‘Paradise’s Dan Fogelman & Sterling K. Brown On Season 2

When Dan Fogelman created Hulu series Paradise, he envisaged Sterling K. Brown in the lead role of Secret Service agent Xavier Collins. And once Brown read the script and heard Fogelman’s three-season plan for the show, he agreed. Since their first collaboration began almost a decade ago with Fogelman’s hit series This Is Us, the same-age duo have remained friends, having been simultaneously launched into serious success and bonded by its six-season run. Now, with Paradise, together they would describe a dystopian world where a weather event has driven a select 25,000 people into the safety of an bunker underneath a Coloradan mountain. Set up to resemble Anytown, USA, and headed by President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), the community is rocked by an unexpected death and the uncovering of sinister secrets. Here, Fogelman and Sterling reveal not only what’s coming next for Season 2, but what they themselves would pack for the apocalypse.

DEADLINE: I just rewatched Paradise, and now I have the Phil Collins version of the song “Another Day in Paradise” going around my head.

Dan Fogelman: I just had some new versions of it designed for us for Season 2, like some darker covers of that song. I’m literally finishing the finale right now of Season 2, writing. I also just got the first episodes of the edits and it’s so good. I’m so excited.

DEADLINE: Oh, my god. Don’t dangle that carrot.

Sterling K. Brown: Dan doesn’t understand how this whole press thing works. He’ll start playing you clips of the show, and I’m like, “Dan, you got to hold it, man.”

Fogelman: Your death scene is unbelievable.

Brown: [Laughs.]

DEADLINE: You said you’re writing the finale. What have you shot so far?

Fogelman: We shoot two at a time, so we’re finishing three and four this week and we start shooting five and six already next week. So, we’re pretty much at the halfway mark.

DEADLINE: And Shailene Woodley is a part of Seson 2…

Fogelman: She’s so good. I’m watching a lot of her right now.

Brown: She’s awesome. She’s a wonderful human being. She fit in hand-in-glove. Shai is the…

DEADLINE: Oh, you’re on Shai terms. That’s nice.

Brown: Well, we’re on first syllable terms right now. Sterl and Shai.

[In Season 2] you explore what life has been like in the time we’ve missed while our main characters have been in the bunker and some of the outside world stuff. And then paths start crossing as the season progresses, and so [Shailene Woodley] is one of those people

Dan Fogelman

DEADLINE: Obviously, we haven’t met her character before, so it is most likely that she comes from outside the bunker. Is there anything you can hint about her role?

Fogelman: Yes, it’s somebody who’s not from the bunker. I think the fun part of our current coming season is that it lives partially in the bunker and the world that we all know. And then you also explore what life has been like in the time we’ve missed while our main characters have been in the bunker and some of the outside world stuff. And then paths start crossing as the season progresses, and so she’s one of those people, and I think she’s got a kind of interesting backstory and a very interesting profession that affects one of our early episodes of the season.

It’s a big swing. It’s a big, ambitious… The show has always been a big show and when I told Sterling what the three-season plan for was it, I kind of broad-stroked what Season 1 was, what Season 2 was, and the big movements of it and we’ve executed that, and so it’s partially the same show you’re returning to. It’s a lot of Sterling just being a badass and there’s this world below and there’s secrets, but then there’s also these new elements of it that are really exciting and really ambitious and I’m starting to see it now and I’m very excited by it.

Brown: I’ll tell you this much, I went into the writers’ room earlier this year, and what I love about Dan — he did the same thing with This Is Us — he’s like, “I got six seasons in my head.” And for Paradise, he has three seasons in his head and I’m sure when we start shooting Season 3, folks at Disney and Hulu will be like, “Are you sure?” And I am pretty sure that Dan will be like, “Yeah, I’m sure.”And I feel pretty confident in that too, because it’s nice doing television with a beginning, middle and end, because you’re always building towards something. You’re never just putting filler out there for the sake of filler. It’s building and culminating towards something, and you feel it as an actor, like, “Oh, it’s progressing.” Right? When we get to the end of this show, people will be f*cked up, because when he pitched it to me, I cried. Just off the pitch. I was like, “That’s the way to land the f*cking ship, bro.”

DEADLINE: I just came from Cannes where I watched Tom Cruise do all of that stunt stuff in his new Mission: Impossible film. When you geared up the plane in the Season 1 finale, I was like, “OK, this is taking a turn. He’s going to fly the plane.” What’s next? Are we going to see some Cruise-level stunts and aerobatics?

Brown: I got a whole biplane thing that he tried to steal from me for his movie. F*cking T.C., man. But I’m going to look like I’m second out of the gate when I shot mine way before. It does get very physical this year and it’s a lot of fun. We’ve got Ken Olin directing this episode, because he does a lot of Tracker and he’s like, “Sterling, we got to tell Justin [Hartley] he’s not faster than you.” And I need him to tell him that, because I’m pretty damn fast and it’s really just about beating Justin. But no, we have a lot of fun. There’s, like Dan said, exploration of what’s been going on in the world and trying to find my wife. Will he find her, will he not find her? Who does he meet along the way, who is friendly, who is nefarious, et cetera?And sometimes you got to call on a special set of skills and it is fun. I’m just excited that I can still do the sh*t, right? I mean, I’m a year away from 50 and it all still works. All the sh*t still works. The recovery takes a little bit longer and the prep before is like, “Man, you better stretch your ass out, bro, before you start doing this stuff.” But I can still do it and it’s still a lot of fun, so I’m thankful.

DEADLINE: Tell me about the evolution of your working relationship, because you obviously met a long time ago and with this, Sterling, you’re an EP on the show.

Brown: What would you say? What would you say, Eric? That’s his middle name.

Fogelman: I think there’s a lot. I think Sterling and I have a lot of trust in one another. I trust his instincts as an actor, and I think he trusts me as a writer. I imagine there’s many times when Sterling’s going through scripts where things don’t quite maybe track for him, because that’s just inevitable. We’ve done so much television together that there has to have been scenes here and there where he’s like, “Oh, why is he doing this?”But he never really questions it. He kind of finds a way into it. He trusts that even if maybe he’s not seeing it, I have it, and similarly, I’ll be in an editing bay and go, “I didn’t expect Sterling to do that in that scene and then now we’re going to roll with it because he’s so f*cking good that I’m just going to trust the process.”It’s not a very verbal thing between us. It’s not like we talk about it a lot… It’s just an easy relationship. What did you say, Sterling? I don’t keep up relationships. I’ve never really worked with somebody multiple times in a lead of anything. I’ve had all these movie stars I’ve had these great relationships with, and I tend to let them fade because it’s always fraught and stressful for me.Their lives are just so gigantic and I don’t want to be a thing that they have to deal with, and so I’ve had these great relationships for moments in time with the Ryan Goslings and Oscar Isaacs of the world, but then it kind of fades and Sterling and I have… It’s a pleasure when Sterling comes in the room to hang. Not that it wasn’t with those guys, but it’s never stressful for me. It’s easy.

Brown: I would agree with all that. Yes. Stamos doesn’t have the same relationship with him as I do. He’s very good at what he does. There’s a lot of trust. I remember I asked him one question on Season 1. I was like, “Hey, man, you think this Jane thing is going to work out? She’s f*cking nuts.” He’s like, “We kind of need somebody crazy.” And I was like, “All right, you say so.” And I was like, “Ah, Jane, everybody hates Jane in the best way possible.”

Fogelman: No, but in that first draft of that final episode where she’s really going bad, and I had, in my mind’s eye, been going, “Have we pushed it too far?” And when Sterling says it to me, I go back to the writers and I’m like, “Hey, let’s take a look and just make sure a couple of these jokes aren’t [too much]. ”As she’s killing people and taunting her dying boyfriend. We have lines where she’s like, “Oh, you bleeding?” And it was so f*cking crazy. You know what I mean? And I was like, “If Sterling’s saying it, I should go check it.” Because he doesn’t say things often. And so, it’s not like I give up on my plan, but I do monitor it.

DEADLINE: I love Jane. The moment where in the midst of absolute horror, there’s just the scene of her playing the Wii tennis game, I laughed out loud.

Fogelman: We have an episode coming this season called “Jane” where you really learn more about this person and how she came to be.

Nicole is wonderful as Jane. And also, people, don’t be mean to Nicole because she plays Jane. People have this weird way of not being able to distinguish between the actor and the character.

Sterling K. Brown

DEADLINE: I just think she’s a sociopath, isn’t she? There’s something very wrong.

Fogelman: There’s something very wrong and you learn about it.

Brown: Shout out to Nicole [Brydon Bloom]. Nicole is wonderful as Jane. And also, people, don’t be mean to Nicole because she plays Jane. People have this weird way of not being able to distinguish between the actor and the character. She’s a sweet young lady, she’s newly married, cut her some slack.

DEADLINE: Speaking of sociopaths, I have no sympathy for Julianne Nicholson’s character Sinatra. I find her to be the most effective villain I’ve seen in a long time.

Fogelman: I mean, her performance in the second episode of the show is so grounding. I think the loss of her child and the performance she gives when she’s in that therapy sequence is one of my favorite scenes I’ve ever worked on in anything. Just watching an actor do that, it’s hard. By the time you get to Episode 8 and she’s got guns on Sterling and is threatening his daughter and his wife, you’re like, “Oh, I hate her.” And it’s hard to remember that character from Episode 2. So, it makes her obviously the villain, but her second season is also incredibly interesting and revealing and there’s even more to her story and to what she’s doing than meets the eye. She has quite an interesting arc in the second season that I think people are going to really enjoy.

Brown: I think Dan likes to write himself into a corner purposely and then he can write his way out of it. You know what I mean? I think it’s a challenge that he enjoys. I mean similar to This Is Us, I think, with Miguel. It was like, “Oh, you’re going to sleep with my mama now? You ain’t going to tell nobody, your best friend’s [wife]?” You’re going to do the worst sh*t a man can do and then see if I can write my way out.

We have an episode coming this season called “Jane” where you really learn more about this person and how she came to be.

Dan Fogelman

DEADLINE: You have your therapist character Gabriela losing faith in Sinatra, saying, “I told everyone the monster wasn’t a monster.” And there is that line Sinatra crosses where you can’t excuse her behavior.

Fogelman: In the second season, you’re going to have more context for some of her behavior that goes beyond what you know so far.

DEADLINE: So, this is where you teach us to like her again. I see.

Fogelman: We’ll see. Part of this show that’s been fun is the pulling back of the onion of the mystery of the show, and I think there’s more mystery. It’s fair to say we solved all the questions about what the bunker is and why it was created in Season 1, but there’s kind of a deepening of it as you get into Season 2 and what’s really behind it all.There’s more science fiction in it in the second season intentionally than even was in the first. And that involves climate change and science and the things that were coming behind it.

There is more of that kind of survivalist [story]. How did the people that made it out in the world outside of the bunker do it? And we explore that in the season. I’m kind of at a point where I think television, there’s comfort in some shows which give you what you want consistently, and then in a show like this, that’s an eight episode show that is really propulsive. I wanted to keep taking it to new places and be challenging and exciting and you don’t know what’s really coming next… That’s really fun and exciting for me at this point in my career, probably for Sterling as well. [To Brown] Why are you laughing at me?

Brown: Because I called you Daniel Lindelof. Lost was always sort of an influence on the show, but there’s things that even sort of go a little bit more in that direction, which I think are going to be very interesting.

DEADLINE: OK so what TV shows would you bring in your bunker? Let’s assume there’s Wi-Fi or some ancient VHS situation.

Brown: I think The Studio is one of the smartest comedies out there right now. I hope it’s not too inside baseball and it’s just people in the industry that love it, but it’s so f*cking good. [Seth] Rogen is… I mean, it is genius and it’s not only funny, but it is artistically beautiful. The way that it is shot is gorgeous. I love the whole thing. It’s great.

Fogelman: For me, TV is so nostalgic that I always go back to older shows. I find the West Wing inherently rewatchable, because I’m factoring in the fact that I’m in a bunker, per your question, and I have limited resources, it’s something that I can watch over and over again and that’s one that makes my list at the very top. I loved The White Lotus this year. I think that show can always be polarizing for people, depending on what season they attach to or not. I just think the execution of the conceit is so brilliant there. That was probably my show this season.

Brown: Season 2 is my season. But you see what I do is I pick shows that are not in the same [awards] category as our show because I’m smart.

Fogelman: Right. This is why you always get nominated.

Brown: I’ll say in terms of that nostalgia thing, any of the Michael Scott American The Office.

Fogelman: And Everybody Loves Raymond hits that for me. That show used to make me laugh. It’s so well done. It’s such a perfect sitcom.

Brown: And of course I could name dramas too, but I’m not going to right now.

Fogelman: You know who’s a wonderful actor? Adam Scott.

DEADLINE: You just wind him up. Keep going.

Fogelman: I’m going to promote all of them [Brown’s category competitors]. Pedro Pascal needs a break.

Brown: [Laughs.]

DEADLINE: Stop it. You are so funny. You can take three things into the bunker. What are you taking?

Fogelman: Are we doing the thing where I have to say my family or-

DEADLINE: Let’s assume all your loved ones are safe. We’re talking things, just things.

Brown: This is going to sound really weird. My attachment to things is fairly minimalistic. There are certain things, I guess, that would have nostalgic meaning to me. There’s this one picture of my mother. This is a true story. She has this picture of herself when she became a school teacher and when she went to the bank and cashed her check, she took the first dollar bill, put it in the frame of this picture and she keeps it in the house, right? And my mom has ALS right now and she’s been fighting it for a long, long time. I told my brother and sister, “You guys can have everything. You can argue over this and that. I want this picture of my mom. And that’s pretty much it.”

Fogelman: It’s interesting. Similarly, when the fires happened, we live in the valley and we weren’t directly affected, but as it was creeping a little closer, we had that thing of, “Let’s pack up sh*t and get ready.” I’ve got a young kid and in this current day and age, there’s not that much that has import anymore, because it’s all kind of digital. If I want pictures, they’re on my phone. But I found it was loaded for me because my mom passed away when I was young and I found myself at that last minute when we were like, “Sh*t, the fire’s getting kind of close.” I was scurrying around, and my mom had this crazy obsession with collecting little frog knick-knacks. That was every birthday, every Mother’s Day, people would get her frogs. And when we cleaned out her little condo in New Jersey, I just grabbed a bunch. I was packing up our house, the fire was coming and I was just grabbing random frogs that I’ve taken from my mom’s house. Literally, I grabbed this [holds up frog toy]. I don’t even know what it is. It didn’t have great deep meaning for my mom. But it like there’s some tactile things, I think, that hold a different value when they’re older from the analog age and especially if you’ve lost someone or that picture’s important to you, because your mom’s ill. There’s something different about that stuff.

Brown: Totally.

DEADLINE: Dan, I want to tell you, you may remember, a few years ago, you wrote a guest column for us at Deadline and I think about it a lot. It was about your mom when she was sick.

Fogelman: I was trying to get a consult from a doctor on what to do for her and I made a connection to a doctor who needed the stuff overnighted and I couldn’t get it in time. And the sweet man at the Fedex store who was telling me they were closed, it was the only time I started melting down, because we were getting bad news on my mom, and I was flustered and I started spilling the papers all over the ground. I started emotionally cracking a little bit in front of this guy and this sweet man with a deep accent came out from behind the counter and put his hand on my shoulder and told me, “I will get these out for you tonight. You take your time.” And it was this very sweet human moment I had with this stranger at Fedex as I was trying to get her medical reports to get them to San Francisco.

DEADLINE: It was beautiful writing, and it really stayed with me.

Fogelman: Well, I had another one. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this Sterling, but when I did my first movie, I was hired for Pixar to write the movie Cars. And when it came time to do the premiere, they did it at a speed track, a raceway in North Carolina or South Carolina. I was excited and I called my mom and dad. My mom was still alive, and they were divorced, and they hadn’t really seen each other since their divorce when I was 15 years old. It would be basically their first time seeing one another. And they came down and it was this loaded, bizarre week. And they both fell asleep at the movie, by the way.

But the night before, we were sitting in the hotel lobby and it was just me and my mom and my sister. And Paul Newman walked in, who was one of the voices of the cars. My mom wouldn’t have known a celebrity if they kicked her in the face, but Paul Newman walked in and she turned to me and she said, “Danny, do you think I could go get a picture with Paul?” And I was like, “Mom, I’ve met him twice.” I was 25 years old. I go, “We can’t go over to Paul Newman and ask to take a picture.” It wasn’t even the cell phone era when that was common. It was like she had her little disposable camera. I said, “I can’t. But go walk behind him and I’ll try and take a picture while you’re behind him.” And so, in my office now — it was one of the things I grabbed during the fire — is a picture and it’s Paul Newman standing in a bar and you just catch a glimpse in the corner of my mom’s ear and her blonde hair. And I printed it out for both of us and framed it. And then my mom never got to go to any of my big stuff after that. That was my life lesson. Just go ask Paul Newman to take the f*cking picture with your mom next time. Or the equivalent thereof. It was like, don’t be so nervous about everything all the time.