had a huge hit was with a show that played in the UK called Spooks but played here as MI-5. That show was my idea and it was inspired, absolutely, by my love of Le Carré novels. That idea I had goes back to 1970 and since I was a teenager I’ve been a fan of Le Carré. When I got a call from The Ink Factory, which is the company founded by Le Carré’s son, telling me they’d read I was leaving the company I’d founded and was in the process of reinventing myself, they told me they were in the very early stages of developing The Night Manager with the BBC. They had the first draft of the first two episodes and they had Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston attached and they asked if I would like to join the project and sort of take the lead executive role on it. It was like I’d died and gone to heaven, quite frankly. Yes, is the long answer to that question, I have always been a fan of Le Carré.
ADTV: I remember Spooks. I used to love watching it. It’s crazy that that was actually inspired by him. I learn something new every day.
SG: Completely! What’s interesting is, as you know, TV and movies are full of spy stories, but at that time when we started Spooks, television on both sides of the Atlantic was full of cop shows and doc shows, essentially. That time, to go into a spy show was really quite rare in TV. Now, you can’t turn on a channel without bumping into a spy so it’s harder to make a great spy story sing. But, Le Carré is the granddaddy of them all. He invented the modern spy story and, in a way, also invented the sort of anti-hero lead. If you go back to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold he has these fabulously morally ambiguous central characters. He was way ahead of his time with a slightly bleaker, cynical, realistic view of what it meant to be a hero. He’s responsible for what we take for granted in 21st century storytelling, but he was way ahead of the game.
ADTV: Speaking of the antihero, Hugh Laurie was absolutely perfect in the casting, and he’s also obsessed with Le Carré, which is perfect. He had a history with this, didn’t he?
SG: That’s right. By his own admission, he is an obsessive Le Carré fan. When the book came out, he tried to buy the rights and somebody, Sydney Pollack in fact, got there ahead of him. He wanted to play the part that Tom Hiddleston played, but 25 or so years later he had no option but to be Roper. In a way, you sort of thank God for that because I can’t imagine anyone better than Hugh playing Roper and I can’t imagine anyone better than Tom playing Pine. Sometimes, failure and rejection can work to your advantage, and it did in that case.
ADTV: Tom was perfect for his role as Jonathan Pine.
SG: He’s had, rightly, a lot of praise for, I think, what is so hard to do proper justice to in terms of the quality of his performance. There’s so much silence and so much space between words and, with a lesser actor, that would just feel blank and dead and dull, but there’s so much going on inside his head, behind his eyes that you really can watch him, for huge periods of time, seemingly without him doing anything. That’s why what he’s doing is so extraordinary.
ADTV: I can’t say it enough how perfectly they worked together. You struck gold with this one.
SG: It was thrilling. Again, I think one can’t underestimate the role our director Susanne Bier played. If you’re familiar with her work, you know she’s won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and was nominated another time. She is just a masterful magician with human alchemy. She does her best work in the space between words and the way in which bodies react to one another so that heady mix of Susanne, Tom, and Hugh just created something special that you can only dream of really and then stand back and admire when it happens in front of your eyes.
ADTV: What were the challenges in basically recalibrating the novel? The book came out in 1993. The series was modernized and you changed the end of the book, which worked out incredibly. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but in this case, it really did.
SG: I think the three big changes were, as you said, modernizing it, and that’s where the credit should go in large part to David Farr, our adapter, who had the idea because Le Carré’s original story starts in Cairo. If you do bring it up to date and you’ve got the Cairo story happening four or five years before you get to finding Pine in the Zermatt hotel actually coinciding perfectly with Arab Spring so it all fit. It also combined with the feelings that when Le Carré was writing in the early nineties the whole thing about Mexican drug cartels felt very fresh and, yet, now TV and movies are full of that. It felt more contemporary and resonant to be talking about illicit arms dealings in the Middle Eastern context. All that fit it beautifully and that was a stroke of genius on David Barr’s part.
Then, I think, what happened with the other big change up of turning the character of Burr, who is a man in the book, into a woman, was something I, when I came on board, had in conversations with my partners and Susanne Bier. It was clear that Le Carré had created, which was true to the time, a very male world, but suddenly in a 21st century context, that didn’t feel right. The obvious person to have go through a sex change was Burr. Susanne said there’s only one actor that [she] wanted to work with and that was Olivia Colman. In their first conversation, there was good news and bad news when Olivia said, “Yes, I’d love to do it, but by the way, I’m pregnant.” We then had to navigate our way through the insurance and, needless to say, we weren’t terribly excited to send, by then, a very heavily pregnant woman to Morocco with quite intense filming of running down corridors and guns to her head or whatever. Anyway, we were so excited by the possibility, from a story and character point of view, of not just having a woman in that role, but a pregnant woman that even if the insurance had vetoed Olivia, which they came close to doing, we wrote the part to be pregnant. It seemed, to us, to add so much value and vulnerability and tension to the story as it unfolded.
With the ending, there are some endings that are very satisfying in a novel, but they just don’t work as well on screen. It’s quite hard to articulate, but it’s partly because you can get inside the heads of characters very easily in a novel. In terms of, externalizing satisfying endings, there are some things you have to reinvent. I think we were true to the spirit of the ending of the book but just handled it in a different way. At the end, as you’ve probably read or heard, Le Carré, himself, is really thrilled with how this one’s turned out. We all are such fans of Le Carré so if we made him unhappy, however successful the show had been, that would have been pretty devastating. The fact that it worked as well as it did and he’s delighted is as thrilling as it gets.
ADTV: This is a TV production, but if you were to make a movie of it, you’d have probably two hours. However, TV gives you more hours to get your adaptation across. How did that work for you?
SG: Here’s the thing, and this goes back to why it took so long for the story to come to screen, Hollywood generally has this slightly knee-jerk response when a book, particularly a thriller, appears to just get bought from the assumption that if it’s a good thriller you can turn it into a movie. The truth is, particularly with Le Carré, you can’t condense the story into two hours because if you reduce The Night Manager just to the plot, then you actually lose everything that makes your skin tingle about it, which is that slow burn of the cat and mouse game played out between Pine and Roper. There are some stories that just need more space. Some novels are great at 200 pages and some are great at 600 pages and this happens to be one that works at 600 pages.
The truth is, also, having one director and one writer tell that story over six hours essentially makes it a six hour movie. It just so happens that movie theaters can’t cope with six hour stories [laughs] so it’s perfectly suited for this new golden age of television. You’ve got audiences who want cinematic quality and cinematic complexity and cinematic ambition, but they want to watch it at home with their increasingly growing screens. As multiplex screens get smaller, home screens get bigger so the fusion between the two worlds is actually creating exciting possibilities. I think that there’s no better place for this story to be told than in ways that allow people to consume it at home.
ADTV: When you watch it, it is like a movie. The production values are so incredible and you’re filming in all these great locations. Did you have any challenges when filming in Morocco or wherever?
SG: It’s always a challenge, particularly because of the Roper character being clearly a kind of oligarch, you obviously have to find locations, in particular a villa kind of fortress that reflects his status in the world. When briefing our location scout, someone had done a bit of research and pulled out pictures of houses that were the sort of thing that would work, and someone had actually found a picture of the very house we used. We needed to find the perfect house and base everything around that and our location scout found the very house that we’d used as a comp saying to find something like that and he found that! That house in Majorca, which is owned by a British hedge-fund guy, just couldn’t have been better. Historically, it had been a fortress. It’s exactly the place that someone like Roper would hang out. We sort of extrapolated from that and used Majorca to provide locations, so, when you saw captions that said Morocco or Istanbul or Madrid, that was all in Majorca. We had a second unit camera man go to Cairo and Istanbul and create those scene-setting shots, but the details of it was all in Majorca.
In terms of challenges, we had a great Moroccan crew in Morocco and Spanish crew in Spain and our physical production team did an amazing job navigating their way through different cultures. This is sort of a long winded answer to your question about some of the challenges, but you see in the credits on movies things like ‘best boy’ and ‘grip’ and all those terms the public aren’t familiar with, but the Moroccans had this standard member of their crew who turned up every day when we were filming on location who was a snake charmer. He was there to make sure that we were not invaded by snakes. Susanne adopted him and he stood by Susanne for every waking second of every day and night that we were shooting outside in Marrakech. We had no snakes so either he did a brilliant job or there were no snakes, but I loved the idea that we had our own snake charmer.
ADTV:When you’re watching it, and I can’t remember it from the book but, there’s almost a homoerotic connection between Pine and Roper. What do you think draws them to each other?
SG: I think it is in the book and it’s something that happens quite a lot in Le Carré. I think he is very drawn to the idea of good looking men being drawn to one another, and I think that underpins a lot of the key relationships in his storytelling. That’s very much there. They are, in a way, diametrically opposed but sort of two sides of the same coin. That’s a very important part of their relationship and, in terms of the storytelling, it really only works if you’re constantly uncertain as to whether Pine might be seduced by Roper in a way; not sexually seduced, but seduced into his world. That attraction and a kind of admiration of one another’s minds and approaches to the world is part of the appeal and, I think, what also elevates this from being a conventional thriller into something that has great emotion and psychological depth, which is what makes it so satisfying. It’s never overstated, but I think there’s always just so much going on. That homoerotic attraction between those two men is a very important part of it.
ADTV: So, what’s next for you?
SG: As usual, [laughs] one always has three or four things at various stages of development so you never quite know what’s going to pop up next. There’s a project I’ve been developing with Lionsgate and Stephenie Meyer’s company Fickle Fish. Stephenie has optioned a novel called The Rook, which is a supernatural spy story set in London. We’re developing that for Hulu. It’s developed, but that doesn’t mean it’ll happen first but that could be next. At the moment, it’s just incredibly enjoyable and satisfying basking in the glow of The Night Manager going out and that will disappear soon and once it becomes last year’s news then we move on.
The Night Manager airs Tuesday nights on AMC at 10pm ET. The series wraps May 24.
The Television Academy has only awarded A&Es superb Bates Motel one Emmy nomination in its 4-season history.
Let’s let that sink in.
One nomination. In four years.
Granted, it was the right nomination – Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Vera Farmiga – but it simply isn’t enough now that the show has matured not only in its storytelling but also in its deepening of its characters and associated performances with each passing year. Bates Motel is not only a thrilling suspense drama worthy of comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock’s great original, but it’s also a touching ode to the complexities of parenting. More specifically, to motherhood.
Farmiga’s Norma Bates isn’t a particularly good mother. She’s well intended but near-sighted where her son, Norman (Freddie Highmore), is concerned. Emmy should not be so similarly near-sighted in their reaction to the series. Bates Motel is a complex drama that astutely documents a complex relationship far better than any previous attempts have been able to do.
Bates Motel isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. To fully appreciate it, you have to stick with it for the long haul. It builds on itself, layering psychosis after psychosis until it nearly cracks from the suspense – much like Highmore’s Norman. It’s a great symphony of pain, suffering, and trauma. The iconic movements in season four wouldn’t resonate without the mistakes planted in earlier seasons, sewn into the ground like so many rotten seeds.
And perhaps that’s ultimately why the Television Academy struggles to reward the show. Those who may have missed out on earlier seasons may feel left out of the overall arc, although that’s hardly an excuse. Even passing knowledge of the series mythology would help you appreciate the brilliance of the fourth season. Even if you know nothing of Mother and Norman Bates, the casual viewer cannot ignore the towering performances of Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore. I’ve written about Farmiga before, and everything I said then sticks today. She’s flat-out astounding in the role – the greatest role of her fascinating career. Even though she deserves very serious Emmy consideration this year, I’m worried that, as the Television Academy failed to nominate her for last year’s “Norma Louise,” she’ll likely be left out again this year. You can forget about Mother not being happy. I’m pissed as hell.
But as great as Farmiga is this year, Freddie Highmore may have been slightly better with a trickier arc this season. He’s played the two halves of Norman Bates for a few years now, but this is the year in which the two halves seem to finally merge into one. I don’t know how he does it, but Highmore’s eyes seem to have completely died overnight. They’re the blackest eyes… the Devil’s eyes. And season four Norman Bates is th
e Devil indeed. Highmore brilliantly captures the internal struggle of the committed Norman, the terrified Norman, the murderous Norman, the Mother-infused and flirtatious Norman, and the resolute Norman that burns your soul with hatred from the inside out.
Aside from completely blackening his eyes, Highmore has shredded the plucky younger version of himself on display in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland. This is a man, a very dangerous man, and this is Freddie Highmore’s moment in the moonlight.
And don’t forget he also wrote an episode of the series (“Unfaithful”). This kid is talented.
These actors are talented.
This show is great.
Emmy, don’t make Mother mad again. We can forgive your past transgressions.
We all go a little mad sometimes…
Guaranteed Nominations
Sad face
Probable Nominations
Super sad face
Possible Nominations
Vera Farmiga, Lead Actress
Freddie Highmore, Lead Actor
Writing
The eighth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race comes to a close on Monday night, and the final three is arguably the most worthy trio the reality show has ever seen. There have been some rocky moments (that horrible Madonna-inspired runway that led to kimono-gate), but there shouldn’t be too many complaints as to who is up for the crown this season.
The final three queens represent three backgrounds and facets of drag performing, and RuPaul is going to have her work cut out for her this season. Megan, Jalal, and Joey make the case for comedian Bob the Drag Queen, artist Kim Chi, and model-in-the-making, Naomi Smalls. Who makes the best cast?
Bob deserves to be America’s Next Drag Superstar because she knows how to play the game. She branded herself with a signature catchphrase on day one (“Purse First!”) She is by far the most confident queen with the strongest sense of self-awareness in the competition without being arrogant. She excelled where it counted by winning the most challenges (the Empire acting challenge, Snatch Game, and Shady Politics) and showing class and stage presence under pressure when she had to lip sync for her life. When the rest of the competition took the easy route during the Madonna challenge by wearing a kimono Bob dressed in her infamous Boy Scout uniform. I fell in love with Bob a year ago when I ran across some of her videos on Youtube. In her lip sync performances she references Nene Leaks, Crazy Eyes, Celine Dion, Viola Davis, and even Brian De Palma’s 1973 film Sisters.
Once the show began I fell in love with her passion for performing and that she just seemed so grateful to be a part of her favorite show. Her strong personality made her come across as brass, but she is also humble. She is the perfect spokesperson for the LGBT community, having protested in drag on a weekly basis in Time Square until gay marriage was legal in all 50 states (even being arrested at one point). No other queen in the competition exhibits C.U.N.T. like Bob (remember her premiere look?). While the other two contenders are still developing as performers, I think Bob knows exactly what she would do with the title and would represent Ru, New York City, and World of Wonder proudly. #IMWITHBOB –Jalal
No one is as surprised by Naomi Smalls’ presence in the top three than me, and I mean that in the best way. Like most people, I had written off Naomi Smalls as a “glamour queen.” With her focus on fashion and posing prowess, Naomi might be the most model ready contestant that Drag Race has ever seen. She has consistently kept up with the pack right until the end, and she’s even won us over with her relationship with her mother.
Naomi made quite the impression with her first photograph. RuPaul never declared a winner of that mini challenge, but she had the most striking picture. She’s been able to keep up with the acting challenges (like in the Empire inspired skit), and she admits that she stumbled with this season’s maligned Snatch Game/Madonna runway challenge. That lip synch obviously shook her to the core, because she broke out of the middling middle to deliver some serious model realness on the runway after falling into the bottom two (That Wizard of Oz look? Book club couture? Yes, please!) It sometimes takes real balls to acknowledge your own mistakes. Naomi is easily the most confident on the runway this season, and it’s incredible watching her strut her stuff every week. Naomi exudes sex appeal.
Like Bob the Drag Queen, Naomi understands how important it is to learn from LGBT history. She is not just a pretty face. Naomi has a thirst for knowledge and pop culture that doesn’t twinkle in older contestants’ eyes. She wants to become better and become a well-rounded queen and performer. Can I point out that she’s only 21 years old? It also doesn’t hurt that she’s young and not a total jerk. She’e sweet and charming. Anyone who has that much ambition and determination is someone that Ru would consider a rightful heir to the RuPaul’s Drag Race throne. –Joey
Kim Chi has a familiar narrative of past RuPaul’s Drag Race winners like Jinkx Monsoon and Sharon Needles. She’s a misunderstood outsider (she hasn’t even come out to her family yet) who has a unique look (her paper outfit was runway-worthy). But she’s quieter than Monsoon and Needles. She’s a rarity on RuPaul’s Drag Race in that she rarely, if ever, has thrown actual shade.
Netflix held its first annual Rebels and Rule Breakers luncheon on Saturday in Beverly Hills. The online streaming giant partnered with Women in Film and SAG-AFTRA on the event, which celebrated the powerful women working in all aspects of Netflix’s current lineup.
Jane Fonda (Grace and Frankie) speaking as part of a star-studded panel said, “I didn’t realize what a completely different animal episodic television is. It was really hard for me the first season. I kind of fell apart. So I went back into therapy, and I got an acting coach.”
Also in attendance at the Rebels and Rule Breakers luncheon was Master of None‘s Lena Waithe who said that women were taught to be polite.
“I would rather be a person who stood her ground and demanded respect,” Waithe said. Dominique Crenn from Chef’s Table added, women, in general, are bad ass with, “It’s not about playing the woman or man card, it’s about being who you are.”
Speaking about Grace and Frankie, creator Marta Kauffman said, “I’m proud of so much. Dry vaginas, we can talk about them. We can tackle issues about aging.”
The panel also featured Orange is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan and star Laura Prepon, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star Carol Kane, Jessica Jones star Krysten Ritter, and Chelsea Handler. Her new show, Chelsea, recently made its debut on Netflix.
Check out the gallery from the luncheon:
We’ve got a full slate for this week’s Water Cooler Podcast! First up, we’ll jump back a few podcasts to revisit the topic of upcoming series cancellations (ABC’s The Muppets) and renewals (ABC’s The Catch). Now that the major networks have officially unveiled their intentions, where did we get it right? Where did we go wrong? And what makes us still shake our head? Then, we’ll review the first three episodes of Chelsea Handler’s new Netflix talk show, Chelsea.
Our main topic is the concept of hate-watching which leads us to a discussion of ABC’s recently renewed The Catch. What is hate-watching? What shows do we admit to hate-watching? And what does that have to do with The Catch?
As always, we close with our TV Flash Forward. Check back with us next week as we deep-dive into the hotly contested Limited Series categories at the 2016 Emmys. Could it be the most interesting races this year? Find out next week!
ENJOY!
3:17 – Fall TV Cancellations / Renewals
17:34 – Chelsea
31:16 – Hate-Watching and ABC’s The Catch
54:36 – Flash Forward
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Better Call Saul‘s Rhea Seehorn talks about the acting, scripting, and filmmaking craft behind the smash cable drama
When talking to Rhea Seehorn, you’re immediately taken aback by how excited she is about the end-to-end craft of filmmaking. Previously best known for her role on NBC’s Whitney, Seehorn definitely excels at interpreting the character of Better Call Saul’s Kim Wexler based on Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, and a host of insanely talented writers’ scripts. Yet, it’s clear that her thirst for the overall craft of filmmaking drives her. Throughout our conversation, Seehorn deftly interjected smart observations and lavish praise for the creative team that helps create one of cable TV’s highest rated series.
At a time in her career when Rhea Seehorn could easily rest on the many accolades and laurels she’s received for her transformative season two performance, it’s completely refreshing to see her so dedicated to the task of accentuating her acting career with a broader experience. Like House of Cards‘ Robin Write and others before her, Seehorn has a keen interest in the task of direction, and, based on her intuitive eye, it’s a career direction that would undoubtedly server her well.
As Better Call Saul‘s Kim Wexler, Rhea Seehorn is the unique center of the show, balancing between the flexible ethics of Jimmy McGill and her own infallible moral center – a dichotomy that may well prove the couple’s end. While Seehorn has always been a strong component of the series, her season two performance has elevated her to new heights, putting her on par with Emmy-nominated co-stars Bob Odenkirk and Johnathan Banks as well as critically acclaimed Michael McKean. Her quiet, yet silently powerful, performance imbues the character of Kim Wexler with such clear presence that, even if she’s not speaking, you’re never unaware of her place in the scene.
Through our conversation, I could not help but be hugely impressed by Seehorn’s raw intelligence and insight into the complex series. Here’s hoping Emmy voters remain similarly impressed when the voting window kicks off in mid-June.
AwardsDaily TV: Happy belated birthday, Rhea Seehorn! How did you spend the day?
Rhea Seehorn: Thank you! I am shadowing the director Scott Winant [Emmy-winner for Thirtysomething]. Just trying to learn directing because it’s something I’ve always wanted to learn more about. I usually just watch when I’m on sets for my own shows. It’s informative as an actor just to understand all parts of the machinery, but I’d also like to direct one day. So, it was a great day, learning for 14 hours!
ADTV: That’s great, so should we expect you to take up the director’s chair on Better Call Saul in an upcoming season?
RS: Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t discussed that at all. I have my hands full with my own character. I’ve never aspired to direct myself. Right now, I’m just loving creating Kim [Wexler] on that, and that takes up all of my brain space.
ADTV: So what brought you to Better Call Saul originally?
RS: I auditioned for it with Sharon Bialy, Sherry Thomas, and Russell Scott. They cast Breaking Bad, so they’ve been with those guys for a long time. Sharon and Sherry have auditioned me for other things over the years, so I’ve played a range of characters for them. Casting directors, especially great ones like them, tend to know a larger body of your work than anybody because its all the stuff for which you didn’t even get the part. They really know my approach, the way I work, and the types of characters that they think would be a good fit for me… It was a really fun audition, a really wide-open audition to just do your best and see if you’re the right person to tell the story.
ADTV: I know the way Vince Gilligan [series creator] works so a lot of the character was there on the page. Tell me, though, how did you define the character of Kim?
RS: You know, it is… and Bob [Odenkirk] has said this too… it’s 99 percent in the text. Their scripts are just so incredibly strong, and we have almost no rewrites… which is very uncommon in the business. You can begin to build a foundation pretty much the second you get the script. It’s pretty much all there. Even when I had my very first episode for season one – the pilot, I’m seated in the conference room scene, and Jimmy comes in with the Ned Beatty “You will atone” speech from Network – which is amazing. The first time I speak or do anything is in the parking garage, and it’s really just one sentence broken into two parts… and we share a cigarette. But it’s all there. By that, I mean, even when you don’t have lines, you can read the scripts and get these very fine nuances where you can start to build the outline of your character. You’re forever coming up with new parameters of what edge they can go to and new details to add and then you kind of fill in. It’s a process of deduction.
If you’re sharing a cigarette with somebody and take it out of your own mouth and put it back and you don’t flinch (which was written in the script), then you know you have a history with them. We can finish each other’s sentences, so that also implies a long history. And it’s clear we’ve had this argument many, many times if I know exactly where it’s going exactly when he starts it. That says a lot about somebody, and it says something about their relationship. That’s how their scripts are written. It’s not just the beautiful dialogue, it’s the entire environment that is constantly giving you colors to use. To paint the portrait you’re trying to make… Even though we don’t know anything past the script we have, you have enough to build a three-dimensional person. There’s something that’s magical about their writing where I’ve never come across a contradiction about Kim’s life… It always seems revelatory about her. It just becomes an inspiration to interpret, and they [the creative team] really trust their actors. They all love to see how many thousands of ways you can play a line, and that’s a really wonderful environment to work in.
ADTV: So, I reached out to Twitter to get a sense of what people would like to ask you. One of the questions I’d received was around Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul comparisons. There are a lot of fans who consider Better Call Saul a better show than Breaking Bad. What are your thoughts on the comparison?
RS: Hmm… You know what, I don’t bother comparing them. I think it’s odd to compare them. I’m a huge Breaking Bad fan, still am. There are narrative links to it doing origin stories of two main characters… but the whole thing [Better Call Saul] is definitely its own show. And that’s more of what I focus on. We make sure it’s its own vehicle. Even though there are recognizable similarities, I think most people would agree that it has its own life, its own world that is slightly different. Vince has said this before, for instance, that in Better Call Saul you’re following a character who’s desperately trying to be good versus a character who is allowing his sociopath to come out… I don’t compare them. I just really celebrate that I feel like they’ve made this very rich tapestry that has these seeds that we know that blossom in this other show, but yet it’s its own thing. It would die in the shadow of Breaking Bad if it wasn’t.
ADTV: So, to me, season two feels like Kim Weller’s coming out party. Season one was mostly about the drama between the two brothers [Jimmy and Chuck], and now in season two, you’re a third part of that triangle. What was your first reaction as you started reading some of these scripts as you realized your role was being dramatically increased in size and scope?
RS: Well, I’ve been asked quite a bit what did Vince [Gilligan] and Peter [Gould] tell you about the season and that I was going to have all this stuff this season. But we didn’t. There were no talks, and you get it script by script. It doesn’t come down to counting lines or counting scenes… I mean, look at the Jonathan Banks character, just a brilliant character who says almost nothing… So, you just want to be present in the world, and I knew my character wasn’t going to be a tertiary object because they just don’t write people like that. I mean, even in season one, I relished that she was always three dimensional and always had a point of view in the scenes I was in. By the time I got the stuff for season two, my favorite thing I started to notice was that Kim’s decision not to speak was a reflection of her power.
She’s very observational and much less reactionary than a lot of the characters that she’s around. Kim’s very pragmatic and level-headed. It’s fun to see that that’s not a weakness to be silent in scenes and be observant. Because we work on an episode and then about three days later get the script for the next one… it never occurred to me that it might be this whole season that unfolds with this information about her. You just play it scene by scene, and that’s how you present you have to be when you’re in their material. You never really know what’s around the corner for any character. As a fan of their writing, I love how they answer one question and raise two. It’s fun to keep up with that, and I just want to make sure that I interpret this great story as best as I can.
ADTV: One of my very favorite moments for you in season two is how you engage in these con games with Jimmy. I fantasize that it’s Kim’s version of “breaking bad” a little. Why do you think she engages in those games with Jimmy?
RS: I don’t know yet. I certainly have my own opinions, and it was discussed (in the script and with the director Thomas Schnauz) is she good at them and why is she good at them? You see she just didn’t choose to participate in them, she’s actually pretty good at it. There’s a lot of possibilities there… I never believed Kim loved Jimmy because she had her head in the sand. I always believed that she knew who he was – maybe not every single detail or line that he crossed – but she could have possibly seen him do cons or was aware of the scene he came from. It didn’t feel unfamiliar to her. She’s kind of enticed into it the first time and then she initiated it the second time. But it didn’t feel completely unfamiliar to her. I don’t know where that comes from yet. I’m still learning that. It certainly was fun to show that side of her and for her to grapple with what are the boundaries for her between what’s okay and what’s immoral. There’s legal versus illegal, moral versus amoral, and ethical versus unethical.
I feel like all of the characters in Better Caul Saul feel like they know how to hang on to right and wrong, and they keep finding out that it depends on your perspective. It depends on the situation. It depends on life. It’s much more upsetting to find that all of that lies on a spectrum, that it’s not just black and white. So, that was another reason that it was fun for me to play those scenes. She’s toying with that. She’s toying with not being able to hang on to that anymore, and she’s enjoying watching Jimmy be great at them too. Kind of like the audience. We as watchers of the show are enticed by Jimmy succeeding at these cons. But I don’t know right now what any of that means for Kim.
ADTV: There’s still a lot of discovery there.
RS: There is [laughs]! The good news about me not having a lot of answers is that I can’t accidentally spoil anything.
ADTV: That’s true. Vince keeps a tight hold on his direction for the series, I guess.
RS: Well, he honestly doesn’t know. He and Peter aren’t lying when they say they didn’t know things were going to happen or that they don’t know the ultimate direction of the series. They really don’t know.
ADTV: I like that though. I like letting the characters drive the story line rather than have some artificial endgame that you’re driving toward. It feels more organic that way.
RS: It does! It does. And I didn’t realize until I was in talks with them how uncommon that is. It’s a pretty big gamble to not be sure if all your pieces are going to fit in the end. Those are two smart dudes as well as the whole writer’s room.
ADTV: I can’t even imagine. So, I have two iconic moments for Kim that I want to talk about. One is when you’re rainmaking, trying to drum up new business. How was it for you filming that scene?
RS: That was amazing. That entire montage… ten or eleven phone calls… Forgive me, it’s largely done in post… Oh, that’s another thing, you can film it all, and then you see what Kelley Dixon [editor] does with it. That’s a joy to see. It was like watching magic all over again because the post… putting in the Spanish version of “My Way…” Just brilliant. So, eight to ten phone calls plus the pocket dialogue that is either overwritten with music or you only either gets bits and pieces of it… And then they wanted it to reflect three or four days of time passing, meaning there’s costume changes, and then Kim doesn’t have an office so she’s going to be looking for somewhere to set up shop somewhat privately. But we shot all of that in one day with just me for about fourteen hours… it was amazing.
John Shiban directed it, and Ann Cherkis wrote it. I start with that beautiful scene where I say, “You don’t save me. I save me.” to Jimmy… But all of those phone calls were done on a single day, and the whole thing was like a pit crew. You had to change the costumes. Change the props. The post-its were a practical nightmare with names being cleared, numbers being cleared, and the colors staying the same so that they would match if you went in and out of these scenes. They would also have to be put in the same place each time, and there’s this beautiful crane shooting the scene from outside. And I have to do the phone calls over and over without a scene partner physically there. I mean, you do with the person on the other end of the phone. I actually wrote the other half of the phone calls, and I made them all different just to keep my head on straight. There’s a difference between a friend of a friend versus the dude I used to hang out with in law school or the mother of an old college friend who now works at a law firm. I wanted all of those phone calls to feel different, and that was really the only way to keep myself straight as far as the performance of it. And then if you’d turned around to see behind the crane, there’s the pit crew making it all happen. It was this beautiful circus.
ADTV: And it works so brilliantly.
RS: Oh, thank you for the compliment. One other thing I want to add about the scene is the use of the wides [wide angle lenses] and what a great call that was. These scenes are just beautiful, and they’re so much more than the extreme close-ups that TV is obsessed with right now. They’re so much more beautiful and painterly and monumental. I feel like the viewer is oddly more a part of the scene that way even though you’re physically farther from the action.
ADTV: Totally agree. I’d written a piece a while back about the cinematographer being the unsung hero of the show… It’s just amazing work. It is painterly.
RS: Yeah, I read your piece on that, and you were right. It is another character on the show. This line Arthur Albert walks… his framing… his composition… walks this fine line in being as much a part of the story as anything else and yet he’s not intrusive. I don’t watch it and get pulled out of the scene. It’s always illustrative of the narrative we’re telling.
ADTV: Another brilliant scene that I sort of consider your “money” scene for the season was the confrontation between Jimmy and Chuck at the end of the season where you’re effectively choosing a side between the two. Tell me a little about what was going on in your head while you were filming that scene.
RS: The scene confronting Chuck was maybe one of the most fun times to be on Twitter ever [laughs]. People were SCREAMING… That’s Peter Gould’s writing and directing in that one. And, of course, Michael McKean is giving a tour-de-force monologue. That whole scene and the dynamic is so complicated and constantly unfolding. I feel like a show is smart when it makes its audience feel smart, and this scene does that. You’re being asked as a viewer to keep up… I mean, on one hand, Chuck’s such an asshole for accusing Jimmy of this and the whole time you know he did do it. He’s absolutely correct, and yet you’re mad at him for saying it! And Bob’s [Odenkirk] over there brilliantly playing this guy who cannot figure out if he’s getting busted and what does Kim think and he can’t ask her otherwise he’ll get busted. I mean, I get to play this huge roller coaster of emotions in this one scene again without saying a word. It’s a very Kim moment, and I love them for protecting that part of her. I love all of the directors on the show for encouraging, inspiring, and allowing the performance that I bring to it.
Kim plays her cards very close to her chest, and I’ve never been told that I’ve got to indicate to the audience exactly what I think. I’m so glad because you do get told that sometimes… I think she hears this scam, the more details that come out, the more it sounds like something Jimmy would do. And she realizes it, knows his intentions were in the right place, but the execution is so off as usual… Playing her thought process before she spoke was as fun to me and as important to me as an actor as when she finally says something to Chuck. I spoke to Peter for a while about when she finally confronts Chuck and how it couldn’t be a yelling and screaming moment because that wouldn’t feel like a Kim moment. She makes a choice to protect [Jimmy], but there’s an absolute truth to what she’s saying to Chuck. That’s part of these multiple layers to these scenes that are so fun to play… The emotion of the scene doesn’t really happen until she gets to the car when she punches him [laughs].
ADTV: OK, one last question. When you’re not watching Better Call Saul, what are you watching?
RS: Catastrophe. Umm, I love TV. I watch so much TV. House of Cards. Peaky Blinders. I was obsessed with Togetherness on HBO and was very sad when that was cancelled. There’s so much great TV that I want to watch and just don’t have enough time.
Watch full episodes of Better Call Saul season two on amc.com. Episodes are also available on streaming content providers. Better Call Saul returns for season three in 2017.
Here at AwardsDaily TV, everything is about the Emmys lately. Still, it’s nice to kick back and take in a few non-Emmy related pieces of entertainment. And, as such, here’s the best thing we’ve seen all day. A few days ago, Mashable released this reimagining of Steven Spielberg’s classic, Oscar-winning E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial as a 90s-era sitcom. The edit/music combo is in perfect sync. Yes, that’s the theme some from Perfect Strangers, which makes it even more amazingly perfect.
My personal favorite moment is the “standing tall on the wings of my dream” juxtaposition against Elliot standing on a stool to kiss a classmate after the great frog debacle.
Hope you enjoy as much as we did.
On this week’s Water Cooler Podcast, the AwardsDaily TV team took a look at the leading candidates in the Comedy Emmy races. As ranked on the Emmy Tracker, we talked a lot about the front-runners and, more importantly, the positions that needed to be filled by series and actors who weren’t eligible this year. It’s kind of exciting this year as we have more vacancies that in years past, which gives the Television Academy the ability to shake things up a bit.
Now, common logic tells us that the Emmys like the rerun contenders. There are probably a few reasons why that is. First, popular voting bodies like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Television Academy often feel like they’re honoring their best friends. It pays to be known and liked in Hollywood. People like to vote for those nominees to whom they have a connection. That’s not to diminish the winners, really, but it is a fact that newcomers have to overcome.
Second, there are just so many goddamn television shows on the air. It’s something like 1,400 shows, all-in. How could working actors and crafts persons possibly watch enough shows to take in the variety television is currently offering. That’s why your Modern Family tended to repeat wins. That’s why Veep is a great bet to repeat. It’s why Silicon Valley and likely Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt will be repeat nominees. And, unfortunately, it’s probably why critically acclaimed, near-indie series like Broad City won’t factor into the 2016 Emmy nominations. It doesn’t make it right, but who has time to watch all of that great television?
So, assuming last year’s nominees who are eligible to repeat this year do so, then there are vacant slots still to be filled, particularly in the Comedy Actress categories. So, how deeply does Emmy go to fill them? Will they reach out to the tried and true nominees like Lena Dunham or Melissa McCarthy? Or will recent buzz around some news faces catapult one of them into the nominee’s circle?
Here are a few of the potential previously unranked contenders (both previous nominees and never-nominated) and where they fit in with the AwardsDaily TV Emmy Tracker.
Netflix held an FYC event last night in Hollywood celebrating Narcos. Cast members, including stars Wagner Moura (Pablo Escobar) and Boyd Holbrook (Steve Murphy), were in attendance. Producer/directorJose Padilha, executive producer/director Eric Newman, and Moura were on the Q&A panel following the screening.
Narcos takes on the Medellin cartel in Columbia, charting the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar. Moura who played the infamous druglord revealed he didn’t speak Spanish before taking on the role. Director and Producer José Padilha said, “Three months before we even scouted Colombia, he went to Medellin on his own, enlisted into a university where Pablo Escobar went and stayed there speaking Spanish for three months. When we got there, he knew how to speak Spanish, that’s what it takes.”
Check out photos from the event below:
Narcos is streaming on Netflix.
