Although it may seem like Hollywood has just turned the page on the 2025 awards season, voting for the first round of the 2026 Emmys begins in a little over a month, which explains why the creators and directors of some of this season’s top awards contenders decided to spend a SoCal Saturday at the DGA Theater discussing their craft in… Hollywood ReporterThe focus occurred on company managers.
The series began with Ben’s interview Return Creator Michael Patrick King and THRChris Gardner regarding the third and final season of the show. King has spoken about continuing the show without Robert Michael Morris, who co-starred as Valerie Cherish’s right-hand man, Mickey Dean, in the first two seasons and died in 2017.
“We knew he was sick. He had stage 4 cancer, but we thought we could do it. HBO knew he was sick and they couldn’t insure him. They said, ‘What do you think?’ “And I said, ‘I think it’s going to work,'” King recalls. “And then he got better and better. The more he was on duty, the more energy and strength he felt.”
“He was getting sicker and sicker,” King continued, “and the doctors were saying, ‘What are you doing? Tumors do not grow. What are you doing?” He was just happy, and then when he died, everyone was really sad. And one of the things I remember is, Entertainment Weekly “TV star Robert Michael Morris has died at the age of 77,” he said, “and I thought it would be helpful to leave if he heard him described as a TV star.” He would almost take that.
In conversation with THRdavid canfield, trance Creator Sam Levinson spoke about Zendaya’s talent for physical comedy after showing a scene from the show’s third season in which her character, Rue, must escape from a Jeep stuck on top of the border wall.
“The amazing thing about Zendaya as an actress is the physical strength that she has, and I think that goes back to her training at Disney, that she’s able to move with such humor and tell a story,” Levinson noted. “I always knew before opening this season that I wanted to do something that really throws us into the middle of the action, but with a certain kind of silliness. We ended up having this border wall sequence, which I think we’ll take a look at. I kind of envisioned it as a combination of Buster Keaton set in the modern drug world.”
He also praised Sydney Sweeney for her ability to adapt when she changed her role in a pivotal scene on the day of filming, asserting: “The interesting thing is that if you push her a little bit, she’s great. You just have to do a few extra takes, and she can get to these levels that are very emotionally honest, but also very funny. She’s able to anchor the scene with this kind of madness and chaos that’s going on around her.”
the housemeanwhile, is known for its hyper-realistic emergency room scenes, and executive producer John Wells spoke about the complexity of creating filmed medical sequences in a conversation with THRMickey O’Connell.
After showing a scene in which the show’s doctors perform emergency surgery to remove a baby from its dying mother’s womb, Wells mused: “One of the presenters I like referred to it as… the houseTranscript of the bank robbery scene in heat. These scenes, which we see on a fairly regular basis, are actually like doing stunts. I did a lot of stunts, big stunts.
He added: “It took about three days to shoot, but you do it in sequence, and they’re all different kinds of problems. The uterine sac that we cut out, we only had four of them; it’s like you only have two bullets when the car rolls over. Then we had problems because the baby, once we put the animatronic baby in, and then we put the gunk on it. The amniotic fluid that was inside dissolved, all the stuff that was on the baby, and then we couldn’t get it out.”
While many directors spoke about the technical challenges they faced while filming their shows, one of the directors, Jett Wilkinson, spoke out The Handmaid’s Tale spin off CovenantsHe also stressed the importance of acting as an emotional leader, especially when filming traumatic scenes.
After showing a horrific execution scene, Wilkinson explained, “I think the content for us was to start to kind of get over what was going on here. Executing women at close range was difficult. During those days, we started by addressing all the background artists: ‘This is going to be difficult and it’s going to be difficult, but just know that you’re seen and you’re appreciated, and we thank you for being here and being part of something so important.'” We wanted to make sure that we recognized that this is difficult for everyone.
Every show presents a production challenge, but while most filmmakers and directors who hit the stage can at least rely on scripts, trained actors, and a pre-determined shot list, Jake Szymanski, director Presents jury duty: company reviewfaced an unusual challenge: a lead actor who didn’t know he was filming a TV show.
Anthony Norman, this season’s mediocre hero, thought he was working as a temp running a resort for a small hot sauce company, and Szymanski spoke of the joy the entire crew felt watching him give an impassioned speech in the show’s finale to prevent the fictional company from being sold to a conglomerate he believes is aiming to destroy it.
“Honestly, the minute Anthony walked in the door, we said, ‘We’ve done it.’ It almost didn’t matter what happened. “The goal has been completed,” the manager said. THRScott Feinberg. “He’s going there. He’s going there to stop the deal. He’s completed his hero’s journey. This is the moment we all celebrated.”
“And Anthony gives a speech that no one could write, right? Because he brought so much of himself and his humanity into that moment,” Szymanski added. “He goes from the big comedy, at the top of the hill with the guy eating crab legs, to saying, ‘Yes, stop the deal.’ We’re all watching her cry, and it’s like a real human moment, like the drama that’s happening in the boardroom.”
And to round out the day of programming celebrating some of the strongest directorial work eligible for this year’s Emmys, director Stephen Kay also stopped by for a conversation about Landmandirector Georgie Banks-Davies entered the second season of the series Night managerColin Hanks joined producers Jennifer Candy Sullivan and Shane Reed in a conversation about their documentary. John Candy: I love me.
