Glen Powell had to face his fears about the face of Hulu’s Chad Powers as co-creator, executive producer and star, even if that face typically is literally buried under layers of prosthetics.
“I think it’s always good to go into work scared,” Powell, who recently completed filming the sports comedy’s second season, said during Deadline’s Contenders TV panel. “I think you want to go in going like, ‘Wow, this is the worst idea or the best idea?’ And I think Chad Powers was one of those that I go, ‘I’m showing up, I’m putting on a mask and a crazy accent and trying to really ground a premise in a world that there were so many potential pitfalls with this one.’”
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Powell then recalled his first discussions about the series with co-creator/executive producer.
“The greatest ‘first date’ I ever had was with Michael Waldron on Zoom,” he said. “We just kind of talked about the movies that we were drawn to and especially inspirational sports stories, which are rarely made these days. … The idea of a guy who puts on a mask and enters the world of college football … if anybody’s a college football fan here, you know it’s one of the most high-stakes worlds you can possibly enter.”
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“At first it seems pretty different, but like Loki, it is a redemption story,” said Waldron, who was the principal creative force on that Disney+ series. “And I do think probably what drew me to it was a story about the lengths that people will go to — maybe especially men — to just not take accountability, to not say, ‘I’m sorry and I messed up and please forgive me.’ And in some ways it seems easier to just put on prosthetics and become a whole new person. And that was just a really fun jumping-off point.”
Waldron said the show revels in pushing the notion of hiding behind a fabricated persona as far as it can go, “taking that Mrs. Doubtfire plot and interrogating it for real. And what’s the real fallout of something like that? If you do that for real, I think our show kind of seeks to go past the moment in Mrs. Doubtfire when it’s like the whole time we want to see what happens after that.”
Under the mask lies the more interesting journey, the creators agreed.
“The more that Waldron and I really wrote and marinated on what this character was and sort of the heart beneath it, you just sort of uncovered a really human story, something really nuanced,” said Powell. “It was the craziest, weirdest swing we possibly could have done, but it became a very human thing that I just got very excited about as an actor to play and as a writer to write and to kind of assemble a group of actors to make it feel earned and wonderful, which I really feel like we’ve hit the mark.”
He added: “I think it’s universal, oddly enough. Everyone has regrets. Everyone has a moment they would just like to do over. This is watching somebody get that moment and how they deal with it, however flawed the character may be and all of that. But it’s such a unique concept that I think anybody in this audience could probably relate to.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
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