How the Dazzling Sets for "Welcome to Chippendales" Came to Life
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When production designer Richard Bloom first spoke with co-showrunners Robert Siegel and Jenni Konner about Welcome to Chippendales, one of his first asks was: “How tied are we to the real photos?” Their response: “Take artistic license.”
Spanning more than a decade, the eight-episode Hulu drama tells the outrageous true story of the male-stripping empire Chippendales and the crimes of its founder Somen “Steve” Banerjee (played by Kumail Nanjiani)—which includes hiring a hitman to kill one of his choreographers, Nick De Noia (played by Murray Bartlett). To drive home the heart of the tale, the production design mixes an intensified version of reality with dreamt-up atmospheres. "This is a story about the American dream gone wrong," Blooms says. "And really, it's about these two different men who have very different dreams. Steve is just totally driven by money, and Nick is totally driven by his artistic self. And they're both trying to achieve those visions."
Bloom knew right away that he wanted to make the show's flagship Chippendales a multilevel club to visualize the two efforts at play. Filmed entirely in Los Angeles, the club’s interior was built on stage. A gentleman’s club called PlanB, which exists only a few miles from the original location, was used for most of the exterior scenes. “We were trying to distill down all of the essence of those early Chippendales photos,” Bloom says of the set design. “We have these dancing pods that are in this cheesy sort of marbleized texture. Those existed in the real club. So we were trying to take elements so that any still frame is like a heightened version of what was.”
Throughout the show, the club goes through a transformation. “I thought it would be really fun to juxtapose those very traditional, sad, sort of American wall paneling kind of things with the glitz and glam and the aspirational,” the designer says.
At first, it’s a fairly lifeless setting with a couple of lights, vertical wood paneling, and a wall covered in palm lincrusta that was painted gold. As time passes, the club becomes more and more alive through shimmer—gold vertical blinds in the office, swirling disco balls, a vivid neon sign, and a repetition of mirrors. The color palette expands from two colors to include magenta and various shades of turquoise through lighting. The office maintains an ominous feel while the dazzling glow of the club seeps in through its glass doors.
In addition to replica Chippendales t-shirts and mugs for the gift shop, Bloom's team created three different calendars to closely resemble the ones they're based on. “They look absurd in the show, but they look just as absurd in real life,” says Bloom, who hightly recommends checking out the funny scenes in the 1982 edition of the actual Chippendales calendar.
The homes throughout the show weren’t strictly tied to what the characters' real-life counterparts lived in either. Banerjee’s residence transition is clear. “The concept early on was that, ultimately, when he meets Irene and they fall in love, he's going to achieve that same sort of status that his old boss had,” Bloom says, referencing the Beverly Hills home that played the gas station mogul’s abode.
Steve and Irene Banerjee (played by Annaleigh Ashford) first move into a classic California ranch-style home that emphasizes Irene’s influence in creating a warm, inviting dream house and family life for him. Then they upgrade to a larger mansion that’s “a little lavish, a little Vegas,” Bloom says. The house has multiple doric columns, an extravagant fountain in the front, an exterior spiral staircase, and a backyard pool. It exists in a gated community in the Chatsworth neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley.
“We wanted to show that time has passed, but that he's also become quite successful—and he's becoming quite reckless with his money,” Bloom says. “He's only feeding into the business what he needs to keep it packed, but really he's about status.”
The items in the house further enforce this—from a grand portrait of the couple and their extravagant bedroom canopy to the massive teddy bear and the surrounding sea of other stuffed animals in their child’s bedroom.
For De Noia’s Los Angeles home, Bloom wanted “a showman sort of place but also a very Los Angeles feeling.” He landed on a flamingo-colored midcentury building called the Hollywood Riviera to portray the exterior, showing how De Noia is living in the past and “trying to be a straight man and trying to live that life,” Blooms says.
The interior was built on stage and based on the real floor plan of a specific condo in that structure. It even features drapery from that actual home, which the set decorators sourced from the owner who was planning to throw it out. “When he actually comes out, goes to New York, starts living his truth, and becomes more artistically fulfilled, I wanted to go into more of a Broadway vibe but also more of an Art Deco, ‘80s deco vibe,” Bloom says.
Fittingly, much of the production design process occurred among the show’s chaos. “We'd be in the middle of trying to design something and all of a sudden you'd hear the track and then you'd hear the women screaming,” Bloom says. “It created this really fun sort of party atmosphere that was very surreal at work.”
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