Todd Fjelsted On the Empowerment Through Production Design For ‘Roar’ and ‘The First Lady’

We need more surreal series on television. Apple TV+’s Roar is the limited series that you aren’t watching, and the way it blends humor and social commentary together is nothing short of astonishing. Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive’s series tells eight different stories of female empowerment, and those unique points of view are imprinted into the detailed, accomplished production design. Since we jump around from romance to tragedy to absurdism, we need to believe the spaces are truly inhabited by these characters. Emmy-winning production designer, Todd Fjelsted, brings wit and intelligence to every scene.

I can’t imagine how Fjelsted created so many spaces, especially since every episode is so cinematic. None of the characters interact within the worlds of the other episodes, Fjelsted described every episode like a film.

“Because it is an anthology, every episode is like a mini movie. When you normally do a television series, you have a home base set. With GLOW, it was the gym, and you can always go back and shoot stuff. Every day on Roar was a brand new world, and we would go from an episode of horror to a Western to a romantic comedy. It’s very jarring creatively, but it’s so exciting to challenge myself and my crew to create a throughline.”

In “The Woman Who Was Kept On a Shelf,” Betty Gilpin’s Amelia agrees to sit atop an elegant pedestal to be admired by her husband, played by Daniel Dae Kim. At first, Amelia regards this gesture as romantic and sweet, but she soon realizes that she is an object in her husband’s eyes. Belongings on a shelf do not share their thoughts or desires or opinions–they are merely collected. Fjelsted was inspired by the stories we were told as children, but he gives them an sophisticated, mature twist. The pink paint on the walls is feminine and French-inspired. The room is a confection that slowly turns poisonous.

“The first time I read that, it was disturbing on the page, and all the themes really startled me a bit. We had to make it palatable for the audience and agreeable visually. Betty is such a hilarious actress, and she can make anything funny. We brought in this dollhouse flavor that was a little bit Barbie but added in some Rapunzel and Belle from Beauty and the Beast. We wanted to create the modern day fairytale without losing the corniness of it. With something like Barbie, things can be ridiculously pink and feminine and expensive, and we wanted to elaborate on a life that she thinks she wants. We wanted to bring in some sparkle and some bling from that world in order to make some of it her own. A lot of what we see in the end is what she likes about her captivity which is being on display and being glamorous. Amelia starts as a child star and then she ends up with her own beauty line. She never loses sense of what she wants to do, but, in the end, she has ownership of it.”

“The Woman Who Found Bite Marks On Her Skin” is one of the darkest episodes of the season, and Fjelsted revealed that it was a personal story for the creative team. Cynthia Erivo’s Ambia is eager to return to work after giving birth to her second child, but the more time she spends away from her family, the more she finds bloody, mysterious bite marks all over her. Is it stress? Perhaps her eldest child is jealous of her new sibling and taking it out on her mother? Ambia’s home is warm and bright, but Fjelsted gives her work environment some darker qualities to hit home the guilt mothers can sometimes feel about leaving their children at home.

“Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch have said that it is the most personal episode to them since they are both such hard-working moms. When I read it, I could feel how personal it was to them. The key ingredient to that episode was this Cronenberg style body horror where you are trying to move through the world while hiding something from the world. Everything for that episode fed into the joy and darkness of being a mother. The struggle that each mother goes through day-to-day like allowing someone to pick them up from school or leaving them at home to go to work is something we wanted to focus on in the design. It literally eats women up alive. The kitchen is designed to be big and bright and filled with toys, and the little girl’s bedroom had a jungle mural on the wall. We wanted to play on the red herrings like maybe the daughter is biting her mom. Maybe it’s the baby during breast feeing. Everything we did visually fed into that so by the time it got to the hospital, it allowed the DP, Quyen Tran, to go a bit more surreal. For instance, you can walk down the hallway and you see the nursery, but then the lights flick on and there is a blue hue that lends to a totally different tone. We worked really closely with Quyen on that episode.”

If you were given the chance to return your spouse or partner…would you do it? Couples spar all the time, but in “The Woman Who Returned Her Husband,” Meera Syal literally takes him back to the store for an exchange. The Costco-like store is fun with its graphic signs (The markdowns! The savings!), but Fjelsted kicks into high-gear camp when we see Anu’s neighborhood.

“We wanted to play on the mundane and the ordinary and how this character, who has fallen into a routine, has lost her joy. The store represents the consumer thing that we all deal with, and we wanted to make it as close to reality as possible…but you can buy husbands. We came up with some surreal ideas, but they ended up being a little too big. What worked best for this character’s journey was to keep it as real as possible in the real world but then reverse it when we get to their home. We leaned into this Edward Scissorhands vibe. We wanted to reverse that surrealism so when she realizes that she and her husband just need to work on some things that it makes sense. She already has it, but they needed to see it for what it was.”

Fjelstead also wanted to make sure that Anu’s home differed from her neighbor’s.

“We wanted her home to feel more traditional like mom and dad style from 1970’s or 1980’s. With the neighbor across the street, we wanted it to be the newer version of that to feel it more pregnant with meaning. The neighbor’s house was modeled after the nosy neighbors that you see in Edward Scissorhands. Those busybodies who want to know everyone’s business.”

As if Fjelstead wasn’t busy enough, he was also part of the production design team behind the mammoth Showtime limited series, The First Lady. After Fjelsted allowed me to gush over my love of Michelle Pfeiffer, he revealed how exciting it was to show the journey of Betty Ford’s personal space (White House aficionado, Tony Fanning, worked on the other two chapters). Before the Ford enter The White House, their Virginia home features a lot of wood accents and time period prints on their furniture. Fjelsted was eager to give Betty Ford the space she always longed to live in in Palm Springs.

“The exciting thing about the Betty Ford chapter is that she is looking towards what she could have. When she marries Gerald, she has a very “normal” life with four kids, and that’s a very specific kind of home. We did find as many picture of their home in Alexandria, Virginia, and we matched it as much as we could even right down to the brick. My set decorator, Cynthia Sleiter, is a genius. We brought this Americana, 1950’s and 1960’s flavor to their home, but by the time they were in The White House and she’s been through disappointment to disappointment, she was ready to retire. Then Gerry becomes Vice President, and then he becomes President. She had to become a host very quickly, and she came out on top. By the time they got to Palm Springs, I always saw her as a woman finally settling down how she wanted. She’s allowed to be the life of the party and just enjoy her time. That got the best of her, of course, but those environments had to be such polar opposites to show how she achieved her goals. Betty was out of Americana and now she’s a glamorous person. Everyone goes to Palm Springs to retire, and seeing her get to enjoy herself was fun.”

Roar is streaming on Apple+. The First Lady finishes its first season on June 19 on Showtime.