Evans’ show making waves in Hollywood
British TV creator hasn’t met ‘Staged’ stars in real life
Speaking with Simon Evans on Zoom, it is difficult not to wonder when Michael Sheen, David Tennant or Judi Dench is going to drop in and yell at you.
Never mind that Evans has never met Sheen or Tennant, at least not in real life. (He has met Dench.) For more than a year, “real life” has been a memory; life has been conducted to a large extent over Zoom, and as co-creator, writer and co-star of “Staged,” a BBC One comedy shot entirely on laptops and other personal devices, Evans is a maestro of Zoom.
“Staged,” available in the U.S. on Hulu, is arguably the most successful series to emerge directly from the pandemic and one of the best examples of creative lemonade-making in a long while: If life forces a theater director and a bunch of high-profile actors into lockdown, make a show about a theater director attempting to wrangle theater rehearsal from a pair of high-profile actors. Then in the second season, take it to Hollywood.
The premise of the show, which is scooping up awards in Britain, is simple: Having been scheduled to direct Tennant and Sheen in a play that is indefinitely postponed by the lockdown, Evans attempts to begin rehearsals via Zoom.
The reality it reflects is a bit more complicated.
Evans really is a British director who was supposed to have a pretty big year in 2020: He was scheduled to direct a play and his first feature film, though neither involved Tennant or Sheen. When both were derailed by the lockdown, Evans and the film’s producer, Phin Glynn, wanted to keep working on something that would keep their names “out there.”
“We tossed a number of terrible ideas around,” Evans says. “I was in lockdown with my sister (Lucy Eaton), who is an actor, and I said to Phin, ‘Is there something I could do with me as a director trying to keep rehearsals of a play going?’ Because I had heard of other actors and directors doing the Zoom thing to keep things going. He liked the idea.”
They decided it would have to be two famous actors and a rather hapless director trying to get through what at the time everyone believed would be a few months of isolation.
“We had seen a few things that had been done already during the pandemic, that were very worthy, very serious, and I thought that is not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be very ironic, if it wasn’t too soon for that.”
Glynn had worked with Tennant, so he took this one-sentence idea to him. Tennant had recently co-starred with Sheen in “Good Omens,” and Evans says, they were “secretly hoping he would want to take it to Michael, just because the two of them have such great chemistry.”
Both men signed on, and Evans began sketching out a script.
“Originally, Lucy was going to be the director, but we realized that they just couldn’t be as mean to her, but that they could be horrible to me.” So Evans became the director, and Eaton, his sister, who in the midst of her own personal crisis, comes home to find that her brother has moved into her house.
Tennant and Sheen are each married to actors, Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundburg respectively, which meant the story could be broadened to include the issues faced by three households during the lockdown. So with a sextet of characters, Evans writing, Glynn producing and Alex Baranowski composing, “we decided let’s just make it. If we hate it, we’ll just lump it in a drawer and never speak of it again. But we liked it, so we showed it to the BBC, and they liked it, and we were off to the races.”
Audiences liked it too, so much that the show got a second season, which recently arrived on Hulu.
Both seasons consist of eight episodes that run about 20 minutes each — and every minute is, astonishingly enough, DIY television.
“David had a ring light but that was the only ‘tech’ we had,” Evans says. “We did it all on laptops — we had to download some software that runs behind on Zoom to record better quality. We had phones recording sound and a few scenes. My sister’s fiance had a drone, not a really good professional one but good enough to shoot outside scenes of me cycling.”
“My sister’s fiance had a drone” are not usually words associated with award-winning television, but, Evans says, “that was it. There was nothing else. It was very fly-by-the-seat-of-ourpants.” Working with the BBC offered access to archival footage, and Evans had a friend who was a professional DP who would go out into London with his phone.
He also had a few connections (cough, Judi Dench), and the collective desire within the acting community to somehow keep working. “Everyone was in the same boat, no one could do anything, so asking them was actually the easiest thing.”
Including Samuel L. Jackson. “We needed someone who could demolish David and Michael, and someone said, ‘Let’s get Samuel Jackson.’ I said, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ but he said yes.”
Most of the series focuses on Sheen and Tennant’s highly dramatic and very co-dependent battles with lockdown. Though Evans drew from the pair’s friendship as well as reallife lockdown situations, it is very much a scripted series.
“I wanted viewers to feel like they’d clicked on a link and somehow accidentally got into a call with David and Michael, and during the first season, I would be writing, editing and filming concurrently, so while it was very tightly scripted, I was writing about two people I was spending a lot of time with.”
Evans succeeded so well that many people believed the show was either improvisation or reality.
In a deft twist, the second season of “Staged” presents the first season of “Staged” as a television show. And one so successful that Hollywood wants an American version, which will involve Evans and everyone else except Tennant and Sheen. They are not considered well-known enough in the U.S. to continue starring as themselves.
The success of the first season drew the attention and ardor of a panoply of A-list actors, including Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ewan McGregor and Cate Blanchett, who show up with hilarious regularity throughout season two.
While Evans is not announcing any more seasons of “Staged,” he is not discounting the possibility. “There’s not yet an idea for making more, and everyone is getting busier. But we’ve talked about everyone’s movements in the future. So we’ll see; everyone’s really touched with how it’s been received.”
“I talk to David and Michael and Georgia pretty often,” he adds, “but I am really hoping to actually meet them. In person. At some point.”