Bill Lawrence, the showrunner on the hit Apple TV+ series Shrinking, has shared what it’s like to write lines for veteran actor Harrison Ford.
Harrison Ford got his first Emmy nomination for this season; do you feel like you learned anything about how to write for him from the first season?
One of the cheat sheets to successful streaming television is, at least for me, working with actors with whom I’ve worked before. Like Jason or my wife [Christa Miller]. We didn’t know Harrison personally, so we originally wrote him as a very serious guy. As he grew to trust us, we realized he was game for anything, and that freed us up to write stuff for him that we normally wouldn’t. I also noticed how vulnerable and emotional he was, that he made stuff sad even when we didn’t put that in the script. Like the Thanksgiving dinner speech in the season-two finale; he could have delivered that matter-of-fact, and it would have worked. We shot everyone’s reactions to him simultaneously, and a lot of those emotional reactions were real. It was a super poignant moment — and I’m a hard, cynical dude, so I got surprised by it.
I’m surprised to hear you describe yourself as such.
I mean that in terms of, I don’t really get surprised on TV sets anymore. It’s why I love having young writers around, because they still get that wow factor. I’m the luckiest guy on the planet, and I’m super grateful to get to do this, but one of the things that comes from getting your 10,000 hours in something is you don’t expect to be surprised. When you are, it’s revelatory.
How hard was it, logistically, to pull together that scene — with your entire cast in one room at the same time?
It can be self-indulgent to direct your own show, but one of the reasons I directed that one is I knew I was the only one who was allowed to ask certain things of the cast for that. It was a giant room of thespians, but the whole scene was in service to Harrison’s speech. And it’s a nightmare for a crew to be like, “We’re going to shoot eight pages at one location and there are 17 actors.” But it was worth it.
Shrinking seasons 1 & 2 are now streaming on Apple TV+.
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