[This story contains major spoilers from season one, episode four of Paradise.]
Dan Fogelman is fessing up.
The Paradise showrunner and writer, famed for his other hits This Is Us and Only Murders in the Building, tells The Hollywood Reporter about a white lie he told 20th Television (owned by Disney) to delay shooting the post-apocalyptic thriller currently taking up a lot of space on screens and social media feeds.
“I’m saying it now, because it looks like the show might be moderately successful, so no one will care,” Fogelman says with a laugh to The Hollywood Reporter while discussing the Hulu series’ latest episode.
In the first three episodes that launched the series (streaming on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ in the U.K.), Sterling K. Brown‘s Secret Service Agent Xavier Collins is reckoning with the assassination of his protectee, President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) while the allusive yet powerful Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) oversees the continuation of relative normality in their utopian bunker beneath the mountains of Colorado. The end of the first episode revealed the show’s big twist when audiences were shown that the underground haven has for over a year shielded the 25,000-person community from the environmental collapse of the world above.
Xavier has two children to think about but has, at least, a sidekick in Jon Beavers’ Agent Billy Pace. That is, until Sarah Shahi, playing therapist Dr. Gabriela Torabi, gets Brown’s character away from any surveillance (in the shower) at the end of episode three to drop the cliffhanger of all cliffhangers: She has a message from the late president that Billy is not to be trusted.
In this week’s fourth episode, Xavier is now battling his dwindling faith in everyone around him. On confronting Billy, his partner explains that Sinatra is at fault for what he’s done. Fans are shown a glimpse of Pace’s tragic life before the bunker: a child abused by his uncle whose subsequent time in prison makes him a muscled brute fit to guard a president.
Elsewhere, the audience sees in flashback Billy killing the bunker’s explorers who ventured to see if life was viable above ground. He did this on the orders of Sinatra, but before Billy can explain what happened and why to Xavier, his seemingly innocuous lover Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) poisons Billy and makes the scene look like a suicide.
Below, Fogelman catches up with THR to explain killing off Beavers’ character despite falling in love with the actor, finding the perfect president in James Marsden and the lengths he went to to get Nicholson in his show: “She was somebody I wanted from the very beginning… I moved heaven and earth.”
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Did you know early on that Billy wasn’t going to be a character who would make it to the end?
It’s a good question — no. When I wrote the pilot, I just sat down and wrote it and didn’t really know exactly what the twists and turns of it were going to be. And I actually found myself really quickly falling in love with both the character and the actor, and then realizing that the most unexpected thing would be to kill him in the way we were going to. It would be a real shock, because if I can make the audience fall in love with him in that episode, they wouldn’t feel it coming.
But I really fell in love with the actor. Jon [Beavers] auditioned on tape, and I also knew that because the character was going to die four episodes in there might be some desire to put maybe a big name in the role as it was a short little arc. But Jon came in and did a chemistry read on tape for me and I really wanted him to get it. He nailed it. But I wanted to make it undeniable.
At that point, I had the fourth script already written for this episode, and there’s the long scene at the end where he has a confrontation with Sinatra in her office. I said, “Hey, Jon, can I grab you? Would you do me a favor?” I ran outside the room with him and had them print out the pages of that scene. I said, “Take a look at these pages. If you’re not comfortable or it doesn’t go well, I’ll never show anybody this, but I just want to have it in my back pocket just in case.” And within five minutes, he knocked on the door. He said, “I’m ready.” I was shocked, because it was so much material. He came in and it was unbelievable. I just knew he had the part there. And then I was very sad that we were going to be killing him two scenes later.
Agent Billy Pace (Jon Beavers) with Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) and his daughter, played by Aliyah Mastin, in Paradise.
Disney
That cliffhanger in the shower at the end of episode three, we’re told to be suspicious of Billy. But Sinatra’s hold on him is ultimately ineffective. He is a goodie. He was on the right side.
Yeah. I think one of the things I always loved about the show and the characters who surround Sterling is they’re not all bad and they’re not all good. Billy is a really flawed character who’s done some really, really awful things, and you fall in love with him in the same episode you’re seeing him do those things. Julianne Nicholson’s character is, arguably, the heavy in the series, but she’s also probably the character who will most make you cry and [who] you will feel for in a lot of ways. It’s an optimistic view of people that I’m trying to keep right now. People who appear to be mad aren’t all bad.
Even Julianne, at one point this season, she says: “I’m not a monster, even though I seem like it.” Quote-unquote villains are much more compelling when there’s that morally gray area. She does nail the sinister element, though. Was Julianne always the frontrunner for Sinatra?
She was somebody I wanted from the very beginning. I’d admired her from afar. I didn’t want Sinatra to be like a mustache-twirling villain, I wanted her to be softer, but also quietly commanding. I really wanted Julianne and we Zoomed, I sent her the scripts, and we hit it off. I thought she wanted to do it, and then I got word that she did, and I was so excited. Then it came back to us that there had been a screw-up in communication and she was shooting a film or another series and the dates weren’t going to work.
So I moved heaven and earth. I said, “Can we change the shooting schedule?” and we did a little bit, but it still wasn’t going to work. There was too much overlap. Eventually, I received the call, like, “You have to move on.” I was devastated. I’m saying it now, because it looks like the show might be moderately successful, so no one will care. But I actually lied to the people at the studio, and I said: “We’re not ready to make the show. We need more time in prep,” which cost a lot of money to extend prep… I made it [seem] about 12 different things, but that allowed for us to delay starting shooting, and allowed Julianne to be free. Now, obviously, everyone’s so glad we did it.
Dan Fogelman, you lied to Disney?
(Laughs) I lied to Disney to buy a couple of weeks of time for Julianne Nicholson.
What a great tidbit. I’m curious to know Sinatra’s motivations. I know she wants to keep things underground. She wants to keep people protected. I wonder if it’s an element of: “If I had to lose someone, everyone does.“
I think there’s two type of viewpoints of the world, right? And there’s one viewpoint which is that people are naturally terrible, right? And if I have something good, people will try and take it. Then there’s the other viewpoint, which is people aren’t all terrible, and that there is goodness in people, even under dire circumstances and you don’t have to do the wrong thing because you’re afraid of other people doing the wrong thing. I think those two points of view are at war for Sinatra.
It’s not really your typical post-apocalyptic show. But in those early seasons of The Walking Dead, that was such compelling television, because there was one central question underneath it all, which is, what lengths would you go to in a catastrophe to protect your family and the people you care about? Would you kill? That is a core question underneath Sinatra. She’s been doing a lot of bad things for a really long time under the umbrella of protecting not just her family, but eventually all of the people under her charge. You have to have a spiritual reckoning with that. I think that’s coming for her.
And while we’re on the topic, let’s talk about Mr. President, too. Was James Marsden always your top pick?
There were a lot of discussions at the beginning [about who would play the president]. It’s a very tough thing to get your head around, the image of who’s going to play a president, the lothario booze-drinking president who also has gravitas. [Marsden] was somebody who was at the top of my list from the very beginning. I approached him multiple times. Awkwardly, once at a dinner, I almost approached him. He was sitting at the next table and my wife begged me not to interrupt his dinner and talk to him about it, and I didn’t. And the next time was at an awards show. I was there for my other show, and he was winning awards for his other show, and I awkwardly accosted him in the lounge saying, “I have something coming your way. My name’s Dan.”
I went home and told my wife like I was incredibly awkward with James Marsden. “He’s gonna think I’m such a weird guy, and he’s never gonna do it now.” He says now that he found me charming, but I’m not so sure.
I’m sure he did.
He did a tremendous job with it. Three unwritten rules in Hollywood are: don’t act with children, don’t act with dogs and don’t play President of the United States. Because a lot of actors will have heard about the role and be like, “Oh, no, thank you. I don’t want to play the fictionalized version of a president who drinks in the Oval Office.” [Marsden] just dove in and took on all the levels of it. He’s very charming and he’s very funny, he’s very witty. But he also carries a deep, deep weight with him, especially as you get into the later episodes of the series. There’s a real gravitas and sadness to him. That guy who also can pull off the looks, charm, charisma and comedy, it rarely comes in the same package.
Marsden as President Cal Bradford.
Disney/Brian Roedel
Cal Bradford is the leader of the free world when the planet is quite literally ending. You previously told THR that you did a lot of research into environmental catastrophe and the reality of a nuclear winter. Who did you speak to?
We did it on all fronts. We spoke to an architect whose job was, not just for films but for think tanks, to design futuristic cities and find out what the next level of building futuristic cities might look like. We talked to sociologists, one of whom wrote a paper for us, a 40-page dissertation on the thought process behind starting an underground civilization. It was called a hypothesis on how to perfectly construct an underground civilization built for 25,000 people. And he wrote a very scholarly dissertation for us on how you would try and govern, what guardrails you should try and keep in place, where you could fall apart. So that was a really useful tool.
Then we just did a tremendous amount of conversations about climate change and nuclear fallout. In the show, everything’s hidden — it’s still left to be seen what the state of the world is. And we’ve very carefully crafted that. I hired one of my writers who wrote what I think is the greatest American novel, The Deluge by Stephen Markley. It’s a 1,000-page novel spanning 40 years about a fictionalized environmental catastrophe. So he’s been a writer on the show, and it’s been a really useful resource.
Whenever we get into talk about climate change, I go, “Can I wait for Markley to get here, because I don’t want to have this conversation without him!” [We also watched] TED Talks. When you’re exploring this stuff, you’re constantly stunned by how much information there is on the internet. We were worried it would get us on a lot of watch lists at a certain point, because we were researching really terrifying stuff. It will be explored more in the second season of the show, but we really built out a simulation of what we think happened, both because of the environmental effects, because of the nuclear effects, and all the other stuff that came with it. We have a real plan for what happened in the world above.
Did you speak to any government officials?
No, we did a fair amount of research on the Cuban Missile Crisis — people’s memories and recordings of what it was like at fraught times, whether it be Churchill or whether it be the Cuban Missile Crisis. What it’s like to be in the room where terrifying things are happening. A lot of 9/11 research. There’s a really incredible piece that was written in, I forget which magazine, which was a minute by minute accounting of what happened after 9/11 from Air Force One with George W. Bush. When things went off the grid, what the state of the United States military was when nobody knew exactly what was happening and how large the threat was, what the journalists were doing on the plane. So we did a lot of research but no, I mean, this is something that’s never happened before, so there’s nothing to really research. We just tried to get it as accurate as possible.
Based on that research, did you establish how likely it is that any of this could happen?
When we sat down to make this there was no agenda, environmentally or otherwise. We wanted to have a big piece of propulsive entertainment. I wanted to pick something that was far fetched enough that it didn’t feel like the most eminent way the world might end, while at the same time, do something that’s grounded enough in reality that it is something that could end the world. And so that was the fine line we were trying to walk.
There’s a lot of other more obvious ways things could go really awry on the planet. So I don’t think people have to be up at night worrying about this particular one, but the way our world collapses in this show… there are scary things that are more present right now, [like how] the human condition is really frail. One of the things that’s really scary about climate change that I’ve learned is that six inches of sea level rise, these things seem minor and small, but they can trigger economic collapse and civilization breakdowns.
One more question. I know Jane’s going under the radar. I have suspicions about Jane. Can you confirm or deny?
I would be worried about her. She killed her boyfriend.
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The first four episodes of Paradise are streaming on Hulu, with new episodes dropping weekly on Tuesdays. Read THR‘s interview with Jon Beavers on episode four.
