- Hi, I'm Sarah Goldberg, and you're
watching In Studio with The Hollywood Reporter.
(upbeat music)
- Now before we jump in, I have to ask,
have you seen Gene's acting ads that he's placed?
- Yes, yeah, actually I saw, well,
the first one I saw was in New York
because I live in New York, and I was on the subway,
and I heading into Union Square
and there was lovely Henry as Gene.
- For those people who haven't watched the show,
do you think they're trying to reach out
or what do you thinks going on?
- I don't know, it's like this subliminal advertising.
I really wonder what people who haven't seen the show
would make of it, especially if they recognize Henry Winkler
and don't know his character.
They think something's gone very wrong in his life.
- Henry has a name change.
- Yes, yes, he's having a second life
as Gene Cousineau, yeah they're very charming.
- They're really great.
You're here to talk about all things Barry season two,
looking back to season one, what stood out
about the script specifically and about Sally?
- Well, I remember way back when I got the pilot script
a decade ago, yeah it's been three years.
I remember reading it and thinking
I just hadn't read anything like that ever before
and you get sent so many dodgy scripts,
let's just call them, and I read it
and it was just so inventive and creative
and tonally just really surprising,
and I hadn't read a female character like that either
who sort of had this weird combination of girl next door
guileless charm, matched with this kind of crazy narcissism
and tunnel vision and obsession with her career and
yeah, it was so funny and dark and it really
jumped off the page to me immediately.
- That's awesome, and was Bill a draw to the show too?
- Totally, I mean, I grew up in Canada,
and they do have SNL in Canada, but I was deprived.
I didn't watch much SNL and then I moved
to England, so I honestly didn't really know his SNL work
that well, I knew him from Skeleton Twins,
which is the most incredible film,
and then I went back and watched all of his old sketches
and on set when we're all tired after a 17-hour day,
he performs all the cut for time sketches
from between like, when was he on?
2007 to 2013?
So I've seen all the cut for time--
- He performs them for you guys?
- Yes, yes, he does all the voices of all the other actors,
so we've seen all the cut for time sketches,
so they did have their air date just in the studio.
- [Brian] That's so awesome.
- Yeah, but anyway, I mean yeah, he was such a huge draw.
He's really sort of singular talent.
He's got such a wild imagination.
- With the show being so different,
I mean, there hasn't been a show
like this that I've seen ever.
- No, me neither.
- It's so different.
- Yeah.
- And it really is this dark comedy.
What do you remember the conversations being
with Bill and Alec about kind of where they wanted
to take the show and why they wanted
to make it so different I guess?
- Well, I think it's a quite casual beginnings.
I think they were sitting in a diner
and trying to figure out what they wanted to write,
and I think Bill said what about a hit man show
and Alec was like, I don't want to do a hit man show,
and he's like no, but I'm the hit man.
And then Alec started laughing, so I think he was kind
of just a very natural, easy birth.
And from there, I mean, I think
that we've all surprised ourselves
and they've surprised themselves
with sort of the scale of it and the ambition of it
and it's a show that has no formula.
You can't pin it to any one thing, and it shouldn't work.
On the one hand you've got this shoot 'em up
and this sort of almost Breaking Bad-esque hit man story
and on the other side you have the rest of us in tights.
No, the sort of waiting for Guffman--
- That's a good description.
- Yeah.
They all come back from shooting in the desert
like windswept and sunburned and sand in their hair
and we've been like, hey what did you guys get up to?
All cozy in our theater.
But yeah, it just, as an idea, it really shouldn't work.
You've got two very separate shows in a way in one
and the way they've put that all together
was really genius I think.
I think that they've really, they're diving this season
into a real exploration of shame and the lies we
tell ourselves to survive, and who we think we are
and who we really are, and what we present to the world,
and I think Bill has a great line, Barry has a great line
in episode four where he says, you know,
you should be able to be who you say you are,
and that theme runs through the show.
- [Brian] We see that with Sally
especially in season two, yeah.
- Exactly, and there's a lot of parallels
between them as characters actually,
because they're both having to live this life
for their own survival.
- For you as an actor, how wildly different would you say
Sally's kind of rise to being an actor has
been compared to yours?
Or similar in any way?
- No, thankfully not similar.
Yeah, I would say we're wildly different,
except we look a lot alike.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, but no I grew up in Vancouver in Canada
and then when I was 19 I moved to London
and I did a conservatory three year drama training.
I really wanted to do theater.
That was my passion, and that's actually a parallel
with Sally, she also wants to do theater,
and I moved there and lived there for nearly nine years
then did a ton of theater over there
and then started doing theater in New York
and I think the main difference,
I think I was lucky that when I was in school
I had this incredible acting teacher, Michael Weiner,
who really just taught me this great work ethic,
and I really was well trained in that I knew it was
gonna be so hard, I knew it was gonna be a long game.
He used to say, you'll be broke but you'll be so happy,
and my big ambition was to have my own theater company
and I just knew it was--
- Do you still have that as an ambition?
- Well I had one, but we only lasted one season.
- Oh, okay.
- I was 18 years old, it was called Beyond Blue Theater.
We did one show at the presentation house theater
in North Van to mixed reviews.
- [Brian] Gene can bring it back.
- Gene can revive us, yes.
But yeah, I think I just never,
she has this ambition that's slightly misguided,
and I think she's really anxious to have these dreams
come true, but I don't even think
she knows what those dreams are.
She's got ambitions to be famous,
and I never really had those same goals,
and I was lucky enough early in my career
to work with Alan Rickman and Sophie Thompson
and all these great British actors who come
from repertory theater, and you know, it's a long life,
so you could go the long way round, you know?
- With the acting element to the show,
it's really like a play inside a play kind of.
- Yeah, yeah, it's very meta.
- Yeah, how fun is that for you to play an actor?
As an actor, but you're also playing her,
but then she's playing her, you know what I mean?
- It's slightly surreal at times,
and doesn't require a huge amount of research.
No it's um--
(Brian mumbling)
Yeah.
It's really fun, honestly, because we get
to experience things on set that we've experienced
in real life in season one.
That audition scene I have where I fall apart
in the room, I mean, listen, no acting required.
I've been there, and it's fun in that way,
that you can kind of have a little bit of catharsis,
but on the other hand, it's very different from all of our,
as a cast, like all of the acting class,
we all have different backgrounds,
and this is a very different story that we're telling,
so we can have a lot of fun,
and I think we keep in a real place.
I think there's--
- [Brian] It feels real.
- There's humor to it, but we're not sending them up.
We all care about these characters,
and we're all trying to give them, do them justice,
and that their needs and wants are very real
even if they're totally warped.
- We find out more about her back story.
Is that something you knew from the beginning,
or were you kind of learning just as you were learning?
- Well we talked about it a lot before we shot season two.
In season one, we were lucky enough
to have all eight episodes
before we shot, which was such a luxury and such an anomaly.
- [Brian] That's so rare.
- Yeah, so rare, and I mean, what a joy to sort of be
able to map out your whole trajectory
before starting shooting, and you can bring all that
at the beginning, I didn't get to the story
about her past and the domestic abuse situation
that she's come from until the finale of season one,
so I knew that that was her story or her backstory,
I didn't know that that's what we were gonna
be diving into until we started this season,
and I was really excited that Alec and Bill
wanted to take it there and I'm always up
for making it darker, and they were very thoughtful
about how we were gonna go about telling that story
and we were all quite vigilant in what we wanted to say,
and we ultimately were living in sort of in century times
and in very stressful times around that topic,
and so we wanted to
we wanted to really do Sally justice
and tell her story, and she's not a representative
of every woman, god-willing, hopefully,
but at the same time, we had an eye on the macro
and what was going on in the world as we were shooting.
So it definitely informed what we were doing.
- In season two you have this powerful monologue
where she vows to never be with a violent man ever again.
- Yeah.
- [Brian] And then it cuts to Barry kind of making a face.
- Yeah, I mean, poor Sally, if only she knew.
Yeah, I mean she has this guileless self-involved quality
that's quite useful as a tool for story telling,
because obviously we can get away with a lot.
She's not so quick on the uptake
because she's quite distracted
by her own stuff, you know, I mean there's that scene
in episode three where there's bullets flying
and she's very focused on herself, so it's fun to play.
It's fun to get to play with that and I mean, I feel
for her that she doesn't' know the situation that she's in,
and that she's actually with a very dangerous person.
There's a huge tragedy to that, and there's a tragedy
to both of them that they,
they're both kind of lost souls,
and they've come to the wrong town to heal that.
- [Brian] Not the place to be.
- No, and they can't fully see each other.
I mean how can you take care of someone else
when you haven't learned to take care of yourself?
And so they keep missing the point
and their whole relationship is based on projections.
Sally doesn't see Barry, I don't think.
She sees herself reflected by Barry,
but this season we see her veneer kind of crack
and this personality that she's worked so hard
to build to escape her past,
it's all starting to be chipped away at,
and she can actually walk toward a more honest life,
but for Barry, it's much more complicated,
because that might mean prison in the end.
- Well going off that, do you see it
being kind of a tragic end?
- Do I see the show being a tragic
end between them? - No, for Barry and Sally.
- I've always said it's not a love story.
- [Brian] Yeah, it's not.
- It's not, and I don't know whether it will
be a tragic end, but
I feel for them that they,
they're looking for something
and they're looking in the wrong places.
- Going back to Henry, what have you learned,
I guess, working with him?
- Honestly, that man is the mayor of the world.
He is so kind and I think I really learned grace
from him, well still working on it,
but he really, he has this effortless grace
and generosity of spirit about him,
and he comes to work every day like it's his first day
on the job, and he has this effortless humility,
and I think he's seen this industry from all angles,
and the absence of bitterness in him is a marvel,
and I mean, I love the man, I'll say it.
I love him, he's just so wonderful,
and I think he sets such a buoyant and beautiful tone
and everybody has to meet him there.
- He sets the bar high.
- Yeah, he sets the bar high.
There's no misbehaving around that man.
You gotta come to work with an open heart.
- Now the finale is on Sunday,
what's your best tease for what we can expect?
- Oh my gosh.
You're gonna get me fired.
It just gets darker.
- Well I'm nervous to see it too, we both were nervous
to hear before, not too much spoiled. but
- Yeah, no, no spoilers.
It just gets darker.
Like a good Leonard Cohen song.
- Well that's good because the show
is renewed for season three.
- Yeah, yeah, I'm delighted yeah.
- Where do you want to see it go?
- Well I'd like to stay living, that would be great,
or they're gonna kill me off.
I'd love to come back and haunt them all.
Yeah, the boys have some ideas up their sleeves
and I just trust them, and that we've got this,
they've got such wild imaginations
and such precision of story telling, I think it's gonna
be exciting wherever we go.
- Can't wait to see it.
- Yeah.
- Make sure to check out the finale on HBO on Sunday.