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[This story contains major spoilers from the seventh episode of Grotesquerie.]
Nothing in the marketing for FX horror series Grotesquerie tipped viewers off that this Ryan Murphy show is not what it seems. And, that was intentional. Because when the seventh episode of the Niecy Nash-Betts-starring series released, Murphy wanted a collective gasp from viewers. And that's exactly what he got when the extended hour released on Wednesday night.
"The very fact that none of this got out is a miracle in today's modern age," Murphy, who co-created, wrote and directed Grotesquerie tells The Hollywood Reporter in a chat with his collaborative partner, John Landgraf, Chairman of FX Content & FX Productions.
The twist was so big, and the rollout was so unique, that the pair sat down with THR to unpack their master plan: Grotesquerie is a drama series, they say, that will continue to unravel twist after twist, leading up to a finale cliffhanger that will propel viewers into a second season. But most importantly, it makes making TV fun again for the pair, who have brought viewers the American Horror Story, American Crime Story, American Sports Story and Feud anthologies, as well as Pose and new offering Doctor Odyssey, among others.
"If you get to do something like this with Grotesquerie -- which John and I love and has this big schockaroo thing, and the fact that it never got out -- it's like, 'Oh, this is fun again. This is show business. This is why we do what we do. That's why,'" says Murphy. Landgraf adds, "The idea that Ryan had that we went with is genuinely to surprise the audience. You're supposed to find it in real time."
What viewers found when watching Grotesquerie is that the entire story thus far has been taking place inside the liminal mind of the starring Detective of the series, Lois Tryon, played by Nash-Betts, who -- in the big flip reveal -- is the one who has been in a coma this entire time, not, as viewers have been led to believe, her husband, played by Courtney B. Vance. The reveal flips the entire series on its head, as the characters who viewers have come to know -- played by Micaela Diamond, Raven Goodwin, Lesley Manville, Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Travis Kelce -- are very different in this new reality, giving the cast dual roles to play.
But Murphy and Landgraf say the twists aren't over. So buckle up as Grotesquerie continues to reveal itself with its final three episodes. Below, the pair dives in with THR on the unique release strategy for Murphy's latest horror hit, which they say taps into the current climate of existential crisis ("I really wanted all of it to air before the election," says Murphy), and keeping this big secret as they talk about all things from Kelce to pitching Taylor Swift and why, at this point in his career, Murphy is only looking for a challenge.
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So the release strategy for Grotesquerie has been a bit unusual. Two episodes have dropped per week with this seventh episode and the finale, airing on Halloween eve, getting their own nights. At this point, John, do you give Ryan the runway he needs with episode length and season structure? What was the rollout strategy thinking here?
JOHN LANDGRAF We all talked about it. We show this to our partners at Hulu, who understand the platform and audience and who also do the on-platform promotion. But ultimately, we tend to group things together the way the storyteller wants them to be experienced, and that's exactly what happened here.
We wanted to get to this twist sooner. That's why it's in week four, which is really three weeks to the day after premiere. Then Ryan wanted to do episodes eight and nine together, and then 10 [the finale] on its own. When you see the episodes, you will understand. As a follow-up to episode seven, episodes eight and nine together really reset the show. The penultimate episode and the finale each have twists in them, also, that reset the show in their own way. Ryan, I think you wanted to get to the twist in episode nine one week after this seventh episode, and then the finale really sets the template for the whole series. So, it's like a series of reveals that you're going through now.
RYAN MURPHY Yes, there's a big reveal here in episode seven -- and then there's another one in eight and nine and 10 [the finale]. In the TV landscape, I've had all types of rollouts. You can do a binge. You can do one week at a time. Based on what I can find out internally about who is watching and how they're watching, people like the idea of consuming. If there are cliffhangers involved, what's the next one? What's the next one? So in the storytelling, we were thinking that way as we were breaking the episodes.
Ryan, when I last spoke to you and you were describing all of the shows you launched this fall, you summed up Grotesquerie as "a horror story borne out of my brain." Now that we know the big twist, what inspired you to bring this story to the screen?
MURPHY And by that I didn't mean an American Horror Story, I just meant a horror story. I have never really done anything like this before. I haven't ever written a season of television just on my own or for fun, just to do it, right? So I was interested in writing about something that I was feeling, which is this sort of existential crisis of: Is this all happening? Why do I feel every day that I'm in sort of a nightmare we can't wake up from? And even more than that, as you'll see, that love is really the only thing that gets us through.
I feel ultimately that we live in a very cynical time, but that ultimately this reveal -- and what happens after that -- is really about people fighting for love and connection, which I certainly do every day. So I just went to my collaborators Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, and we talked about it and I wrote it. Then when I finished it, I think I had nine of the 10 episodes completed and I showed John [Landgraf] nine scripts. And he said, "Oh wow, you've never really done this before." When he got to episodes three or four, he called me and said he really liked them. And I said, "Oh, you haven't gotten to The Thing." I always called episode seven, "The Thing." I said, "Keep reading." Then he called and said, "Wow, ok." And then we decided to make it. Then we started casting it and it all happened relatively quickly, but there was also this urgency to it. It just was about something. It was really about where we're living now and in the run-up to it, I really wanted all of it to air before the election. I thought that was also an interesting part of it. There's something very of-the-moment about it.
Why not make this a season of American Horror Story starring Niecy Nash - did you ever consider putting Grotesquerie under the AHS umbrella?
MURPHY Never, never. It was never that. It's so different than that. John and I have talked about that. Other people and I have talked about that. AHS is fun, it's straight-forward, it announces what it is instantly. This is much more experimental independent filmmaking the way we made it. It was very different. Many filmmakers have done different types of horror things. I think you can do different types of horror things, and this has never been that.
LANDGRAF There's always a malevolent entity in American Horror Story, and the protagonists always end up dying, right? That's the genius of the format -- that you can kill off most or all of your cast every year, and it just reboots. That's one of the reasons it was hard to do horror within the television landscape until Ryan came up with that idea. This one is different. As you've seen, no one has actually died and we're eight episodes in.
If we can trust that, technically! Is this a limited series, or do you want to do more seasons?
LANDGRAF We're definitely considering doing more because as you'll see at the end, it's like a series of Russian nesting dolls. You just saw the doll within the doll. Then there are more dolls inside these dolls. And you won't even have a sense of what the base reality of it is, for sure, until you get to the finale. But then there's a whole story that takes place in that reality which, again, is very of our reality.
What Ryan showed us all [so far] was a sort of nightmare, fever dream, surreal liminal version of our reality. But it's not that far off emotionally. It captures a lot of what I feel these days. I'd love to wake up from a coma and realize, "Oh, it was all a dream." But I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. Ultimately there is a depiction of the world we live in today that you're going to get to, a dissection of what's really going on and why it's going on.
Let's talk about this twist reveal. Some castmembers told THR they don't all know how the season ends. Did you black out scripts and, why was that important to hold back from the actors?
MURPHY Well, it was conceived as a drama series. That's what it is. So it's a multi-year approach.
LANDGRAF Yep.
MURPHY It was an interesting thing how I pitched it, and with who and when. I met with Niecy in November at the Chateau Marmont and we talked about it. But I hadn't really done The Thing. After John read it and loved it and greenlit it, I sent the scripts to her in January. She had read everything through nine, so she knew what the twist was and it was a very fun experience. She was texting me as she was reading it going, "Wait, what?" I didn't really tell her what it was about, I just said, "Read it, I want you to do it." Because, we've worked together for 25 years. All of the actors, I have various different relationships with, and for the most part, I've worked with them for a long time. Courtney [B. Vance] and I had a conversations about what he's playing and how when [Niecy] wakes up from the coma, he takes over for a while. Lesley Manville, I've always wanted to work with. She knew going in that there was a duality. All of the actors knew there was a duality. Some of them knew a lot more than others, based on what they needed to know. It was a fun thing for me.
LANDGRAF Your question also made me realize something. The idea that Ryan had, that we went with, is genuinely to surprise the audience. Genuinely, to not tell them what they're watching and to figure it out as time goes on. Nothing in the marketing or the publicity that we did gave away the show. You're supposed to find it in real time. And I think part of the reason why maybe some people are wondering if it's like an American Horror Story is because they don't know whether it's a closed end, one-off story yet. And I can tell you, you'll know by the time you get to the end that this is a series.
Grotesquerie is a series with the current cast?
LANDGRAF It's not an American Horror Story. It's a series about these characters, and it has a big, big, amazing cliffhanger at the end of the first season that propels you into a second season. So yeah, we didn't want to tell people this is what to expect. Ryan and I are always restless. One of the things I've always admired about him is that he gets bored, and wants to do something new. He's taken television in a new direction so many times that's very fresh. They did Nip/Tuck before I even got to FX, and one of the reasons I came is because loved it so much and thought it was so original. So the whole notion here was, "Let's genuinely drop this into the world and let people figure it out."
Was the show initially called "Snow Globe"?
MURPHY No, the title "Snow Globe" was a fake name. There are various people who had fake names. It had NDAs. You can see the very fact that none of this got out is a miracle in today's modern age. Every day since we premiered I would wake up to say, "Did somebody in an uncool way reveal the twist?" But I think everybody who made it loved it, from the cast and crew down. It's very hard to keep secrets in today's media landscape. And it's also why we decided not to show too many episodes in advance. We showed one or two in the beginning to some press so Niecy could do the opening promotion.
But it's a real indication of my relationship with John. We've worked together 21 years and we've done things like this -- I call them The Big Swings. Like with Horror Story, where I told him that at the end of the season, we burn the sets down and have all new actors. A lesser person would have said, "Wait, what. We need to talk about this." And John said, "OK, let's do that." (Laughs) It was exciting. It was bold. And it was like, "Ok, that scares me a little bit." But we always say that to each other -- that if it scares us, we should do it. We did the same thing with O.J. [Simpson, for American Crime Story]. That was not an easy thing to get made, back in the day. People take it for granted now, but that type of storytelling was not [easy]. And that's exactly how it felt when we were working on this. This felt new and fresh, and I really love that there's a big shockaroonie in there.
John, how much of a risk did making this show feel like for you?
LANDGRAF It always does but, who is going to make a show about the ballroom community in New York [with Pose] and say, "and I don't want to cast it with anybody but people who actually lived this experience. I'm gonna have an open casting call and I'm gonna go find a cast of stars. So let's just make a TV show knowing going in that they're all going to be faces you've never seen before, because they've never had the opportunity to work." Ryan just pulls it off, over and over. I still remember the moment when he brought in the cast of Pose, all of whom were unknown; he found them all and they were all amazing. You just knew instantaneously you had a television show. But until then, no one had ever done that before.
With this Grotesquerie episode, you also have someone not necessarily known as an actor who is revealing himself as one in NFL star Travis Kelce. Not only has he had this key role so far, now he also has a dual role. How did you know he was right for this part?
MURPHY The fun thing for me now is that people can go back and rewatch it from the beginning, and there are so many Easter eggs in Grotesquerie. Literally dozens of them. If you even look at the opening shot of the first episode, that's a hospital curtain on fire. We took great care with those things, like all the curtains in that episode -- that's her surrounded in the coma. There are little things throughout. Another scene in episode one, Lesley Manville is eating a fruit in various forms of close ups. People got that wrong. They said it was strawberries. It's not. It's cherries, which were meant to be a metaphor for blood clots. So there's all of these things. So, the cast was in it from the get-go. They all knew what this was.
When I hired Travis, I said, "You are playing dual parts here. You're playing kind of a guardian angel." When you see him, he's lit like he's God. It makes no sense that there are acres of flowers in that hospital set that we brought in and designed [in his first scene with Nash-Betts]. I lit him and dressed him like that. But then when he did the turn and played the character with the mullet who worked at Cinnabon [in this episode], he was really involved in, "Ok, I want my mullet to be here and I want to wear this." Because Travis is funny and it's just kind of great. It was kind of a fascinating thing to work with all of these actors on that. I think it's the reason why actors like playing twins, because they can do two things. They all couldn't wait to play the second character. Because they were either very different, or the circumstances were the same but they were still very different.
Are you trying to get Taylor Swift for season two? Have you pitched her anything?
MURPHY I've talked to Taylor's people about various things through the years, and all I will say is that I think she's great and if she ever has time to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat. I think she's one of the greats. I was so shy talking to Travis about her. But he's very sweet about it and respectful. They are a pop-culture phenomenon. It's a very interesting dynamic, the way they've captured the imagination of the world. But I always knew Travis could do it. I have this saying: A star is a star is a star. I just knew he could do it. He rolls up his sleeves and he says, "Ok, let's do this." There's that last scene of [Kelce and Nash-Betts] in episode three that I directed where they go in the red getaway car -- that's a little Taylor Swift nod for you there! -- and they drive off to this black limbic space, which makes absolutely no sense. But it does make sense now, because you know [Lois] is in a coma.
How much were you trying to tip off viewers with these hints? What kind of balance did you find in the editing of these episodes?
MURPHY I worked really hard with all of our people, with Max Winkler and Alexis Martin Woodall, our showrunners. We wrote it, and then I hired them to give it visual life. I wanted younger collaborators. We talked a lot about: How much do we reveal and when? And there were things in the scripts that I wanted shot that then we saw them, we were like -- and I actually just did this today in an episode -- "that's too much." I wanted people to feel a sense of unease and I wanted them to have a sense of like, "Wait, what's going on?" And it couldn't be too obvious or overt. It had to have a reality to it. And so I worked hard on that with them, and I did cut things that we shot where I thought it was going to be too obvious.
Ryan, we recently spoke about how many shows you have out in the world right now. I wanted to ask you about moving back to Disney and what you learned your time at Netflix. Is there anything you would have done differently?
MURPHY The truth is I never left, really. My deal is a really interesting deal, because I kept all the shows that I had with John [Landgraf] and Dana [Walden]. And then I went on and did wonderful things at Netflix as well, which I really wanted to do as an artist and as a business person, and I was allowed to do that. I continue to work on Monsters [with Netflix], which I'm very passionate about. I get that what I'm doing is very unusual, but with Grotesquerie -- and with The Beauty, which is the next show I'm doing with John -- we talked a lot about getting the band back together, although the band would literally go get coffee and never broke up. At this point in my career, I only want to do things that are hard. Grotesquerie was very hard to make. And The Beauty is very hard to make. Grotesquerie is about a deeply American experience and The Beauty is more about an international thing, a feeling. But they're both great and it was fun to do.
LANDGRAF I remember when Ryan made his deal with Netflix, and it was so emotional because we had worked together so long -- me, Ryan and Dana, all of us. He came over and we had this very emotional thing, where I told him how proud I was of him and wished him well and said how much I would miss him. Then the next day, we kept working and we did more the next year than we did the prior year (laughs). It was very weird.
MURPHY I know it's a very unusual situation, my life and what I do. But everyone has been so kind and cool. It's such a privilege to do what we are able to do, and I think we have all felt that in the last two years with the business model changing and the strikes. If you get to do something like this with Grotesquerie -- which John and I love and has this big shockaroo thing, and the fact that it never got out -- it's like, "Oh, this is fun again. This is show business. This is why we do what we do. That's why."
Well, now viewers will never know what to expect from your next shows. And this conversation is making me think those Doctor Odyssey conspiracy theories might be true...
Grotesquerie releases episodes eight and nine next Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FX (streaming next day on Hulu), followed by its finale on Oct. 30.
