{"id":675563,"date":"2025-06-17T18:17:38","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T15:17:38","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-06-17T18:17:38","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T15:17:38","slug":"exploring-the-world-of-dan-fogelmans-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/exploring-the-world-of-dan-fogelmans-thriller\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring the World of Dan Fogelman’s Thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tOne theoretical question after a meeting with a wealthy businessman led Dan Fogelman to the concept for Paradise<\/em>. \u201cI was very overwhelmed by him and his life, and I started thinking about this guy and how many people must be doing his bidding and what would happ<\/a>en if the shit ever hit the fan,\u201d Fogelman recalls. \u201cWould those people really stay with him or would they take care of their own, which is what I suspected they would do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPut that theory within the context of the American government with the president of the United States and the \u201cpeople who are literally employed to take a bullet for that person,\u201d as Fogelman puts it, and you have his postapocalyptic thriller that sees Secret Service agent Xavier Collins, played by Sterling K. Brown, lead a revolt in his pursuit of answers following the death of reluctant President Cal Bradford, played by James Marsden.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe\u2019s kind of a perpetual kid in some ways, where he\u2019s like, \u2018Well, if I\u2019m here, I\u2019m going to have a good time with it and I\u2019m going to try to do the right thing,\u2019 \u201d says Marsden of his character, who\u2019s only seen in flashbacks. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t devoid of humor,\u201d he adds of the role. \u201cI had latitude to actually provide some levity to this pretty heavy story by his nature and his shoot-from-the-hip playfulness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe initial shit-hits-the-fan moment for the Hulu show was the eruption of a supervolcano, which sets off a series<\/a> of global natural disasters, including a 600-mile-per-hour tsunami and an 8.9 magnitude earthquake, the details of which audiences don\u2019t learn until episode seven. The domino effect leads to the demise of several countries and the relocation of 25,000 preselected American citizens to the underground bunker city in which the story takes place.<\/p>\n

\n\tFogelman says he and his team of writers, which includes Stephen Markley, author of the dystopian climate change epic The Deluge<\/em>, met with a number of \u201cvery scary\u201d experts in the fields of psychology, sociology, archeology and architecture \u2014 \u201cpeople who sit and do TED talks on how the world is going to end\u201d \u2014 to come up with the right doomsday event to build the series around.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe wanted it to be something that\u2019s still in a television program that could speak to the issue of climate change in a natural disaster while being kind of far-fetched enough that it\u2019s not the number one way the world is necessarily going to end,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tBrown with Julianne Nicholson, who portrays the cunning Sinatra.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISNEY\/BRIAN ROEDEL<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tJulianne Nicholson\u2019s Sinatra was the chief architect of the man-made city in the old world and continues to pull the strings behind the scenes in the new one. Fogelman pulled a few of his own to get the actress \u2014who was already booked for another project that would begin filming at the same time \u2014 locked in for the role. \u201cI basically called the television studio and lied to them and told them we needed to spend some money to buy a couple more weeks so we could get all the departments ready, when the truth was, I was mainly doing it to stall so that I could get Julianne from the U.K. over to the United States,\u201d he admits.<\/p>\n

\n\tScheduling conflicts aside, Nicholson was in from the moment she was sent the scripts for the first four episodes. It\u2019s in episode two, titled after her character, that viewers learn Sinatra\u2019s backstory: how she was a tech billionaire \u2014 \u201cthe richest self-made woman in the world,\u201d to be exact \u2014 before the cataclysmic event. How she met her future husband. How she once smiled before the death of her son, that loss coloring the austerity with which she now exerts her authority. \u201cI had never read an episode that so beautifully and delicately picks over these important moments in a woman\u2019s life,\u201d says\u00a0Nicholson.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tGerald McRaney (left) as Cal Bradford\u2019s father, Kane Bradford, and Marsden.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISNEY\/BRIAN ROEDEL<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDespite declaring, \u201cI\u2019m not a monster, even though I seem like it,\u201d Sinatra is the show\u2019s central villain \u2014 at least in season one (the finale foreshadows she\u2019s met her match in Nicole Brydon Bloom\u2019s agent Jane Driscoll, an assassin who earlier in the season kills her own boyfriend, beloved Secret Service agent Billy Pace, played by Jon Beavers). It\u2019s Nicholson\u2019s embodiment of the chilling authoritarian that makes her fans and even co-stars love to hate her.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve had an acting crush on her for a long, long time,\u201d Brown says of Nicholson. \u201cShe\u2019s so good at making you detest her,\u201d he adds of her portrayal of Sinatra.<\/p>\n

\n\tBrown, on the other hand, who starred as lovable father and husband Randall Pearson in Fogelman\u2019s NBC family drama This Is Us<\/em>, has a knack for making audiences root for his characters. Collins, the protagonist of Paradise<\/em> whom viewers see desperately try to get his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), on board a plane in Atlanta to make it into the bunker with their son and daughter, is now among them. In episode six, Collins learns his wife may not have perished along with the millions of other Americans left behind, with his decision to leave the bunker to find her in the season one finale setting up a major plot for season two.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tBrown with director John Requa<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISNEY\/SER BAFFO<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tBloom as Jane in the hours before Billy dies.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISNEY\/BRIAN ROEDEL<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cI never said it out loud to myself, and I don\u2019t even know that I processed it myself, but by the time I started giving the script to a couple of core confidants to read, they were all saying, \u2018Have you sent this to Sterling yet? Is he going to do it?\u2019 And it started occurring to me, not only had I written this thinking of Sterling the entire time, but if he doesn\u2019t want to do it, which I found very possible and even probable, I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m going to move on with the TV series without him,\u201d Fogelman admits.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat was never a question for Brown, who\u2019s also an executive producer of the series. \u201cAs soon as I read the pilot, I was like, \u2018Ah, shit that\u2019s easy. When do we start?\u2019 \u201d he says. \u201cOne of the other things was having Steve Beers, one of our producers, be able to get our crew together. The crew for This Is Us<\/em> is 80 percent intact for Paradise<\/em>. It\u2019s like a homecoming.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tProduction designer Kevin Bird, one of the rare new faces on the Paramount lot, where the show is filmed, was tasked with building the look of the fabricated two-and-a-half-mile-wide city set in the Colorado mountainside.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tBrown with Aliyah Mastin and Percy Daggs IV, who play his character\u2019s children, Presley and James Collins, inside the World War II blimp hangar used as the entry to the underground bunker city in Colorado. <\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISNEY\/BRIAN ROEDEL<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cWe landed on this sort of New England architecture, but Disney-fied,\u201d Bird explains. \u201cCreepy-perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFogelman initially had a very different idea for the show\u2019s setting. \u201cAt one point, I toyed with the reveal being that they weren\u2019t underground but in fact were on a space station, but that just seemed really hard, so I abandoned that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch of the design was informed by a 25-page scholarly paper on how to govern such a city, written by a professor of sociology specifically for the show.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tJon Beavers, who plays agent Billy Pace, aka \u201cUncle Billy,\u201d with Mastin and Daggs IV.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISNEY\/SER BAFFO<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cThat rule book gave us our guide for when we were building and location scouting,\u201d says Bird, who built most of the series\u2019 interior spaces \u2014 characters\u2019 homes, the library, the diner \u2014 on stages. \u201cObviously there\u2019s no shortage of mansions in L.A., so for that we were good,\u201d he adds of the exterior facades for the wealthy homeowners. For the suburban neighborhood where characters like Collins and Pace live, the crew shot north of Los Angeles in Santa Clarita.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo add to the uniqueness of the city, composer Siddhartha Khosla, who wrote the score for the show, also created the sounds that are heard when residents swipe the electronic wristbands they wear, which is how they pay for everything and also receive special alerts. \u201cI was on the phone once with [editor] Howard [Leder], and I had this omnichord, which is like this \u201980s synth [musical instrument], and I just started tweaking it a little bit and playing little bleeps and bloops from it and he\u2019s like, \u2018That\u2019s cool, send me that,\u2019 \u201d Khosla recalls.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tBrown on set inside the White House.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISNEY\/SER BAFFO<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tPart of the season finale was shot inside a quarry, with the episode retracing the steps of President Bradford\u2019s killer, revealed to be \u2014 spoiler alert \u2014 the city librarian (Ian Merrigan), a former project manager who was fired when he sounded the alarm on construction workers being exposed to arsenopyrite poisoning while building the underground city.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt had a 180-degree huge rock wall about 250 feet tall,\u201d says Bird. \u201cWe found this unbelievable blimp hangar, which is an existing location from World War II, and decided that that would be an amazing entrance into the mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShooting on location limited the amount of VFX used in the series, and Los Angeles, with its diverse terrain, proved ideal for making Paradise<\/em> look as real as possible.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf it was all stage builds, in the end it does start to feel like that if you can\u2019t pop outside and see a real world we\u2019re building,\u201d says Bird. \u201cAnd the scale, we\u2019d never be able to build onstage, so in the end [shooting in L.A.] helped, actually.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tNicole Brydon Bloom\u2019s character, agent Jane Driscoll, reacts to agent Billy Pace\u2019s death.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISNEY\/BRIAN ROEDEL<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tFilming for season two has resumed in Los Angeles, the location a priority for both Fogelman and Brown, who want to see more production brought back to Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNow that we still shoot on the Paramount lot, we can pretty much use whichever [stage] we want because there\u2019s just not the same level of activity in the city anymore,\u201d he says, in comparison to when he filmed This Is Us <\/em>there from 2016 to 2022. \u201cThe $750 million, the infusion, I hope it\u2019ll be something,\u201d he adds of the proposed new cap for the film tax credit plan that has passed in the state Senate. \u201cI hope it\u2019s not too little, too late.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tSterling K. Brown as the president\u2019s Secret Service agent Xavier Collins.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisney\/Ser Baffo<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThis story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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If you want to read more Like this articles, you can visit our Social Media category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One theoretical question after a meeting with a wealthy businessman led Dan Fogelman to the concept for Paradise. \u201cI was very overwhelmed by him and his life, and I started thinking about this guy and how many people must be doing his bidding and what would happen if the shit ever hit the fan,\u201d Fogelman…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-675563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-mediaa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}