Action, Murder, Musical and Romance: The Afterparty Cast and Creator on the Art of Genre-Bending
The post Action, Murder, Musical and Romance: The Afterparty Cast and Creator on the Art of Genre-Bending appeared first on Consequence.
Technically, The Afterparty is one show, a murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie that tracks what happens when the celebration following a high school reunion becomes the site of tragedy for an obnoxious pop singer (Dave Franco).
But it also could be said to be many different shows, as every member of the all-star cast, including Sam Richardson, Zoë Chao, Ben Schwartz, Ike Barinholtz, Ilana Glazer, and Jamie Demetriou, is a suspect, and as Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) interviews them, their version of events mimics a popular genre of entertainment.
Each episode thus focuses on one genre, from rom-com to action movie to musical and more, as meticulously recreated by creator Chris Miller, which he says evolved organically out of his original concept for the series.
“I grew up loving murder mysteries, I read all of the Agatha Christie books and watched Columbo religiously and movies like Clue and anything I could get my hands on,” he tells Consequence during a recent press day. “I always loved how it would make me feel when a good murder mystery happened, like it was all right there in front of me and I didn’t see it. It was both surprising and satisfying.”
From there, he says, “I got the idea to try one in Rashomon style, where each character would provide a different version of their view of what happened on the night and it would all add up to something, and that is where I got excited.”
While it had originally been a potential feature film idea, once it became a TV series, executive producer Phil Lord says, “that opened up the opportunity to treat each episode as its own genre, the way everyone is the hero of their own narrative. They star in their own movies so it seemed only natural to depict each person’s story in the way that they imagine it.”
Adds Miller, “Each one of these is like its own little movie, and each one has its own music and lighting and lenses and camera work and costumes. There’s slight variations in everyone’s costume from episode to episode to match the style… It’s complicated, it’s really ambitious. But that’s part of the fun, is that you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. That’s what we like to do we never really have it any other way.”
While playing with genres in this way is on the surface a fun aspect of the series, it also has a deeper thematic purpose. As Miller says, it explores “the idea that everyone sees the world through a different lens, and people that you may think of one way are actually seeing the world another way, and it’s also an opportunity to get into their internal life and visualize what they’re feeling.”
The season premiere spotlights Aniq (Richardson), who’s attending the reunion that night with hope of reuniting with his long-ago crush Zoe (Chao) — and thus, Episode 1 goes full romantic comedy, from the cheerful music to the dreamy montage of the happy potential couple bonding.
“Oh, I love a rom-com, so to play in those tropes was so much fun with the sort of optimism and starry-eyed or like gloomy gusts sort of everything’s going wrong, everything’s going right sort of energy. It was so much fun to play,” Richardson says.
Meanwhile, Episode 2 spotlights Brett (Barinholtz), Zoe’s ex, whose point-of-view takes the form of a high-octane modern action movie. It was exciting for Barinholtz, he says, because “I love action movies. I’m a simple man, and for a guy who normally just plays, like, indigent perverts, to get to play an action star jumping off of a car doing a choreographed fight was so fun.”
While Vin Diesel’s seminal work in the Fast and Furious films was a clear inspiration, Barinholtz also asked to include some “minor Seagal notes,” to pay tribute to the star of Above the Law and Under Siege. What is a Seagal note, you ask? “It’s very, very subtle,” says Barinholtz. “When you rewatch [Episode 2], you’ll see some of the karate moves I do — you don’t see Vin Diesel doing a lot of karate moves.”
Also, Barinholtz adds, “I do a Seagal-y delivery sometimes. I remember one time I said to Sam, ‘Brother, you’ve made a big mistake,’ and that was very Seagal-y. That broke Sam up. Sam starting laughing, like, ‘I can’t believe you called me brother.'”
Glazer also broke a lot during the shooting of Episode 2, she says. “it was really fun to be part of that action style, but I was really laughing during that. That was the most difficult thing, having to be serious and also like to have Ike in my face doing an action [character].”
For Barinholtz, what really made the comedy of the action episode work was in the contrasts. “The fact that you to cut it immediately with being the comedy of a guy going through a mid-life crisis was so great, to be able to jump from ‘Let me tell you one thing, brother’ to ‘Oh hey honey! Can I talk to you?’ is so fun, I can do that all day,” he says.
“It’s so joyfully stupid,” Chao agrees.
The Afterparty (Apple TV+)
While it was hard for the cast to keep a straight face around Barinholtz’s Vin Seagal impression, there was a general consensus amongst that on a technical level, Schwartz got the toughest genre to execute with Episode 3, in which aspiring musician Yasper expresses his version of events in the form of a full-fledged musical.
Fortunately, Schwartz says, starring in a musical was “the dream one for me. When Chris told me what my one was going to be I was like, ‘Are you serious? I get to do this?’ And he said yeah, and he hired me for it, and then after he hired me for it he said, ‘Can you sing and dance?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, a little bit — you didn’t know when you hired me?’ And he said ‘I just assumed you did, you just seemed like someone who would know how to do those things.'”
It’s a genre Barinholtz did not hesitate to admit that if he’d attempted it, it would have been “cringy at best. Fuckin’ Ben Schwartz, man, I don’t know how he does it. There’s a scene where he’s singing a song and I’m playing the guitar and he got up there and lip-synced this entire song, dancing a whole number, and they’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do it again,’ and he does it again.
“If that was me, I’d be like, ‘Okay, we’re going to wrap the show for a couple of weeks, I’m going to go to Sweden to a clinic and just be cured of this exhaustion.’ Ben just coasted through that effortlessly and made it so funny and vibrant.”
Demetriou, who plays wallflower Walt, says that he was surprised to learn, the day a big dance number was shot, that he was involved in it. “I’d heard people were taking part in the choreography for weeks. And then suddenly my name appeared on the call sheet for the day of the dance, and I’m like, ‘Oh, what’s this about? I assumed, oh, they’re just gonna have me in the scene standing by watching the dance, but when I arrived, Chris Miller said, oh, no, you are gonna be in it,” he says.
Turns out that was the point, as Miller wanted to, in Demetriou’s words, “create a natural sense of someone having no idea what they were doing. To be honest, if I’d been part of the choreography, I think I still wouldn’t have known what I was doing.”
Says Chao, “Schwartz is incredible in it, he really is.”
The Afterparty (Apple TV+)
In later episodes, genres like animation and thriller get used to explore the deeper emotions of some characters, allowing The Afterparty, Miller says, “to use the storytelling tools as a window into each of the character’s internal life.”
Really, none of it was easy, as Lord explains. “They all had fun challenges. Making an animated episode in the midst of a live-action one is a real pain in the bottom. The musical episode is lots of lots of prep to get to that magical moment where music and choreography all come together. The scariest one seemed like the thriller, because you’re not using as many as your typical crutches to make people laugh or undercut something that’s supposed to be scary, it actually has to be scary. That’s terrifying for filmmakers.”
“We’re just gluttons for punishment, I guess,” Miller adds.
When it comes to the possibility of a second season of The Afterparty — featuring the return of Aniq and his friends, or a new cast of characters caught up in a different mystery — Lord and Miller say that they have ideas but, Lord says, “You should not wait til Season 2 to watch the show. You got to get into that Season 1 right away.”
Adds Miller, “We had so much fun making it and there are so many elements of storytelling that we didn’t get to do that we’d love to do — it’s such a fun world and it would be amazing to do another one.”
Richardson already has an idea ready, should he be involved with a second season: “If I could play something else it would be, like, a kung fu movie.”
Schwartz agrees. “That’s a great pitch!”
The first three episodes of The Afterparty are streaming now on Apple TV+. New episodes debut weekly on Fridays.
Action, Murder, Musical and Romance: The Afterparty Cast and Creator on the Art of Genre-Bending
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