New streaming series has it all ... and that includes a Pittsburgh toilet
“Angsty teen”? Sophia Lillis giggled at her character’s description. Although she is far from it, Lillis delivers the angst in a big way.
“You kind of have to play the role,” she said with a big, sunny smile that belied her character in Netflix’s new series “I Am Not Okay With This.”
Based on Charles Forsman’s somber graphic novel of the same name, protagonist Sydney is a young high school student fretting about the usual anxieties.
She’s not popular, and she feels like an adolescent freak. She seems to have lost her best friend, Dina, to the cool clique and jerk of a boyfriend, Brad.
Things aren’t great at home, either. Her father died a year ago and her mother is working two jobs trying to keep the family afloat financially. On top of this, some very strange things are happening to Sydney.
“What I wanted to do was find a way to take all of the elements of somebody on a journey and kind of being confused by lots of different things in their life,” said
Jonathan Entwistle, who cowrote and directed the seven-episode series.
Entwistle won a Peabody Award last year for another Forsman adaptation on Netflix, “The End of the F***ing World.”
He was sitting in a makeshift conference room on a stormy July afternoon north of Pittsburgh, where a sprawling complex in Marshall enveloped the indoors set. In addition to Sydney’s bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, basement — there’s a Pittsburgh toilet! — and the bedroom of her friend, Stanley, on site was a huge re-creation of the top of a fire tower. Maya Sigel was the series’ production designer.
“I Am Not Okay With This” streams the entire series Wednesday. It might be described as “Carrie” in a John Hughes picture, but that’s just scratching the surface. The series is by turns funny as well as a portrait of a family in anguish, but it’s also a mystery as Syd contemplates her own sanity.
Whereas “The End of the F***ing World” is very British and features two lead characters who act as if they’re numb to the pains of the world (and possibly to each other) “IANOWT” is very American.
“I’m just making a more irreverent ‘Stranger Things’ and a slightly more sanitized ‘End of F***ing World’ and meet them in the middle, using superpowers,” said Entwistle, leaning back in his chair and fiddling with the toothpick in the corner of his mouth.
A nodding homage to “End of the F***ing” world is evident on the kitchen table at Syd’s house. There lies a mock-up of USA Today. On the front page is a banner headline declaring young killers are on the loose, with a picture of that series’ star characters, James and Alyssa.
“I saw that!” Lillis said. “That was really cool.”
“That [joke] is for us,” Entwistle added.
There are sight cues everywhere that harken to the iconic teen films of the late John Hughes. In one scene, Stanley and Syd sit facing each other, heads bent forward a la the final scene in “Sixteen Candles.” Students are sent to detention with a huffy principal lording over them as in “The Breakfast Club.”
In one amusing scene that was shot the day of the press visit, actor Wyatt Oleff, who plays Syd’s neighbor Stanley, dances around his room in a Hugh Hefner-style bathrobe and mixes a cocktail to Prefab Sprout’s “The King of Rock ’n’ Roll.” It could be right out of the Anthony Michael Hall or Jon Cryer playbook.
“It’s a ‘getting-ready’ montage. I won’t say for what,” Oleff said afterward. The actor would celebrate his 16th birthday that weekend, saying — with what seemed to be honesty — that he was psyched to be in Pittsburgh for it.
He and Lillis, 18, were both in the “It” franchise, as the child versions of Stan and Beverly. They were in scenes together, but their characters never interacted. “IANOWT” was a chance to have fun and show their onscreen chemistry.
“I just get to play off her looking at me like I’m an idiot, which is just how it normally is, so it’s perfect,” he said, laughing. Both said they’ve had a lot of fun on set.
Many of the series’ exteriors were shot around Western Pennsylvania, especially in Brownsville, Fayette County. Other locations include the Mars Lanes bowling alley in Mars and the Beaver Valley Bowl in Rochester, Beaver County. Fiddle’s Diner in Brownsville gets a shoutout, and the Westinghouse Arts Academy is the local high school.
In small ways, it’s also a Yinzer’s world. Sydney has a familiar orange carton of Turner Dairy iced tea in the cafeteria, as well as a loaf of Mancini’s bread at the grocery.
Although Syd wears a Steelers Super Bowl T-shirt and two guys wear Pens and a Pitt T-shirt at a party, Entwistle and the production design team made a conscious effort not to place the action in any particular era.
“Every time you see someone you could say, ‘Oh, they could be around 20 years ago, but they could also be around today,” said costume designer Bex Crofton-Atkins.
“I was looking through all these old yearbooks, 1990s from Pittsburgh, and using vintage fabrics in a bunch of styles and colors … the lettermen’s jackets don’t have patches on them; they’re simple.”
There were rooms full of outfits in brown, beige and more brown, stacks of shoes.
“I know every thrift store in Western Pennsylvania,” she said, clacking hangers against each other as she sorted through one rack. “No H&M allowed in here.”
She made up a few custom designs for Stanley to wear, including an Enya Tshirt under a powder blue tuxedo. “And [the jacket] is double-breasted,” a reporter noted.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Oleff deadpanned.
Sofia Bryant, who plays Dina, said, “There’s such a timelessness with
Pittsburgh. Coming from New York, I don’t get a lot of super-cool vintage vibes all the time that are not premade.”
Horror and humanity
Lillis has been the go-to young actress of late for believable horror. Not only was she in the “It” movies, but also she recently starred in “Gretel & Hansel.” Kathleen Rose Perkins (“Episodes,” “You’re the Worst”) plays Maggie, Sydney’s exhausted mom.
Although she is no one’s mother and Lillis can’t actually pick up a bowling ball by telekinesis, their performances are grounded in a human connection. They fight — a lot.
“This show is more ‘Lady Bird’ than ‘X-Men,’” Perkins said. “[But] Maggie really represents the home and the home rock for Sydney to come back to.”
Lillis, she said, has a charm that had Perkins feeling bad about having to yell at her.
“She’s just a sweet, quiet kind person, and that took me a while to get used to, because in this business you’re either an extrovert or an introvert. I’m an introvert who has learned to be slightly extroverted. I think she has learned to be extroverted, and I really appreciate that about her, because she takes her time getting to know you.”
In Forsman’s graphic novel, Sydney can’t handle the dark side of what she believes is beyond mental illness and destroys herself. That is not part of the Netflix series.
“Chuck wrote a story about mental illness and essentially suicide, and what we did was take all of the things that drive the character there and expanded the world … and built out the backstory of how she got there [from] day one,” Entwistle said, describing “IANOWT” as “more like a superhero show done differently.”
Christy Hall is an executive producer and writer on the series, and Shawn Levy is a “Stranger Things” production crossover.
Sydney is no Eleven from “Stranger Things,” but Lillis said she could relate: “Toward the end of the day it’s just about a girl, a coming-of-age story, just trying to get to know yourself and accept yourself.”