Interviews

Jamie Dornan

Actor The Tourist

TV DRAMA: What appealed to you about the script and the concept of The Tourist? DORNAN: It was kind of peculiar in the best way. It had me questioning lots of different aspects of what was going on. Whenever I felt comfortable with it, it changed in the best way. I loved the way it was playing with tone and structure. And I thought it was really funny. It was an interesting blend of darkness and humor. I had kept an eye on what Two Brothers Pictures had been doing in recent years. They’ve had their fingers in a lot of very tasty pies, and I do think they have a unique voice within television in the U.K. It was a departure from the things I’d done recently. And I had an eye on doing something in television because it had been a while for me.

TV DRAMA: How did you prepare to play a character like The Man? DORNAN: I’ve played characters before who have lost their memory. I’ve dealt with what that is, the trauma of that, and the panic. Not that I don’t have to plug back into what that is, but I have dug around in that area before, which is good. I had a chance to really play. The backstory was being written for me, and then I was able to add to that from everything we don’t hear about pre what [Jack and Harry Williams] put in the script, as we reveal and discover as the series goes on. There’s so much of that confusion and dismay and horror of what he was finding out. I wanted it to feel as much as possible like he was finding it out for the first time. A lot of it is trying to have an understanding of where you think his origins are, what his backstory is, but also trying to forget it! [Laughs] I’m trying not to know too much because the sincerity of that news is impactful for him. Trying to play each beat with total conviction and sincerity—you don’t want the audience to think that maybe he’s trying to hide something. We’re trying to keep it at: This is news to him; he is on this journey with you. If we lost that, it wouldn’t work.

Christopher Meloni

Actor & Executive Producer Law & Order: Organized Crime

TV DRAMA: How did you come to reprise the role of Elliot Stabler? MELONI: I got a call out of the blue stating that Dick Wolf had an idea that he wanted to bounce off me—a new show, a new way of telling the stories; it being serialized as opposed to episodic. In essence, the return of Elliot Stabler in a different unit. I appreciate and enjoy the different dynamics of telling the story over time as opposed to one singular piece of entertainment. I’ve done that before. This is something new in this role, and I’m enjoying it.

TV DRAMA: There is a physicality to Organized Crime that is greater than it was on SVU. MELONI: I think that is what the more serialized storytelling allows—you don’t have to introduce and then resolve in 44 minutes. It gives you more time for more dynamic stunt pieces, more drama and physicality, as well as hopefully the storytelling and the intricacies of what the crime is, the strategy of what you are doing to bring the bad guys down. Yes, I’ve been doing a lot of stunts!

TV DRAMA: Besides being first on the call sheet, what extra responsibilities do you have as one of the executive producers? MELONI: We all have different talents or gifts. I think one of mine is being able to see a scene and help give it clarity or possibly a little more dynamism. That’s really my role. I say the writers break the rocks, and I just sit there and polish them! I try to do it respectfully and with their blessing. I want them to engage, but I do have a point of view. Sometimes, I don’t understand the scene. Or I suggest, again, very respectfully, how I think the scene may serve the story better in the long run. That’s where I put my two cents in. Every once in a while, I’ll make a suggestion to the director. I’m there to be another set of eyes—a set of eyes that has done this role for a long time.

Photo: Virginia Sherwood/NBC

Nicola Walker

Actor Annika, Marriage

TV DRAMA: What appealed to you about Marriage and working with Stefan Golaszewski? WALKER: Stefan was the main, immediate draw for me because I’m a huge fan of his work. It’s very different from anything I’ve ever done before and anything I’ve ever seen before. Stefan was interested in looking at a real marriage and taking a snapshot of these people’s lives. Sometimes not very much happens, which is like our real lives, not the lives we all adore watching on television. I love watching incredibly dramatic, exciting pieces of work. But for me, this felt like, Oh, this is dropping in on these people’s lives for a period of time and seeing them cope with loving each other for 27 years and [dealing with] the weight of that shared experience. They don’t talk about their awful, shared history, but it is always there. That was the appeal for me—to see something a bit more real.

TV DRAMA: You’ve played several detectives. Are you drawn to the genre? WALKER: There was a year when I was a detective on two shows almost back-to-back. One was Cassie in Unforgotten, and [the other] was Jackie in the Abi Morgan show River. Cassie Stuart, created by Chris Lang, is one of the finest detectives ever. Then I got offered River, which was Stellan Skarsgård manifesting me as a version of his mental health. And I’m sorry, I challenge any actor to say, Oh, no, I’m not going to play this other detective. They were so different. So that’s my defense on those two. They were both incredible scripts.

But I think there’s something else going on as well, culturally. There has been a drive over the years to get women at the front of shows. And I think, interestingly, audiences, myself included, accept a female leading a police show. They believe that a woman could do that. All actors have a bit of a type, and maybe the policewoman is my type. It’s not a bad type. I’m very happy!

Joanne Froggatt

Actor Angela Black

TV DRAMA: What appealed to you about Angela Black? FROGGATT: I look for a great script. [I can’t say no to Jack and Harry] Williams because I know they’re fantastic. They sent me the first three episodes, and I couldn’t put them down. It was a nobrainer. Also, they write thrillers so brilliantly, and this is a subtle-to-start-with, Hitchcock-style thriller that shifts and twists and turns, and I had no idea what was going to happen or where this character was going to be taken. There is also important subject matter running as a through-note. We were going through lockdown by the time I read the script. The issue of domestic abuse had become so much more prevalent because everyone was [staying] in their homes. Jack and Harry wrote this script before Covid was a word on any of our lips, but, by chance, it was incredibly timely.

TV DRAMA: Do you feel an extra responsibility when dealing with these complex subjects? FROGGATT: Yes, absolutely. Laura, my character in Liar, had suffered a sexual assault. Angela in Angela Black is a victim of domestic abuse. Approaching two thrillers based on very sensitive subject matter by the same writers, I will always want to make the characters as different as possible. I needed to know I could do that and do both characters justice in very different ways; I had already done Liar. Jack and Harry did this for me because the style of Angela Black as a show is very different.

Laura in Liar is used to being listened to and respected. She’s used to having a voice and has become obsessed with justice, and understandably so. That breeds real anger and resentment in her. Whereas Angela is a very different being. She’s in a very different space. She’s lost her sense of self. She’s lost her drive. She’s lost her confidence, her self-esteem. Everything is on very shaky ground. Then, she is almost broken down further before she can rebuild herself again. Whenever I tackle sensitive subject matter, I feel a responsibility to give the most truthful performance that I can give.

Howard Gordon

Showrunner & Executive Producer Accused

TV DRAMA: Tell us about Accused. GORDON: It’s based on a Jimmy McGovern BBC series. It felt like an amazing opportunity to tell stories about my own anxiety about living in the world today. It’s an anthology series. Every week we have a new cast and a new story. The format is such that you start [in a courtroom with] somebody who is accused. It’s not some sociopath or a career criminal. It’s someone who you either see yourself in or can relate to. It has the trappings of a pretty classic courtroom story. But it’s about so much more than that. It’s about very human, relatable, small-scale stories, told against all the fault lines we’re living with: the corrosive impact of social media, identity, race, inequality. It’s an empathy engine.

TV DRAMA: How do you see the state of broadcast TV today? GORDON: The world is unrecognizable in how people consume content. I have a strong feeling about the abnegation of curating content. There was a moment when you knew Monday night was Thirtysomething or Thursday was E.R.; it created a sense of anticipation. Now an entire [season] is dumped. And you’re left bleary-eyed. [A show] doesn’t live in your imagination, heart or mind for very long. So structurally, we’re in a curious place. The ratings of the broadcast networks are obviously a fraction of what they were. But they remain the most durable place for people to gather at the same time and watch a story. Then, of course, there are secondary windows. Accused will also be on Tubi and Hulu, so people can catch up. And because it’s an anthology, it doesn’t require that it be watched in any order or for everyone to have watched every episode. I think we won the last Emmy for a network show, and that was for 24 in 2006. Since then, it’s been the streamers, cable and premium cable [that have been winning Emmys]. The business model is a curious thing, but I’m more interested in how it’s impacted our capacity to tell a story where enough people watch it at the same time to spark some kind of conversation and impact.

Julian Fellowes

Creator & Executive Producer The Gilded Age

TV DRAMA: What did you want to explore in The Gilded Age? FELLOWES: I read a book about Alva Vanderbilt and her daughter, Consuelo, who was one of the more famous of the “dollar princesses.” I started to read about this period, and I realized, as always with history, that I had been walking past the houses of these people ever since I first went to America a half-century ago and never really taken them in. I sort of knew about the Gilded Age, this period of extraordinary consumerism after the Civil War and these enormous amounts of money. It wasn’t just that some people were richer than you could imagine; it was that there was an almost whole tier of society that was richer than most of us could imagine. I started to read about the Goulds and Carnegies and Fricks and the double side of the Gilded Age, the ruthless robber barons and their palaces. And then I got interested in the Vanderbilt family. For a time, I toyed with the idea of doing a series about them. I found my difficulty was that when dealing with real people, I have an obligation to write about what really happened and make them say things they really would have said. This is quite limiting. So I gradually came to think that if we were going to do a television series about the Gilded Age, we would do better with fictional families living through very possibly truthful events.

TV DRAMA: Do you have a process when you write? FELLOWES: I started writing when I was still acting. That was quite a plus for me because when you are acting, you go where the work is. I couldn’t afford to say, Oh, I can only write in my study in Dorset. I try to get started at least by about 10 o’clock. Then I break for lunch and bang on after lunch. Of course, you’re always fitting it around things. I comfort myself with the fact that Anthony Trollope said no one should write for more than three hours a day. So, I use this as my excuse when I feel I’ve been rather lapsed!

Robert & Michelle King

Creators, Showrunners & Executive Producers The Good Fight, Evil

TV DRAMA: What issues have you wanted to explore in The Good Fight? ROBERT: Right now, what drives the show is fear of civil war in America; worries about a Balkanization of American politics. You see this in Ukraine, too; how do people live their lives, start their businesses and run their businesses as warfare is going on around them? So we are taking it to a political dimension. MICHELLE: And much of this, of course, is through the eyes of Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski, who’s torn. On one end, she is very political and wants to fight the good fight; on the other, she is sick of feeling miserable. So [we look at] wanting to be happy, and is that selfish?

TV DRAMA: How did Evil come about, and what served as inspiration? ROBERT: I think our relationship served as inspiration, as it did for The Good Wife and even The Good Fight, in that we have a very strong religious distinction between us. I hate saying I am a devout Catholic, but I go to mass every week. MICHELLE: And I’m Jewish but on the agnostic side. For as long as we have known one another, over 30 years, we have been talking about how one explains evil in the world. You read every day in the newspaper yet another evil act. How does one explain it? Robert goes more toward a supernatural demonic explanation, and I am more likely to look at psychology or a sociological explanation. ROBERT: It’s that basic question of why bad things happen to good people. That is a lot of the discussion. We were intent on having two people on opposite ends of this question but had respectful conversations, even loving conversations, and didn’t, as in most of American society now, start screaming at each other and throwing things. Hopefully, that’s what you are attracted to when you see it because even though it has scares and comedy, the emotional core is two people who have a very different epistemological view of life but are still able to talk about it and not hate each other.

Miguel Sapochnik

Co-Showrunner, Executive Producer & Director House of the Dragon

TV DRAMA: Tell us about the origins of House of the Dragon. SAPOCHNIK: After Game of Thrones ended, there were a number of different spin-offs that were being tossed around. Ryan [Condal, co-showrunner and executive producer] got involved in one and asked if I was interested. I didn’t know whether I wanted to go back to that world. The person who runs my production company, Alex Raben, who is also my wife, said, this would be so much more interesting if it was told from the female characters’ perspectives. With Alicent and Rhaenyra, originally one was a woman, one was a girl. [We decided to] make them the same age, give them a shared childhood, so they grew up together and have this baggage between them. Suddenly, you have an opportunity to really talk about the patriarchy, but through the eyes of these women. It opened all these possibilities, and it was no longer going back and seeing more boys with toys. Ironically, it’s really served the male characters as well. Both Paddy Considine and Matt Smith [who respectively play Viserys and his younger brother, Daemon] had to deal with a shift in emphasis. The show wasn’t just about them.

TV DRAMA: How have you and Ryan approached running the writers’ room and breaking stories? SAPOCHNIK: When we first started, we agreed to not do anything apart. It was a way of expressing that we needed to understand each other and how we work so that we could finally not be in the same room together and know how the other was thinking. As much as I would try to get to the writers’ room, it would become limited to small chunks of time. And then when we got to the edit room, Ryan was already having to start breaking season two. There have been a lot of challenges to do with what the role of a showrunner is when you’re a director and what the role of a showrunner is when you’re a writer. There’s a negotiation between us that’s constant. But also, at some point, you have to accept, I can’t be there so I have to trust you.

Juan José Campanella

Producer & Director The Envoys

TV DRAMA: What drew you to TV? CAMPANELLA: My Master’s degree is in film and television. When you tell a story, it doesn’t really matter that much what kind of media it is going to be transmitted on. There are subtle differences, of course, from the big screen to a smaller screen. I find pleasure in both. In film, you have a larger canvas and feeling of permanence through time. With TV, I love the fact that you can go deeper into the characters. I find television more like a novel, and film like a short story. I like the speed of television, I like the fact that you have to think and shoot from the cuff.

TV DRAMA: How are the opportunities today for non-Englishlanguage content? CAMPANELLA: It used to be that in every country, you would have American television and local television—and very little from any other country. Now, we find ourselves watching series from Israel, Palestine, Africa. It’s a great opportunity for us who work in a foreign language. It also makes the competitive canvas even broader. For the audience, it’s all good.

TV DRAMA: You write, produce and direct. How do you shuffle which hats you’re going to wear on a given project? CAMPANELLA: It depends on what my capacity is in it. If I am the showrunner and the show is going to be presented as me being the creative force—which is not in every show that I’ve worked on—then if I make mistakes, they should be my own. I don’t like to put my name on somebody else’s mistakes. Because I come from editing and writing, I have the bookends of the project. I actually became a director to protect my scripts. But we do projects in which other people are the creative force behind it, and there, I just look and give my notes. It’s not that hard for me to work on several things when I wear different hats, but if I’m wearing the same hat on two or three projects, it’s more tiresome. It’s easier to change discipline than if you have to write one project, then write another, then write another.

Miranda Kwok

Creator & Executive Producer The Cleaning Lady

TV DRAMA: Tell us about adapting the Argentinean show The Cleaning Lady for U.S. audiences. KWOK: I’ve always wanted to do a female Breaking Bad. In adapting this project, there were a few elements I wanted to layer in. In the original, she’s a cleaning lady who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and then is forced to work for the mob, and she also has an immunocompromised child. The Argentinean format was a oneseason show. In bringing it to an American audience, I had to figure out how to make this a show that could last for many seasons. And not to have her just be a cleaning lady, but somebody who was a doctor in her country who isn’t able to work in the U.S. because her credentials don’t translate. The other layer was having her be an undocumented immigrant. That is such a hot topic right now. Sometimes people can be afraid to address what that means.

TV DRAMA: Did you have a platform—cable, broadcast or streaming—in mind when you started working on the project? KWOK: I definitely felt like I would be pitching to cable and streaming initially. That’s usually the platform where stories like this land. The darker criminal elements of it, the serialized element of it, and the leads were going to be diverse characters. At the forefront of the show is a Filipino Cambodian family, and we have diverse characters across the board. Normally, those are shows that aren’t as embraced by mainstream media. But as I was developing the project with Warner Bros., they said, there seems to be a much greater appetite and audience for diverse and marginalized voices, we would love to pitch this to the networks first. And I was like, OK, we’d have to adjust language and nudity and violence, scale that down. FOX scooped it up immediately. I feel so fortunate. Being on a broadcast platform allows the show to be seen by a much larger, broader audience.

Sandra Stern

President, Television Group Lionsgate

TV DRAMA: Lionsgate has a long history of looking outside the U.S. for financing and partners on projects. When and why did you start with that strategy? STERN: We started with that strategy long before Lionsgate. Jon Feltheimer [Lionsgate’s CEO] and I were at New World Entertainment, and we were always scrambling for money. So, we looked outside the U.S. to see if we could put together some funding, which we did.

We like working with international partners. We like to think that all of our product is global, that we make it for a global market. So, it’s always good for us to have that international voice. And we have continued with that strategy.

When I came to Lionsgate in the early 2000s, we were scrambling for money. We were able to take advantage of our Canadian citizenship to access tax credits and advantages. In the early days, almost everything that we did had a Canadian nexus and had a Canadian partner or Canadian money. These days, we continue to do co-productions. Fortunately, we are not as tight on money anymore as we were. Now, our co-production partnerships are really centered around strategic initiatives rather than financial ones.

TV DRAMA: What factors have allowed Lionsgate to boost its TV output? STERN: There are many more buyers, and many more platforms, with production needs to fill, and we are delighted to be a good source of projects and materials for them. The general state of the TV business as of late has really allowed us to boost our output, and we have taken advantage of that. We continue to be, as we learned in the early days, if not the first, then certainly one of the first [studios] doing originals for some of the new platforms. That has been a real asset to us, as well as to every other studio that has focused on the streamers. I don’t know that any of the others are as laser-focused as we are on new platforms, but that is just an industry-wide boon.

Dan March

Founder & Managing Partner Dynamic Television

TV DRAMA: How are co-production models evolving? MARCH: Co-productions fit into one of two buckets: creatively driven or economically driven. Creative coproductions are kind of obvious, whether driven by story, IP or whatever it might be. There’s a natural creative [drive] that might attract two different partners from two different countries. The economic model is harder. The benefit of economic models is often trying to attract an additional broadcaster or another entity. That’s getting a little bit more challenging. But I think in general, demand for co-productions is very strong. With increasing costs and increasing demand, it’s getting harder and harder to pull off more ambitious productions.

TV DRAMA: How is the U.S. market for engaging in co-productions? MARCH: The U.S. is a challenging market. If we are talking about a U.S. buyer—not a global streamer buying for the world—coming on board a show early on as a co-producer, it doesn’t really happen that often. Part of that is because the bar is extraordinarily high in the U.S. It’s so hard to get broadcasters or buyers to come on board a project early to take that risk because they are investing so much of their own money in their original shows. The U.S. is the one market in the world where they really don’t need a partner to crank out $4 million to $5 million episodes year-round. There’s not an inherent need for co-production structures the way there might be in Europe, where you have smaller markets and smaller investments. Can you presell? Yes, you can. Will the buyer have a little bit of creative input? They might. It’s a very English-languagedominant market, so [you have to look at], what are you bringing a U.S. partner that is going to elevate over that high bar, be a project that they have to have now and also be able to reach that audience. You’re threading a really small needle. It is doable, often driven by either big talent or big IP, but it’s not an easy task.

Patrick Phelan

Director, World Sales LEONINE Studios

TV DRAMA: What’s guiding the drama strategy at LEONINE Studios? PHELAN: Our strategy is focused on highprofile international productions. This includes English-language productions as well as local ones. The package is key— great stories combined with great talents behind and in front of the camera. We’re looking for content that offers viewers something exceptional like an exotic and exciting new look, unique storytelling or a story that hasn’t been told before.

TV DRAMA: Tell me about the producer pipeline that feeds the LEONINE Studios worldwide sales slate. PHELAN: We have established two streams of content: We fill our slate with high-profile productions coming from our LEONINE Studios production banners Odeon Fiction and W&B Television on a project-by-project basis. At the same time, we are establishing relationships with producers from around the world like the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Scandinavia, Spain, Israel and Belgium, for example.

TV DRAMA: What drama genres are in high demand? PHELAN: Genre-wise, it is all about thrilling crime stories, true stories and young adult edgy satirical dramas. Digital providers have a very clear view of viewing habits and are steering their content choices based on their data. In addition, escapism and female characters are at the forefront, reflecting the current zeitgeist with a focus on female empowerment, diversity and entertainment to distract from the harsh realities we’re all facing.

TV DRAMA: Why is now a particularly good time to be in the global drama business? PHELAN: The opportunities are constantly growing. Established markets are evolving and new platforms are entering the market. There is a healthy appetite for content and a great potential for further growth.