The Party Down Cast Reveal What Has (and Hasn’t) Changed For the Season 3 Revival
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The post The Party Down Cast Reveal What Has (and Hasn’t) Changed For the Season 3 Revival appeared first on Consequence.
When Party Down Season 3 went back into production, the vibe was, fittingly, a party. Or, as new cast member Tyrel Jackson Williams tells Consequence, “It was definitely like being at somebody else’s high school reunion. Everybody knew each other and they had inside jokes, and coming back together to shoot the show was really emotional for them.”
Adds star Ken Marino, “it was exciting that first day because we were all there, and it’s that scene from the first episode where it’s like a big reunion, in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. I think our excitement on camera was the same off-camera.”
Ryan Hansen agrees: “Everyone’s been on a bunch of shows and stuff, and you know, they’re a blast. But there’s something so special about this. We have just so much fun making each other laugh. It really is like a party.”
As the cast and executive producer John Enbom explain it, the return of Party Down was one they were all eager for — but that return was one which felt very uncertain up until a recent point. In fact, in the years since the critically beloved Starz series ended in 2010, the conversation around a Party Down reunion initially revolved around a reunion film.
“They had teased us, three or four times over 10 or 11 years, that we were going to do a movie. And I don’t know why, but I had lost faith,” Jane Lynch says. “By the time [Season 3] came around, I was like, I’m not counting my Party Down chickens until they’re fully hatched.”
According to Adam Scott, “I think it was like 2011, 2012, we actually came fairly close to making the Party Down movie. And then when it started falling apart, my initial kind of gut feeling was relief. John had actually written a great script because he’s just a great writer, and it was cool and everyone was in it and everything, but there was something about it that just wasn’t feeling quite right.”
Continues Scott, “It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I zeroed in on it, and it was just that the guys had come up with the perfect idea for a show, which is a different party every week, with our core cast members and different surroundings, different guest cast, different everything. And we get to watch our people get involved in whatever drama is happening at the party, whatever the new surroundings are. It’s just sort of a perfect idea, right? And it’s evergreen. If it’s a movie, that’s just out the window — it could be like three parties, but still it’s not the same.
Enbom agrees. “We toyed with trying to make it happen and we put in a lot of work on it, but the show itself feels very so episodic television to us. We had a really hard time trying to make it a feature film, which makes you prioritize certain parts of the storytelling over the other parts that you can do in an episodic television context.”
Adds Scott, “Did you go home with Henry or go home with Kyle and see his apartment? Do we want to see them at their apartments? It opened up a whole host of questions that I wasn’t sure we wanted to answer.”
So when the writers sat down to tackle Season 3, Enbom says they deliberately started from scratch. “After 12 years, we were very desperate to not seem like we were outdated or dredging back 12-year-old shtick. We wanted to do the best version of ‘This is happening now.’ These people live now. This is now. I don’t even know if there are any old back-of-the-notebook gags [from the film script] in there.”
In Season 3, we catch up with the past and present employees of the titular catering company a decade after we last saw them: Once-aspiring actor Henry (Scott) has committed to an off-screen life, Constance (Lynch) is enjoying life as a wealthy widow, and Lydia (Megan Mullally) has toughened up as her daughter’s manager. Yet some things never change, like Ron (Marino) still trying to keep Party Down in business, with a minimal amount of support from his underenthused staff (returning cast members Hansen and Martin Starr, as well as new series regulars Williams and Zoë Chao).
The legacy of the original series was not lost on Chao, who was a newcomer to the series on screen, but not as a fan. “I was very familiar with the first two seasons,” she says. “And then, my partner has watched both seasons six times, so it’s an important show in our household. It was a big deal when I got the part and then I got really scared that I was going to be a part of it, because we hold it in such high esteem, and I wouldn’t want to mess it up.”
Williams had been familiar with the show beforehand, but “after getting the audition for it, I had to dive in and do my research to prepare, and then I was having to watch the people I was working with do these incredibly hilarious scenes. So it was trying to tow the line of like, yeah, this is like my new favorite thing, but I also can’t let it be my new favorite thing, because I’m going to see them at work tomorrow.”
Party Down (Starz)
While the new season is very much of the moment, the original characters do remain consistent to how we first met them. “I think the thing that people watch this show for is to be with those characters again,” says Lynch. “They don’t want to be with a different version of that character because time has changed them so much.”
So while Constance’s life circumstances may have changed with the passing of time, she fundamentally hasn’t too much. “She is not given to introspection. I don’t think any of our characters are,” Lynch continues. “For Constance, it’s in her name. She’s constantly who she is. She’s there, she wakes up happy. She’s not reaching for the dream, she’s living the dream already. Now she’s basically Constance with a lot of money. But she loves giving away her money, and she loves being generous, and she’s still exactly the same person she was back in Seasons 1 and 2 of this show.”
Marino, meanwhile, also feels that Ron hasn’t changed too much over the years that have passed. “[Ron] takes one step forward, 22 steps back, but he’s always constantly trying to move forward and that’s the beauty of Ron, that he never gives up. ‘Don’t stop believing.’ In my head, if there was any character that had not changed, it was Ron, because Ron has a singular desire to become an owner of something. He feels that that’s the success that would bring him happiness and that would be the victory. And that hasn’t changed. So to me, in my head, anytime there was failure that we didn’t see over the last 10 years, Ron doubled down and kept moving forward. To me I always thought that that would make Ron even more pathetic and sad and funnier.”
Hansen also feels like his character remains consistent, calling it “the magic of being a himbo. You always gotta be optimistic. He thinks that this is, and it is, it’s a part of Hollywood. You win some, you lose some, or you lose ’em all. But yeah, he just thinks keep trucking away and his dream will come true. And that’s part of his journey, is figuring out if that’s really what he wants.”
That attitude reflects how the show’s dark core — the ever-present failure its characters face — also remains intact. As Starr says, that echoes how Hollywood itself is “totally built on rejection. It’s a tough one to keep going in — I mean, I quit for a little bit. I quit for a few years just because I didn’t feel like I was cut out for it, to be perfectly honest. And then I got pulled back in by friends asking me to work on something, and thank goodness I’ve felt the confidence to come back and do it again. Because it’s tough, man. It really beats it out of you, when you hear the word ‘no’ so much, and you start to believe it.”
Party Down (Starz)
Scott says that he wouldn’t characterize Henry’s journey as a failure. Instead, he says, “10 years later we see that he’s moved on and he’s sort of just happily said goodbye to that part of his life. And he’s settled and has a career in a different area and is content and happy.”
However, the lingering feelings associated with pursuing a career in acting never fade, even if you’re a recent Emmy nominee like Scott. “I still feel exactly the same, that sort of anxiety and fear of failure,” he says. “The absolute conviction that you’re getting it wrong and everyone thinks you suck is always there. I think for any actor, it never leaves you. Whatever you thought [success] would feel like, it does not feel that way and you still feel exactly the same.”
It all speaks to the qualities which have made Party Down’s return as a series possible. “The idea of these people living in the space between what their dreams are and what their present day-to-day reality is, was something that you could always find pathos, humanity, comedy, all the things in,” says Enbom. “It never felt dated to us. It never felt like we’d run out of things to explore. So we always were trying to get something going on, just because we felt like no matter how much time passed, as long as the gang was willing to throw in, we could always just keep going.”
Party Down Season 3 premieres Friday, February 24th at midnight on the STARZ app, all STARZ streaming and on-demand platforms. For cable subscribers, it will debut same day on STARZ at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT.
The Party Down Cast Reveal What Has (and Hasn’t) Changed For the Season 3 Revival
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