Psych 3 team breaks down that chaotic ending and the creepy credits scene
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Psych 3: This Is Gus.
Psych has always been an ambitiously silly endeavor, but the franchise's latest movie, Psych 3: This Is Gus (now streaming on Peacock), pushed that penchant to the extreme with its final scene.
In the threequel's hectic closing sequence, Gus' fiancé, Selene (Jazmyn Simon), went into a labor at a crime scene with Gus (Dulé Hill) and Shawn (James Roday Rodriguez). Gus insisted on marrying Selene before the baby arrived to spare his parents, so he found two laptops and opened two video chats: one with Tears for Fears' Curt Smith, who previously agreed to play at his wedding, and the second with Father Wesley (Ray Wise), who took a break from performing exorcisms to officiate this odd ceremony. In the confusion, though, the trio got locked in a safe room before the paramedics arrived, and it fell on Shawn to deliver the baby in the middle of a loud wedding (because giving birth isn't stressful on its own). But all's well that ends well, and Selene gave birth to a baby boy.
To say the scene was chaotic would be an understatement. According to Roday Rodriguez, Hill, executive producer Chris Henze, and Psych creator Steve Franks, who directed and co-wrote the movie with Roday Rodriguez, it was one of the most complicated sequences they've ever pulled off. Below, the foursome break down the entire shooting experience. (Note: This Q&A was compiled from two separate interviews with Franks and Henze, and Roday Rodriguez and Hill.)
James Dittiger/Peacock Dulé Hill as Gus and Jazmyn Simon as Selene in 'Psych 3: This Is Gus'
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Steve, how much of what made it on screen was actually scripted? Chris, I see you shaking your head.
CHRIS HENZE: I just remember at some point it was a 14-page scene and we were like, "This is going to feel long when it cuts together, right?"
STEVE FRANKS: We've never gotten more than like one day to shoot a scene, but we had two full days to do it, and we were going crazy. In my future, I can do battle scenes and horse races and all those things, but nothing will be as complex as that birth scene because so much stuff was going on simultaneously. We had to just keep remembering all of the things going on. It was just orchestrated chaos that just kept building and building. It was one of the first things I wrote for the movie. I just knew that this is the part of the movie for me. [Laughs] I knew that the guys could pull it off, but I also knew there was so much opportunity for it to go completely off the rails, because when you're at that level of craziness, you're just teetering on the edge.
My favorite part of the whole experience is that we had Andy Berman shoot Ray Wise down in L.A. He only shot his parts, and Chris and I were in Canada [where the rest of the movie was shot] watching and interacting on Zoom. But when we did the ADR sessions for Ray, and Ray's like, "Hey, can I watch this scene because I've never seen it," I sat there, didn't look at the screen at all, and just watched Ray's face. Just to watch the joy of Ray Wise seeing that thing and going, "Oh hohoho!"
HENZE: He had no idea what the set looked like! He had no idea how it was going to be integrated. We built this set, furnished it, and were like, "Where are all these things going to go? Where are the laptops going to go with green screens that need burn-ins? What if it's in the background? Then we're going to have to 72 VFX shots because there's a green screen in the background." I remember right before we started shooting, we were like, "Oh, let's put the couch here! We're going to put the laptops here. Should they go on the table?" You could just end up with a completely different dynamic, but in that moment you just have to position everything, figure out what it's going to look like, and then everybody just wings it.
It sounds like it was almost a chaotic as the scene itself.
FRANKS: I had drawn the whole thing, and the set wasn't completed until — you know our budgets. [Laughs] So it was exactly what Chris said. We only had so many burn-ins we were allowed to have. We had to make sure we had to frame out the laptops as much as possible. I drew up this massive battle plan for this one room that we were going to spend 14 pages in. Everybody nailed all the regular stuff. And then James added the crazy emotional breakdown at the end. I'm like, "Is he just going too far?" Because he's literally crumbling from the experience of delivering the baby. But I embraced it and went in and started pitching him the thing about the baby biting his finger. There's a cut of that scene where he goes on for like a full minute and a half about how traumatized he is from delivering the baby. It's so hilarious yet so disturbing for the character. We had to figure out where to draw the line.
James, you co-wrote this movie with Steve. How did you react when you saw it?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ: I think this sequence was the genesis for the movie, and Steve had in his mind the clearest from jump. So in a way, I think we reverse-engineered an entire Psych movie out of this sequence. It was a monster. It was like 11-12 pages long, one location, the entire cast essentially at different points. But I think it's the journey that we've been on for all of these years is the reason we felt like we could pull it off. We know what each of us can do. Once we saw where we were going to be doing — which is a pretty cool half-found and half-built set — it was just a matter of getting in there and filling out the space, and I remember this was a big point of contention, how far do we take it on the first day, because we shot it over two days. It was like trying to find the stopping point so that we didn't lose momentum and everything felt as rich as possible leading up to it. But it was basically just an all-hands-on-deck, go-for-it situation, which if you've never done it before probably feels crazy and daunting, but for us it was like, "We shot a musical in the same amount of time it takes to shoot two episodes. We can do this."
James Dittiger/Peacock Dulé Hill as Gus and James Roday Rodriguez as Shawn in 'Psych 3: This Is Gus'
And what about you, Dulé?
DULÉ HILL: My first thought was, "I didn't know Steve and Roday go on these benders," but I guess you learn something new every day. [Laughs] If you stay with a show for 15 years, you'll learn something new still, because they must've been high when they were writing this. I know the wackiness that is Steve Franks and Roday, so it didn't surprise me where it went — the utter ridiculousness that was happening. I didn't realize it was going to be two days of shooting until we got there, but I knew it was going to be a really daunting task. But as Roday said, I had no doubt we were going to get it done, because when you do a musical on a basic-cable budget and you've done all of these other things, it makes sense to keep pushing it further. This was a culmination of that.
This was the rare occasion where you shot one scene over two days. Can you walk us through how both of you as actors handled an experience with so many moving parts?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ: I think there were earlier drafts where it may have been as long as 14 or 15 pages. We got it down to 11 pages. But I think it was the balance between: What story beats do we need to nail so that this makes sense and has a trajectory and jazz to it? Inside of those moments, let's make sure we're doing what we always do on Psych and not miss any magic that can happen if we're all dialed in. Whether that be improvisation or if something goes wrong, or if somebody says something at the wrong time, those are the kinds of things we embrace on Psych. A lot of times what might be deemed as a mistake on another show is gold for us. I think it was just keeping ourselves in the moment, knowing that X, Y, and Z were important, and just keeping it fresh and listening to one another and trying to find any other wacky thing we could along the way.
A good example is toward the end once the baby is actually born and Shawn starts having a ridiculous emotional panic attack, that was sort of like, "Hey, let's just see what this is and if we like it." And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Was Gus' "C'mon, son" scripted?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, it was like the all-time epic on-the-nose "C'mon, son"!
HILL: I don't think the length of the "son" was necessarily scripted. The only thing that would've been the icing on the cake would've been if randomly Ed Lover showed up inside that moment.
We never actually find out baby Gus' name. Do you know what his name is?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ: We do, actually. There was a scene that was shot that reveals Baby Guster's name that isn't in the final cut of the movie. So we all know what it was meant to be —
HILL: We said his name in [that scene]?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ: It was on the crib.
HILL: Oh right! That's right! I forgot about that.
RODAY RODRIGUEZ: In the event that it ends up not being that, I feel like it might need to remain a piece of trivia for a later date. But as of right this second, Baby Gus does have a first, middle, and last name.
James Dittiger/Peacock Jazmyn Simon as Selene and Maggie Lawson as Juliet in 'Psych 3: This Is Gus'
In the end-credits scene, we find out that Selene's murderous ex-husband, Decker [Allen Maldonado], who escaped during the birthing scene, is stalking Gus and Selene. Did you know from the beginning that you wanted him to get away?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ: Pretty early. We haven't had a potential supervillain since Yang, and we thought it would be cool to put our version of the Joker out into the Psych universe just so that he's out there. It's not necessarily a promise that we will or won't see him again, but we love the idea of having it as an option. And we love the idea of someone kind of losing it and being driven by a warped version of romantic love and how that could potentially manifest itself into being a supervillain. It was a seed that we were pretty sure we wanted to plant in the writing stages. It was just a matter of, how do we want do it? What looks cool? And then we found that room we turned into the darkroom, which actually had enough space to do a tracking shot.
HILL: And you can't really have a cinematic universe — a Psych Cinematic Universe, a PCU — without having some dangling food out there. You gotta have the added scene at the end. You gotta have that pineapple hanging out there.
Steve, do you know where you want to go next, especially with Shawn and Juliet, if Peacock orders a fourth movie?
FRANKS: Absolutely. The great thing about leaving cliffhangers is that leaving an emotional cliffhanger is way more fun than just leaving a physical "Oh, there's danger out there." We have lots of ideas of where we want to take them. Not only for movie 4, but movie 5, should we be so lucky that the economics of it all work out. We have very specific ideas about the next step of this journey. And we also have some pretty good ideas about what happens two or three movies down the line. We're just hoping people continue to enjoy it the way we enjoy making it and watching it with Ray Wise in the background.
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