Just so you know, I'm only including TV shows that premiered in 2021; though I, of course, mean no disrespect to returning gems such as Succession or Never Have I Ever or Insecure or [insert any number of wonderful shows here]. Also, there are totally spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution.
If you're interested in behind-the-scenes facts about 2021's biggest movies, check out this post.
1. According to a Netflix behind-the-scenes video, the glass stepping-stones set from Squid Game used real tempered glass. In the words of Jung Ho-yeon, who played Kang Sae-byeok, it was "actually terrifying" to film on.
Jung estimated that the bridge was suspended about 1 meter (that's a little more than a yard) above the ground.
Director and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk said in the same video, "A mere 1.5 meters can make you frightened. The glass made them nervous. I think we could notice the unnoticed rigidity and fear of the body. It felt like really jumping off a high bridge. The game was real and they felt real fear. Their bodies showed that fear. We think that set had the power of realism."
2. When Paul Bettany got the call about WandaVision, his character, Vision, had just perished in Infinity War. So he figured he was about to be fired, not offered a starring role on a new TV show.
Bettany told BuzzFeed, "So I went in. I said, 'Look, there's just absolutely no hard feelings. It's been a great run. Thank you so much.' And they were like, 'Are you quitting?' And I went, 'No, aren't you firing me?' And they went, 'No, we were gonna pitch you a TV show.' That's how I found out."
3. In Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse series, protagonist Alina wears a power-enhancing necklace known as an amplifier. In Netflix's adaptation Shadow and Bone, the necklace was changed to an eerie and altogether more visceral bodily alteration because of safety concerns.
In the series, the stag antlers Alina wore as a necklace in the books are instead fused to her collarbone. In an interview with Decider, showrunner Eric Heisserer said that re-creating the necklace as it appears in the books would've been impossible to do without it either posing a danger to actor Jessie Mei Li or looking extraordinarily fake.
Heisserer said, "Our safety person stepped in with a lot of concerns about Jessie accidentally getting injured. Even if we had made something softer — and we tried with some soft foam and rubbery necklaces, and they just looked very soft — they would be very bendy when Jessie moved around."
4. When they first began filming the suspenseful mystery series Cruel Summer, neither Chiara Aurelia (Jeanette Turner) nor Olivia Holt (Kate Wallis) knew how the season was going to end.
Aurelia told BuzzFeed, "I was kept in the dark under every circumstance. The lovely [showrunner] Tia Napolitano did not tell me the end. I was very much invested in doing everything in my physical power to figure it out. I think I found out the end probably around Episode 8."
In the same interview, Holt said, "We were mostly getting information as we filmed. I read the first two episodes before I signed on, and I was already really invested in both of the characters and the story. I was interested in where the story could go. The trajectory of them was foreign to me. I had no idea where it was going to go until we started shooting."
5. In the Loki episode of the behind-the-scenes series Marvel Studios: Assembled, it was revealed that Alligator Loki was modeled off of a real-life "support alligator" named Wally.
Michael Waldron, who came up with Alligator Loki, said, "I'll tell you, for every really dumb idea like that that made it in, there's a hundred even stupider ones that these guys had to pull me back from."
6. Malcolm Spellman, the creator and head writer of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, told BuzzFeed that his favorite scene to write was Sam Wilson's speech to the senator because he got to work with actor Anthony Mackie on it.
Spellman said, "I got to spend hours on the phone with Anthony to craft that in a way that hopefully felt very resonant and of the moment. It was my favorite scene to write because I got to spend time with Anthony on it."
7. Joshua Jackson, who stars as the terrifying surgeon-gone-bad Christopher Duntsch in Dr. Death, watched the pilot with his wife, fellow actor Jodie Turner-Smith, and his mother-in-law. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight Canada, Jackson said his mother-in-law "walked out" after the first surgery scene.
Jackson said that while Turner-Smith stayed to watch the whole episode and the one following it, she watched the show while covering her eyes with her hands. The actor joked that he interpreted this horrified reaction as "a good thing."
8. Keegan-Michael Key revealed during an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert that playing the musical-hating Josh on Schmigadoon! was the "hardest acting job I've had to do in my career," because he personally adores musicals.
Key joked that when he danced on set, director Barry Sonnenfeld would stop filming and tell him, "You can't dance to the music. You hate it."
During the interview, Key said that Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Oklahoma! are his favorite musicals of all time.
9. Kevin Can F**k Himself combines a multi-camera sitcom with a single-camera drama to create a narrative of a wife snapping under the strain of her marriage to an immature man. And while the two different "shows" look drastically different, the same sets were used for both.
According to Vulture, to transform the multi-camera set into the single-camera one, a (literal) fourth wall and a ceiling would be added. The lighting and camera angles would also be changed to make the room appear more claustrophobic and shabbier than its sitcom counterpart.
Production designer Tony Fanning told Vulture, "You couldn’t get too crazy with pattern and the brightness of color because it would look fake or false in the single-camera world."
10. Amanda Peet, who co-created The Chair with Annie Julia Wyman, told Vanity Fair that she had Sandra Oh in mind for protagonist Ji-Yoon Kim while she was working on the pilot.
Peet said of Oh, "There are a lot of actors who can’t play a romantic comedy because they don’t have longing, they don’t really know how to play having a crush on someone. That was very important to me — maybe even especially because it’s a middle-aged love story. ... Nothing against her costars, but she could have chemistry with a doormat. She was very sensual and very alive to her attractions."
11. In The Shrink Next Door, Dr. Isaac Herschkopf, a therapist played by Paul Rudd, manipulates and takes advantage of his patient Marty Markowitz, who is portrayed by Will Ferrell. The show is based on a true story (well, it's based on a podcast about a true story), and its stars spoke to the real Markowitz.
Ferrell told the New York Times, "[Markowitz] can go to that place where the pain is still at the surface. We asked him, 'Why are you willing to share this?' A lot of people would just feel shame and never want to talk about this again. And that’s where it felt like he was at peace." In the same interview, Rudd described Markowitz as "very forthcoming."
The stars didn't meet or speak to the real-life Herschkopf, however. Herschkopf told the New York Times, "No one from the TV series ever contacted me, ever reached out to me in any form whatsoever." He described the show as a "fiction of a fiction," since he takes issue with the accuracy of the original podcast.
12. Before Barry Jenkins adapted Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad for Amazon, he got the thoughts of a focus group about how best to tell the story, which follows an enslaved woman named Cora who escapes via a literal underground railroad.
According to the New York Times, Amazon organized the group, composed of Atlanta residents, to ask about the parts of the book they thought were the most powerful. Jenkins set two additional ground rules: Everyone in the focus group needed to be Black, and they needed to be asked whether the novel should even get a screen adaptation in the first place.
Jenkins said, "To my surprise, only 10% of the people said that it shouldn’t be done. ... The other 90% were like, ‘Tell it, but you have to show everything. It needs to be hard. It needs to be brutal.' I realized that my job was going to be pairing the violence with its psychological effects — not shying away from the visual depiction of these things but focusing on what it means to the characters. How are they beating it back? How are they making themselves whole?"
13. In a scene from The White Lotus, two characters walk in on resort manager Armond eating staff member Dillon's ass. The scene was originally less...specific, but actors Murray Bartlett and Lukas Gage had other ideas.
Gage, who plays Dillion, told the AV Club that Armond and Dillon were originally supposed to be interrupted during sex, but he and Bartlett said, "‘Wouldn’t it be more interesting if he's getting his salad tossed? I mean, how often do we see that on TV?' I think it’s much more interesting and more jarring to walk in on." Creator and writer Mike White agreed.
The scene was shot under the supervision of an intimacy coordinator, an on-set expert who ensures that performers feel safe and comfortable while filming vulnerable scenes.
14. Mare of Easttown hairstylist Lawrence Davis was instructed to make the cast look realistically messy and unpolished.
Davis told Insider, "When I came on board, I was told bed hair for everyone. ... Everybody was basically, you know, get up and go, and that was the whole feel of it. But I was basically told from day one, 'bed hair,' and I had to ride with that."
15. Amrit Kaur, who plays Bela on The Sex Lives of College Girls, told Decider that she almost lost the role three times.
Kaur said, "I didn’t get the part three times. One, I wasn’t supposed to even audition because only people with an O-1 visa were supposed to audition. So I auditioned and they found out I didn’t have my O-1 visa, so they canceled my producer/director session. But then we convinced them that we could fast-track my O-1 visa, and then it was on again. And then we applied for my O-1 visa. I didn’t get it the first time, and then they had to get Mindy and Justin and everybody to try to pretend that I’m the most extraordinary person on the planet and no one else can play this part except for me."
O-1 visas are granted to "individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement."
16. A few years before he starred in Lupin, which follows a charismatic thief inspired by Arsène Lupin, the charmingly heroic criminal from a series of novels by Maurice Leblanc, Omar Sy told producers at the French company Gaumont that Lupin was the role he'd most want to play.
Sy told Rolling Stone, "If I were English, I’d say James Bond. So I said Lupin, who’s kind of the same." Later in the same interview, when Sy was asked if he would want to play Bond, he replied, "Of course, yes. I know I can’t, though, because one of the rules [is that he’s] English. For now. But that can change."
17. Sterlin Harjo, the co-creator and showrunner of Reservation Dogs, told KCRW that before the show, he was considering leaving the entertainment industry altogether.
He was repeatedly told by people in entertainment that "Native films don’t make money," Harjo said. "And especially, I was in Oklahoma, I wasn’t in LA, so I was even one more step removed from the industry. I didn’t know how to make that happen." Instead, Harjo was thinking about founding a nonprofit.
Luckily, Harjo gave Hollywood another chance, because Reservation Dogs currently has a 98% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
18. After he taped the first take of one scene in It's a Sin, actor Olly Alexander, who plays Ritchie, cried so hard that director Peter Hoar temporarily stopped filming.
Alexander told the New York Times, "I was a complete mess after the first take. I was sobbing."
The scene followed Ritchie and his friends getting arrested for "protesting the British government’s inaction on AIDS."
19. According to Netflix, the movement of the ears of 10-year-old Gus, the half deer, half boy at the center of Sweet Tooth, were the result of practical effects rather than CGI.
The puppeteer Grant Lehmann controlled the movement of the ears via "handheld transmitter." Gus's ears are "always the first part of him to react," which communicates to the audience his enhanced hearing.
20. Invincible creator Robert Kirkman told Decider that he and the rest of the creative team wanted to make the adaptation more diverse than the original comics series (also written by Kirkman) from the "get-go." For instance, main character Mark Grayson has an "ambiguous" racial background in the comics and is biracial on the show.
Kirkman said, "We were trying to come up with a more well-rounded and more diverse world that better represented the world around us. That’s something that’s very important to me. I think the comic book was fairly diverse for its time. But I can’t help but acknowledge that it was created by two white guys in their early 20s."
He went on, "So you’re able to gender-swap a couple of characters and definitely give Debbie, played by Sandra Oh, a much larger role in the series, which I think is really good." Kirkman also noted that the ethnicities of the characters were decided before casting began.
21. Faith Omole, who plays bass player Bisma in We Are Lady Parts, learned her instrument in two weeks after she found out she was cast.
Omole told NME, "It was the middle of the pandemic when I found out that I had the role. I was just doing puzzles and eating all day. On the day I found out, I finished my last puzzle. It was like, ‘Baby, you’ve got to learn some stuff now.’ ... After my first lesson, I left a voice note for my friend trying not to have a panic attack."
22. Margaret Qualley, who starred as Alex in Maid, told E! News that the filthy places her character cleans were thankfully the result of movie magic and not actual, you know, filth.
Qualley said, "It's all fake, like, I'm doing the princess version of all this. It's, like, ketchup and hot sauce and A1, or whatever, that's, like, plastered onto an oven ... Everything is, like, clean dirt." She called the work that went into making the sets believable "pretty breathtaking," and noted that she was fine while filming scenes with cockroaches.
23. And finally: During an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Only Murders in the Building star and co-creator Steve Martin said that he came up with the basic idea for the series over a decade ago.
But in Martin's original plan, the show followed three old men who like fighting crime but are too tired to want to leave the house, hence them solving "only murders in the building." In the final product, the protagonists are two older men (Steve Martin and Martin Short) and one young woman (Selena Gomez).
