Author: Lisa Weidenfeld

March 29, 2016 9:00am PT by Lisa Weidenfeld

 Courtesy of Hulu

“At the end of the day, it’s probably a cult, but all of these cults, movements, religions — they’re just providing answers,” the Emmy winner tells THR about the movement at the center of the new Hulu drama.

What does it mean to lose your faith when religion plays a huge role in your life and the life of your family? That’s the big question at the heart of The Path, a new 10-episode series from Hulu that premieres Wednesday. The series stars Aaron Paul as Eddie, who joined the vaguely Scientology-esque Meyerism as a young man, married a woman (Michelle Monaghan) who grew up in it, and suddenly begins to experience doubt about the movement.

Grappling with his faith is a real struggle for Eddie, who strives to hide his doubt from his wife as well as a charismatic but sinister local Meyerism leader (Hugh Dancy).  It doesn’t help that Eddie’s having nightmarish visions about Meyerism involving a massive yellow snake. The series asks big questions about faith and the purpose it serves, as well as how it can divide a family.

The series marks Paul’s return to TV following his breakthrough role on Breaking Bad. The three-time Emmy winner spoke with THR about Eddie’s difficulties and his co-stars, both human and reptilian.

You’re also producing The Path. What about it that made you want to act in it but also be involved in the behind the scenes work?

I mean, why not? I got a taste of developing with Bojack Horseman, and I just love being a part of those conversations from the very beginning. When this was placed in front of me, after reading the first two episodes, the material was impossible to ignore. I wanted to jump into this world.

A large part of what’s going on with Eddie is that he’s struggling with his faith, which is something that people do across the board when it comes to religion, but Eddie’s experience is a little different. What do you think makes his struggle unique?

When I read it, I instantly could relate to this guy, and I think the audience is going to be able to relate to this guy. He comes from a very tortured past. He didn’t really have that great of an upbringing. Really, the only person he could rely on was his brother, and that ended in tragedy. And so he was just this lost broken guy, and he found this movement, and he was brought into this movement by his loving, beautiful wife, played by the brilliant Michelle Monaghan. And they’ve raised their two kids in the movement. In the pilot episode, he has this crisis of faith. He has this eye-opening experience on this retreat where he realizes he just does not buy anything they’re selling anymore, and that is terrifying to him because he knows if he says anything, he risks losing everyone he loves.

You called it a movement, which people in the show are careful to say: “It’s a movement, it’s not a cult.” Do you agree with them? Is it a movement, or is it a cult?

I don’t know. At the end of the day, it’s probably a cult, but all of these cults, movements, religions — they’re just providing answers. A lot of people are desperately searching for answers, and this is giving those people the answers. You could call it a movement, you could call it a cult, you could call it a religion.

Eddie came to the movement on his own, whereas his wife grew up in it. How much does that affect their relationship?

Quite a bit. That’s the thing. There’s no talking any sort of sense into Sarah. This is all she knows, and I always say that you know what you know. If someone teaches you something from birth, that is all you know, and that is what you believe. Eddie is conflicted. He would rather live a life of lies than lose his family, because if he says anything, if he mentions any sort of doubt, he’s a doubter, and the family will either try to brainwash him or just immediately turn their backs on him and completely forget about him.

Does Sarah’s level of faith give him any sense of guilt that it comes easily to her, but it’s something he’s struggling with?

Oh, absolutely! I think that’s really what’s at the core of the show, at least for Eddie. That’s what he’s struggling with the most. She believes in this thing with her entire being. This is her whole purpose in life. And now he is looking at it as just kind of nonsense. And he just is not buying it whatsoever. And it’s really making him very sad and very confused.

Do you think part of the attraction for Sarah initially was that Eddie was an outsider?

Yeah, I think that’s what drew her in in the first place, because she was just so used to people inside of her inner circle. People that only knew this belief. She saw Eddie as this intriguing, dangerous creature that she was just drawn to.

Did you and Michelle have conversations about what you wanted to do with that relationship?

Yeah, we’ve talked quite a bit about it, but really it was all on the page from day one. We were presented two episodes at the very beginning and a very detailed description of a first season with these characters. [Showrunner] Jessica Goldberg had a very specific vision in mind of how she wanted this story to be portrayed, and so from the very beginning we kind of knew where these characters were going.

When you were getting ready for this, did you dive into the world of people who had left cults or people who were in cults, or were you trying to trust what was already in the script?

I was definitely trying to trust what was there in the script, and it was already there. The detail of this movement is incredible. They’ve created an entire bible for us to do research on. [Jessica’s] attention to detail is really beautiful, and so it was all there, whether it was on the page or in different pamphlets that were given to us. She truly has created a movement in itself. We didn’t necessarily even need to look elsewhere, but I did. I grew up in a very religious upbringing, so I knew what that sort of world was like. I have had some friends who have lost their families because of the way they have decided to live their life, and it’s sad. I have some friends that are in particular religions where they just do not buy into it whatsoever, but they will go, and they’ll do their thing with their family in those movements just to satisfy their family, because they don’t want to lose their family. And they know if they say anything, their family will just completely abandon them. And that to me is just so sad.

Important question here. Was the snake real?

Yes, the snake was very real. His name is Ghost.

Really?

Yes, his name was Ghost, and he was going to the bathroom all over the place. It was pretty incredible.

It was an exciting part of the experience.

Yes, it’s the glamorous side of shooting with snakes. They poop all over the sheets.

Was this your first snake work experience?

I believe so. I love snakes, though.

The Path premieres Wednesday on Hulu.

Lisa Weidenfeld

THRnews@thr.com

February 29, 2016 6:00pm PT by Lisa Weidenfeld

 Danny Feld/The CW

“This is not two people who get together and sail into the sunset really super easily,” co- showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna tells THR. “They’re going to have challenges along the way.”

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Monday’s episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, “Josh and I Go to Los Angeles”.]

Though we’ve seen many ups and downs in Rebecca Bunch’s (Rachel Bloom) relentless pursuit of her crush Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), Monday’s episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend finally saw her make a little progress in her quest: The duo shared a passionate kiss. The moment followed her efforts to prove that the county is diverting water away from his beloved hometown, West Covina, a noble pursuit that clearly had some influence on Josh. It’s not the first time the town has brought them closer together, either. A few episodes earlier, her failed attempts to fit in with his friend group by renting a party bus were only redeemed when Josh learned she’d moved to West Covina because he’d made it sound like a place where people were happy.

But she wasn’t the only one to make great strides in her personal life. Her perpetually awkward boss Darryl (Pete Gardner) has come to the late-in-life realization that he’s bisexual (or “bothsexual,” as he puts it) after romance came in the form of Josh Chan’s friend, White Josh (David Hull), who he met on the same eventful party bus ride. We talked to co-showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna about what this means for both characters.

Should we read into the fact that Josh kisses her after she does something pretty heroic?

She does do something heroic and she does something for a place that he loves. A huge part of their communion, in that episode on the bus — where he finds out that she’s moved to West Covina because he’s talked about it, instead of being repulsed by that, he is smitten by that, that she appreciates this place that he loves that everyone else makes fun of. So the fact that she stands up for this community even though she isn’t ultimately victorious is a huge part of why he finally succumbs in that moment.

Does she understand that that’s what he loved about that moment?

No, that’s a sincere moment on her part. She’s never been anywhere where anybody treated her with the love and respect that she has in this town. And so that’s a sincere moment of her actually saying, “I don’t want to be the person I was in New York.” In order to win this case, I would have to revert to being the person I used to be, and I don’t want to be that person anymore.

How messy is the fallout going to be from that kiss?

That’s a good way to put it, because the next episode is very much a fallout episode, and the episode after that, as well. The ramifications of what she’s doing, and what she’s done, and what that kiss means, and what it doesn’t mean, frankly.

As the season has gone on, she and Darryl have had a lot in common in terms of, they’re both outsiders, they’re both trying to make friends. Was that always a parallel story that you wanted to tell?

That evolved, too. We always thought of Darryl as the person who’s really in search of an identity. He doesn’t really know who he is, and he grasps at things. So he thinks he’s Chippewa and he gets excited about that, but he’s always been in search of “who is Darryl?” and spends a lot of time thinking about “who is Darryl?” Even though he comes at it from a completely different standpoint than she does, he is definitely someone who is in search of himself, and they definitely have that in common.

How did the bisexuality storyline with Darryl come about?

That came about very early with Darryl, because we had been exploring his unhappy marital life and we were talking about him and his searching for identity and that he seemed like a character who was in search of who he was. Then the idea of him being bisexual lent itself to that. Rachel and I both felt like we hadn’t seen that depicted very frequently, even though it’s one of those things that you see in life, but maybe you don’t see as much on TV. He’s such an earnest searching guy that the way he goes about it is so earnest and, I think, lovable. Then we had David and David was so great and they had such a natural rapport and so we followed that relationship, really.

Was White Josh always gay, or did you decide to make him gay because you wanted Darryl to be involved with someone who we already knew as a character?

He wasn’t really either/or. White Josh really wasn’t anything. We hadn’t really made a decision on that and then he seemed to strike up a natural rapport with Pete. It’s a very slow-burning thing. They meet for the first time on the bus and Darryl is very smitten with him just as a person. It was a very natural evolution. We really loved the two of them together and it just occurred to us that we hadn’t stipulated what White Josh was or wasn’t. So the idea that he is somebody who has been out for most of his life and is comfortable with it, it seemed like it went with the show, and with that friend group. That seemed like a friend group where that would not be a big deal. They wouldn’t have been talking about it a bunch. It never came up, basically.

The idea that Darryl is bisexual instead of gay is something we don’t often see done with a male character. It’s a story that we see sometimes with female characters. Sometimes it’s a ratings thing, and sometimes it’s an ongoing, “OK, this character is going to date both genders now.” You just never see it with men. Were you thinking about that as you were writing that storyline?

I only really started working in TV with this show. I’d worked in TV a long time ago. I’m not as up to speed on what has and hasn’t been done. I mean now, people have sort of told me that, but it’s something we’d seen in life. Also, what I think is really particularly interesting for Darryl is that sometimes with bisexual men, people don’t believe them. They think it’s a phase or it’s a phase on the way to being gay. That’s just something that I’ve experienced with friends of mine where it seems super unfair to me that you tell people you want to be this thing, and they kind of go, [sarcastically] “Oh, yeah.” And that seemed like a perfect predicament for Darryl, because he’s so sincere about wanting to be this thing that he feels so strongly that he is. As we continue to explore that storyline, Darryl so sincerely feels who he is, but he is naïve about how the world sees it. He doesn’t even get to the word ‘bisexual’, he gets to the word ‘bothsexual.’ And that’s always struck me as very unfair, when I’ve known people who are bisexual and they’re greeted with skepticism.

Are you going to be addressing the age gap?

We address it a little bit in terms of they have different expectations in their life of what their relationship needs to be. I think Darryl’s the kind of person who would date someone for a week and then move in with them. So it’s partly their age, it’s partly the kind of guys they are, it’s partly what life phase Darryl is in and how parched he’s been for someone to care about. This is not two people who get together and sail into the sunset really super easily. They’re going to have challenges along the way.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriendairs Mondays at 8 p.m. on The CW.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Lisa Weidenfeld

THRnews@thr.com

February 09, 2016 9:00am PT by Lisa Weidenfeld

 Courtesy of Sundance Institute

The actor headlines Hulu’s J.J. Abrams miniseries based on the best-selling book by Stephen King.

The ‘60s were a tumultuous time, an era of upheaval and protest and change, much of which came about after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And for the characters of Hulu’s new miniseries 11.22.63, changing that one event holds the answer to a better 2016 America. Lucky for them, they’ve discovered a time portal that leads to a time and place a few years prior to the assassination, so high school English teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) heads back in time to try and prevent JFK from being killed. Along the way, he’s both entranced and repelled by an earlier America, and discovers the past can be awfully resistant to change.

Based on the 2012 Stephen King bestseller and exec produced by J.J. Abrams, the series, naturally, premieres on President’s Day. We talked to Franco about acting as a character who is himself acting all the time, and whether he would change the past if he had the same opportunity.

You’re known for picking eclectic projects. How did you decide to work on this one?

I had been preparing for my oral exams at Yale for my PhD in English, and I had to read 150 books that I would be tested on by five professors, so it took me about a year and a half to prepare for that. As soon as I was done, I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’ve been in this hole where I’ve only been reading to prepare for this test. Now I can read whatever I want.’ And I remembered that I’d seen 11/22/63 in a bookstore at the airport, and thought it looked great. So it was the first book that I read after the test, and I loved it. It was over 1000 pages, but I read it really quickly, and I remember thinking it was really cinematic. Through a friend who knew him, I got Stephen King’s email address and wrote to him and asked him if the rights were available, because I’d heard that he was very generous with his material. He said, “Oh I’d love to do something with you, but J.J. Abrams already has the rights to the book and he’s doing it as a series for Hulu.”

I thought, ‘Well, there goes that. There’s no way I’m going to beat J.J. out for the rights.’ So I just wrote a little review of the book for Vice and then I guess J.J. read it and a couple weeks later I got an email from him and he said, “Hey, I love everything you love about the book. I’m doing this series, would you consider playing Jake?” 

Jake is a modern man living in a very different time. Was that something you were conscious of when you were portraying him, that you wanted to act like a modern guy stuck in 1960?

That concept was one of my favorite things about the book and the scripts, was that Jake isn’t from this time. As an actor, I’ve done period pieces before, and in those conventional period pieces, you, as an actor, try to act like a character who’s from that period. You don’t see the seams of how the filmmakers create that period. You just want the audience to feel like, ‘OK, we’re back in time.’ But in this case, the character is not of that time. He becomes this really interesting figure who can point out things to the audience about what was great about the past. Like, the food tastes different, the milk tastes better, the pie is so good. And then he can point out things that were horrible or worse than they are now, like Jim Crow laws, and things like that.

It’s a unique storytelling device where the main character really becomes an ambassador for the audience to highlight different things about the past and what he’s looking at. But then in addition to that, what the character Jake has to do, is he has to fit into the past. He’s not of that time. People did things differently back then. He is essentially doing what I do as an actor when I play a role. He is taking on different colloquialisms or different sayings of a period. He is dressing in a different way. He is behaving in a different way. Because he is trying to fit into the past. And so as an actor, playing somebody who essentially is being an actor himself, I don’t know, it was just fun.

There’s a self-consciousness about how he’s behaving in the world.

Yeah, I love that. I love that aspect of it, that there is this justification — because of the setup — for meta commentaries, or these very self-aware commentaries about what’s going on.

Why do you think Jake agrees to the mission? It’s kind of an insane task, to give up years of your life to try and do this thing that you may not even succeed at. Why is he up for it?

Jake’s life in 2016 isn’t really going the way that he had always dreamed that it would. I guess when he was younger, he probably dreamed of getting married and starting a family and becoming a novelist and none of those things have worked out. We find him, he’s a divorcee, his novel never went anywhere, his high school English students don’t seem that interested in what he’s trying to teach. And so he doesn’t really have that much going on in the present.

And then in addition to that, Chris Cooper’s character Al, the one who introduces him to the time portal and asks him to go on this mission, is so emphatic and believes so deeply in this mission and that by saving JFK, maybe the country and the world will be a better place. 

Does that make him the right man for the job?

Well, one of the things that I like about the project is that Jake isn’t a spy. He doesn’t have any military background, or anything like that. So he is in some ways not well-equipped to take on a mission like this. But in other ways he’s smart and resourceful. I like playing characters like that, where it’s sort of an everyman character who is asked to rise to certain circumstances when he’s called upon.

Right place right time, rather than, “You are chosen for this.”

Yeah, it’s not like he’s Harry Potter, like you’re the Chosen One and you’re the only one who can do this. It’s more like, Al has nobody else he can turn to, so please do this.

If you had the opportunity Jake has, would you want to change things? Or would you want to just go back to observe what’s happening?

That’s so tricky. I would say yes, there are certain things that you just would want to warn people about, but on the other hand, if I look back at just the small events of my own life, I know that sometimes the hardest things I had to go through or the most adverse things I had to experience are the things that changed me for the better. Just a really small example is, when I was younger, I did a series of movies that I really didn’t like. I worked really hard on them, but they weren’t movies that I cared about. And after they came out, I just felt so awful. So I could say, oh, I would go back and not do those movies, but in fact by doing those movies, I realized, oh, never make decisions based on career or what other people tell you anymore. Only do projects that you care about, that you believe in, and that idea really just came out of having a bad experience on those movies. So it’s hard to say. Yeah, you want to go and save a lot of people or whatever, but the butterfly effect? Who knows what other horrible thing you might enable if you go change one thing.

11/22/63 premieres on Monday, Feb. 15 on Hulu.

Lisa Weidenfeld

THRnews@thr.com