There were few shows on television as fast-paced as HBO Max’s breakout madcap thriller-comedy The Flight Attendant. Series protagonist Cassie, played by Kaley Cuoco, was always on the go, dashing from one stunning locale to another, evading the feds while trying to figure out how how her tall, dark, and handsome one-night stand Alex (Michiel Huisman) woke up dead beside her in a hotel room in Bangkok.
While Cassie is quite literally on the run from the FBI, she’s also trying to outrun and avoid her inner demons, demons that stem from decades of abusing alcohol and deep-seated guilt regarding her father’s death. In one pivotal, surreal fantasy sequence in the penultimate episode of the first season, Cassie accidentally winds up in an AA meeting and runs into a multiplicity of Alexes, a wasted version of herself, and one ginormous bunny as she attempts to escape from her past. In a climactic monologue at the end of a montage of painful memories, Cassie comes to an emotional realization that it’s time to stop running and confront her demons head-on. “She hits the pause button,” Huisman says. “No more running.”
Vanity Fair spoke with Huisman and Cuoco about filming the memory palace sequence, the technical tricks employed to make it feel as surreal and real as possible, and, in Cuoco’s words, the “tightrope of emotions” she had to walk to pull it off.
By the middle of episode seven, “Hitchcock Double,” it looks like Cassie has run out of options. Still a prime suspect in Alex’s murder, with an assassin named Felix hot on her tail, Cassie has said goodbye to her best friend and legal representative Annie (Zosia Mamet) for what she believes is the last time and agrees to skip town with her former attempted murderer turned ally Miranda (Michelle Gomez). Before they ship off to Montreal or Toronto, however, they must meet Miranda’s contact at an undisclosed location.
This undisclosed location happens to be the very last place Cassie would like to find herself: an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Cassie, who’s just been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct, is still deep in denial about her own addiction to alcohol and not yet ready to confront it. “I don’t need to take that step,” she says to the group. “I am not an alcoholic. So sorry about the rest of you.” Despite her protestations that she’s fine, the AA meeting triggers something within Cassie and she dissociates back to the hotel room—now ironically lined with the “Keep Your Head Above Water” Whale poster from the AA meeting—with Alex, who is pushing her to confront her drinking problem.
“It’s not like Alex to be…such a dick,” Huisman says about Alex’s confrontation with Cassie during the memory palace. “What I like about [this scene] is that all the trauma—everything that Cassie has been running away from—is getting to a point where she cannot control it anymore,” Huisman tells me. “It’s not fun anymore.” To get her attention, Alex shatters multiple glasses, a metaphor for how Cassie’s own life is crumbling to pieces. Huisman says the bottles were made of sugar glass—“it’s the safest”—and that he had to shatter about 10 to get the shot. Still, Cassie’s not yet ready to face the music about her drinking problem, which has consequences for Alex as well, as he’s relying on Cassie to solve his murder.
“He was really pushing her…because he had an agenda for himself,” Huisman says. “He wants to know what happened to him. He wants her to get to the bottom of what happened, but he sees her as spiraling out of control.”
And just like that, Cassie’s back sitting in the AA meeting, anxiety levels skyrocketing. She sits in the back of the AA meeting and characters from her past begin to populate the church basement: her father, the other victims of the car crash, her younger self, and a drunk version of herself the night she met Alex, all staring directly at her. Throughout all of this, Cuoco does an incredible job of calibrating her emotions, allowing the audience to go on the journey with her from slightly uncomfortable at the beginning of the suite of scenes to full-blown panic attack by the middle. “Nothing was really shot in order so I needed to be emotionally ready for a breakdown at any second,” she says. “Before every scene, I would ask producers, ‘Okay, where was I right before this and where are we next?’ It didn’t help my process to do more than that.”
As Cassie starts to freak out more and more, dozens of Alexes flood the AA room, sitting in chairs staring directly at Cassie. As for how they shot all those Alexes into that AA room, apparently “it’s a relatively easy trick,” says Huisman. “It requires locking off the camera and deciding where your focus is gonna be.” Once the camera is set, Huisman says that he hit his various marks in the room, and each take is ultimately layered on top of each other to give the illusion that there are dozens of Alexes in the room at the same time.
Panic attack now in full swing, Cassie leaves the AA room, looking for a way out. The surrealism of the scene kicks up a notch as Cassie runs headfirst into a giant bunny in the hallway. “The bunny was real,” Huisman joked, while Cuoco had a slightly different explanation of how the giant bunny came to pass: “Green screens! It was awesome to finally see it all cut together.” Accompanied by the Cure’s “alt.end,” Cassie’s epic meltdown continues, leaving her screaming and shaking in a kindergarten classroom, unable to run away from the trauma of her father’s death and the guilt she feels for her role in how it happened.
The sequence swings back to a flashback to that death, and then builds to a scene back in the hotel between Cassie and Alex, in which she reaches a moment of clarity and declares herself ready to change.
“To be honest, I didn’t know what we were shooting that day! When I got to set, I saw the sides and was like, Oh, I’m pretty sure this is the big breakdown scene,” Cuoco says of her monologue in the hotel. It’s a deeply felt, emotional performance from Cuoco, who until this point in her career was mostly known for her comedy chops as a sitcom actress on The Big Bang Theory. Cuoco recalls the crew walking on eggshells after she filmed the scene. “I got to set and said, ‘Let’s just roll.’ We did it a few times but never cut, then it was over. We had it and there was no reason to try and get more footage. The minute we cut, my entire empathetic and sweet crew were very quiet and afraid to disturb me. I finally said, ‘It’s okay everyone! I’m only crying because I’m hangry. What’s for lunch?’”
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