Loot: The Surprisingly Complex Story Behind Maya Rudolph’s Hilariously Relatable Smoke Alarm Scene And How It Came To Life
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Minor spoilers for Loot Season 2, Episode 3 are ahead. If you aren’t caught up on one of Apple’s best shows, you can stream it with an Apple TV+ subscription.
I think it’s safe to assume that just about everyone has had to deal with a fire alarm or smoke detector’s batteries at one point or another, and I’m sure many can attest to the fact that it’s one of the more frustrating things to deal with. Well, in Season 2 of Loot, that relatable frustration was hilariously brought to life as Maya Rudolph’s billionaire Molly cluelessly tried to figure out how to get the beeping to stop. Now, the show’s co-creators have broken down the surprisingly complex story behind the creation and execution of this scene.
How The Loot Team Came Up With The Smoke Detector Scene
In Episode 3 of Loot’s second season, Maya Rudolph’s Molly sends her house staff home, and she says she can handle herself for the evening. However, things get chaotic when her smoke detector starts beeping. It’s a hilarious and truly relatable scene, and co-creator Matt Hubbard took the reigns to explain how they came up with it. Breaking down that it was born out of his own experience, he told me:
That happened to us, too. I think we were just talking about how we never know what to do when the smoke alarm goes off. I think that's where that episode's…there wasn't even an episode, we were just talking about it, because it had just happened to me.
He went on to say that from this idea of Molly trying and failing to deal with the smoke detector, they worked “backward.” This ultimately got them to the storyline of her sending her employees home, and her being in the house alone. The juxtaposition of her being this extravagant billionaire and having to deal with a mundane normal issue was what really sold the bit, as Hubbard explained:
That's I think what's fun about this show is that you can take a lot of these big characters and big sets and big crazy billionaire stuff, but we're always trying to like circle back into something that everybody can understand, which is the panic you feel when your smoke alarm starts beep beeping.
Rounding out the explanation of how this scene came to be, Hubbard noted that when you have someone like Maya Rudolph – who was part of one of SNL’s best casts and is known for making her cast mates like Michaela Jaé Rodriguez break on set – leading the show, it’s fun to put her in physical comedy situations like this one.
How The Loot Team Shot The Hilarious Smoke Detector Moment
Those comedy chops were put to work on set too. From a pool net to skis to ski poles to a broom, Molly tries everything to get the detector to stop beeping, and to accomplish the shoot for this scene, it takes a lot of work. Co-creator Alan Yang put that into perspective as he told me:
We have to look for a statue that Maya can use to poke at. And then use a stunt coordinator to teach her how to throw the ski poles and the broom. And then we have to build a rubber smoke detector that she can put in a blender. And then we wrote a panic or demand and Jennifer Dehghan, our production designer, built a panic room on set. All of these elements are necessary to put this scene together. Then in editing, you find the perfect song to play under it. So it's just a long process.
While the scene is super silly and seemingly simple to put together, it was actually quite intricate and took a lot of departments working together to pull off. Yang said that that’s the point. They want the moment to look “super funny” and “effortless,” and it takes all that hard work to do it. He said:
Hopefully, the result is you get something that's super funny and just feels effortless. And you feature Maya's face, and you have her frustration and it's a relatable concept. Because I've had that happen, and I wanted to destroy the smoke detector with a broom, and I just couldn't get it off the ceiling.
It’s efforts and ideas like this that make Loot so brilliant, and it’s Maya Rudolph’s commitment to these relatable bits that make them so funny. Much like the fun Parks and Rec Easter egg featured in the comedy, this scene shows how much thought is put into this series, and it makes me love it even more.
Lucky for us, more hilarious moments like this are bound to happen as Loot continues to drop episodes on the 2024 TV schedule every Wednesday.
