Emmys season is officially upon us, and with it a chance to ruminate on the TV series that provided comfort, confusion, and catharsis amidst a most challenging year. On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, Richard Lawson, Katey Rich, Joanna Robinson, and special guest Franklin Leonard discuss implications of the Discovery-WarnerMedia merger, which was announced this week just three years after AT&T acquired Time Warner for $85 billion.
The group also reflected on a few of the years buzziest shows, including Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad for Amazon and Ted Lasso, the AppleTV+ series that is set to sweep comedy categories and put Jason Sudeikis-in-a-hoodie back on the radar. That show’s long-awaited second season drops on July 23, giving Emmys voters a 10-episode dose of optimism right in the thick of voting.
Someone who knows a thing or two about hit TV shows is Marielle Heller, the star of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit and director of What the Constitution Means to Me on Amazon. Richard Lawson spoke to the filmmaker of previous awards contenders such as Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood about what it was like to step in front of the camera again. The pair delve into the complicated familial dynamic Alma (played by Heller) shares with her adopted daughter Beth (Anya Taylor-Joy). Heller also shares her Queen’s Gambit origin story, how she tapped into her theater roots to helm Heidi Schreck’s play for a pre-election audience, and why she wasn’t convinced that a show set in the world of chess would be a runaway hit. She even divulges her favorite quar-entertainment, including The Crown, Promising Young Woman, and The Real Housewives.
Take a listen to the episode above, and find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. We’d also love to hear from you via text, which you can sign up for here.
Read a partial transcript of the Marielle Heller interview below.
I think the show does such a really beautiful job of delineating that being an independent person does not mean not having people that you rely on. I think that by the end of the show, we see that Beth has this whole coalition of people living and dead who have been around her, this orphan who has now found a community. And Alma’s clearly a part of that, but also found that for herself in Beth.
Yes, Alma’s a huge part of that. And I think she lets Beth open up enough to rely on other people. She’s sort of the beginning of Beth being able to form those other relationships that ended up being so pivotal. And it is so touching at the end of the series, when you realize she has a coalition of people who are supporting her, and she isn’t alone.
And I think for Alma, there’s something so awakened by Beth. I loved the scene we got to play on the plane where I admit to Beth that I have this pen pal I’ve been keeping up with in Mexico City who I’m going to meet up with, and there’s this… I kept thinking of it as like something got woken up inside of me by seeing Beth and this new life we were living together. You know, it…something had been lying dormant for many, many years in Alma that got awoken, and it was such a fun thing to play.
Yeah. How Alma got her groove back.
Exactly.
So I think a part of that interdependence is the way that you and Anya Taylor-Joy worked together. She’s a young actor who has established herself pretty mightily in just a few years, but also this was a huge undertaking. I mean, she’s in pretty much every scene of the show. And I’m wondering if any of your working with Bel Powley on Diary of a Teenage Girl, and just your skills as a director, do you feel that that made you… Did that inform how you acted as a scene partner to someone with, especially, such a huge burden on her shoulders for this project?
It probably did. I think I looked to Anya in a similar way to how I look to Bel, which is almost like a big sister, or I want to say that I sound younger, not like a mom, but that I felt similarly sort of protective of her. And I want her to make the right choices in her career and stay a good person because both Bel and Anya are great people who are connected deeply to their humanity but have not been corrupted by the Hollywood lifestyle and are just not jerks.
And I think a lot of what Anya and I ended up connecting on and talking about was the kinds of projects we want to work on, the types of life we want to have. And me kind of passing on whatever little bits of wisdom I’ve learned the last few years about how to be a young woman in this business and how to protect yourself, but also stay connected to your joy and to the things that make you creatively fulfilled and to not losing that and not becoming jaded, I guess.
So I felt a real kinship with her right away, and I felt a protectiveness of her. And I also wanted her to, like I was, be able to see what a great job we were on. I think she and I both looked at each other every day and we’re kind of like, “This is amazing. Like this is such a wonderful job.” And (creator) Scott Frank is such a wonderful boss, and we have such wonderful characters to be working on. And we both loved the relationship between these two women so much that there was a bit of just kind of relishing what we took on that I felt like I could kind of give that perspective to like, “Yeah, this is really good.”
There’s a lovely marrying there in a way. Obviously things for Beth and Alma are a lot darker, but like that kind of realization of we’re in this thing and it’s going places and that shows in the acting. What was it, whatever was happening off screen, even when you were having a fantastic experience on set, you’re still doing something in a vacuum. You have no idea what it’s going to do when it’s out in the world. And then The Queen’s Gambit debuted on Netflix in October and was a big hit. Do you have a memory of when you realized that people were really connecting with it?
I don’t think there was one moment, but I will say I really didn’t think it was going to be that big of a hit. I mean, I don’t think you can sort of predict something like this, but I thought it was good. I knew it was really good. When we were filming it, I thought it was possibly going to be good, and I felt nervous about how the chess would play. I couldn’t see everything Scott could see cause I wasn’t directing it. I wasn’t the one holding the bag. And then when I saw the first cuts and I realized he had figured out a way to make the chess so compelling and that the relationships worked so much and more than any of that, you’re just on Beth’s side. Your relationship as the audience to Beth is so strong because Scott’s a really good filmmaker, and he puts you squarely on her side from the moment the series begins. And you’re just rooting for her.
I realized how successful it was at what it was trying to do but that still wasn’t realizing it was going to be like this crazy mega hit. I still don’t totally get it. I mean, it’s a show about chess, and I can’t put my finger on why it hit in such a way. There was also a moment when back probably in April, the first month of the pandemic where I saw an early cut and I said to Scott, “Are you really going to wait until October to put this show out?” And he said, “Yep.” And I was like, “Well, but then lockdown is going to be over what a bummer.”
So naive.
And of course it came out at a time when we all needed something like this so badly it couldn’t have come at a better moment. And he waited until it was really done and really good, which I think was the right thing to have happen as well. And then, I don’t know. I started hearing from a lot of people, a lot of people who started watching the show who know me and it took them a while to realize it was me. Just cause I cut all my hair off and I looked so different. And also people were like, “What are you doing in this show?”
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