OHSOGRAY attended the recent Television Critics Association presentations, where the cast and producers of NBC’s new show, Game of Silence, participated in a Q&A. The premise of the show is described as:
“Five best friends have a dark secret they thought was buried 25 years ago, but they soon discover that you can’t hide your past forever. Jackson Brooks is a successful attorney who seems to have it all. He’s engaged to his boss, Marina, and he’s on the fast track to becoming partner at his firm, but his world is turned upside down when his long-lost childhood friends unexpectedly reappear after 25 years. Jackson, Gil Harris, Shawn Polk and Boots always stuck together, like brothers. They spent their boyhood summers in the small town of Dalton, Texas, swimming in the quarry, shooting bottle rockets and doing everything they could to mine the fun out of small-town life. But their idyllic world turned chaotic one fateful summer afternoon when a well-intentioned and heroic attempt to save their friend Jessie from her alcoholic mother ultimately cost the 13-year-old boys nine months at Quitman Youth Detention Facility, where their lives were changed forever.”
What was the genesis of “Game of Silence”?
David Hudgins: I had a meeting about a year and a half ago with Carol Mendelsohn and Julie Weitz just to talk about creative things. They told me they had this show that I needed to watch, and they teased me a little bit with it. They didn’t tell me what it was completely about. I said I was interested. I went home. I got two DVDs of something called “Suskunlar.” It was 90 minutes long, Turkish subtitles. I said, “Am I really…really?” I turned it on, and I started watching, and I fell in love with this amazing show that had incredible heart called “Suskunlar.” That’s where this show came from.
Julie Weitz: It was a huge hit in Turkey, and then it was sent all over the world. Because of its themes, it just became a show that everybody could relate to, especially Carol and I. Carol actually….
Carol Mendelsohn: I tried to watch it in Turkish because there were only four episodes that were translated, and eventually because I mean, stories are stories, but eventually we found someone that could translate for us. It is a great show. David was inspired by it. That’s why we’re all here today.
Is this intended to be a limited series with a beginning, middle and end?
David Hudgins: […] It goes to the way people watch TV these days, my own kids included. I always wanted the show to have a beginning and a middle and an end, not only in the pilot, but in the first season. So we’re building toward, at the end of season 1, the culmination of the stories with these characters where you get a result and you get a payoff. And yet, because I love it and I want it to go on forever, there’s also an ending to the show that I think people will really find shocking and enjoyable. So there’s a bit of a payoff for the audience, but there’s also the way the ending is structured, it just opens up the world into a whole other level and a whole other season.
Do you have other means of keeping these guys together forever?
David Hudgins: Absolutely. I want these guys to be together.
Michael Raymond-James: Along with that, though, is a lot of times the answers that you seek oftentimes lead to more questions. We’re dealing with a series of questions in this first season. If there were to be a second season, those answers that we get this season are going to lead to more questions down the road.
Larenz Tate: Also, because we haven’t seen each for, like, 25 years, there’s a lot that’s happened in that time. There’s a lot of stories that our execs and our writers can pull from to give us some real juicy stuff to do.
Michael Raymond-James: Hopefully, we don’t scare you.
Will the totality of what the boys endured at Quitman, will that be covered in detail in Season 1?
David Hudgins: Yes, it will. A lot happened at Quitman while they were there. Not all of it is revealed in the pilot. You learn a lot about it, a lot more about it as the season goes on. One of my favorite things about the show is, look, each one of these characters has a story. Each one of these characters has a secret. In most cases it’s about how they’re trying to survive and get through and get by and get on with their lives. Part of that is the reveal, as we go throughout the season, about what really happened to those kids while they were there and. For them not only for them, but for Jesse and for Claire van der Boom, who plays Dave’s wife in the show, being on the outside looking in as they’re figuring out what happened to these guys, it just makes for really, really juicy storytelling.
David Lyons: I think it’s also important to note that we’re not dredging grief and this kind of murky emotion all the time. What I found fascinating about David’s script and is absolutely implicit throughout the season is the relationship between the characters in here, the love, the loyalty, this kind of search for redemption. But it’s also transcending the darker parts of their childhood. So as much as we do go back there, we also use as a launching point to kind of feed the hope and feed the journey. I just don’t want anyone to think that you’re going to go in for a turgid sort of dark walk down.
Larenz Tate: There’s a great deal of balance, because with heartache and the pain that is sort of set up in the very beginning with the children’s past when their childhood is robbed. We have a lot of redeeming qualities about them, and there’s a lot of love, and there’s a lot of…
David Lyons: Lot of love.
Larenz Tate: …emotion that keeps them connected as friends. They become more than friends. They’re very much so like a family. That is a sort of through line that they remind each other, when they show up in the time of need, in a time of crisis, that they have to remain together as a unit. That’s really important, and it’s relatable because I’m sure audiences will be able to connect with that because we have people that are in our lives that we may not speak to all the time, but when they show up…
Michael Raymond-James: Why don’t you answer my texts? Why don’t you answer my texts? Like seven times this morning.
Larenz Tate: Because I had…
Michael Raymond-James: “What are you going to wear?” “What are you going to wear?”
Larenz Tate: I had it on airplane mode.
Michael Raymond-James: “What are you wearing?”
Larenz Tate: That’s the only reason I didn’t return your texts.
Conor O’Farrell: The other thing I’d like to say about it, too, that I think is exciting is that with trauma like this, there’s no simple solutions. There’s no definitive closing moments. You think you’ve closed a door, and then three other doors open up because anybody who is familiar with trauma, you spend a lifetime dealing with trauma and how it affects your relationships. There’s a lot of meat to this to continue after the first season, mainly because we’re dealing with a traumatic incident that happened.
Bre Blair: Watching all of our different coping mechanisms. Each and every one of us has a different coping mechanism, and I think that’s going to be really interesting to watch.
David Lyons: Yeah. No one inhabits the same emotional space in the show. That’s what I found fascinating. There’s a lot of gray in a lot of the characters, but we all deal with things as humans in different ways. Very much represented by all the people on this stage is the way they deal with their past, some like this guy’s character is kind of the glue and the really buoyant, beautiful soul in the group. Gil’s got some other stuff going on. I’ve got other stuff going on. Demetrius up there, he’s got a few things going on.
Bre Blair: I think we’ve all got a few things going on.
Larenz Tate: More than one thing we got going on.
Bre Blair: Yeah. It’s complicated. It’s rich.
Carol Mendelsohn: People can experience can all be at Quitman. They can experience what it’s like to be incarcerated, and yet there are things that even they didn’t know about each other that happened and transpired at the same time. So when you talk about secrets, it’s not just the audience being led into the secrets. There is a lot that each character never shared until they meet again as adults.
Michael Raymond-James: The audience is going to see a lot of secrets revealed to characters for the very first time, and you can kind of latch onto that journey and how that lands. That happens a lot.
Bre Blair: Yeah, we’re discovering for the first time as characters.
Did you ever have a chance to interact with the young actors playing your younger selves?
Michael Raymond-James: Absolutely.
Larenz Tate: On the pilot Bre was she’s always the rallying person in our group. She rallies the troops. I guess when the boy when they were doing the scenes when they were riding the bikes and hanging out in more of a jovial time, she made sure that we came down to check the kids out. They were awesome. I thought the casting was amazing.
David Lyons: It was incredible. Those kids got along so well together as well. It was bizarre, these kind of like worlds that we created. We get along everyone hears that, but we actually did get along so well. These guys are hanging out at the hotel and so on, as were we, in the bar. They were in the in the playroom. But…
Larenz Tate: We didn’t invite them to the bar.
David Lyons: It had a beautiful symbiotic sort of aspect to it.
Julie Weitz: These guys are being humble because it was their day off, and they were exhausted. They needed to be there for those kids, and those kids were so excited to see them. So they all rallied and came to the set on a day they didn’t even need to be there.
Larenz Tate: Yeah, we spent some time with them.
Conor O’Farrell: They weren’t excited to see me, for some reason.
Julie Weitz: Only you.
Conor O’Farrell: They weren’t excited.
Larenz Tate: It was good to be able to spend some time with them to see what their dynamic was so when we do our thing, we kind of have some more nuances to add to the performances.
For David Hudgins, you talked about the Turkish series being the main inspiration for this. Did “Sleepers” or “Mystic River” figure into your thinking?
David Hudgins: No. It was “Suskunlar.” That show blew me away. It was like a 90 minute film. Look, I made some choices creatively in adapting the series to make this unique, to make it my own. I fleshed out the world. I brought in new characters. There’s a whole level of conspiracy going on at a higher level that these guys start to find out involving the warden. I also wanted to and I tried to be very conscious of grounding and making human all the characters on both sides, which includes Demetrius’s character, Terry. I would love for you to talk a little bit about that because the idea was I didn’t want it just to be good versus bad. I wanted it to be more nuanced. I wanted it to be more real in that sense. “Suskunlar” did a good job of that. Candidly, in the pilot of “Suskunlar” the main character went all the way to the dark side in the pilot. I thought wouldn’t it be, hopefully, a lot more interesting if our main character Dave you see him go through the struggle over the course of a very long time because he’s got this huge secret, this huge thing coming back from his past into his life. He’s got sort of the perfect life going on now and I thought it would be very interesting dramatically to see him struggle with that. When I pitched the show, one of the things you always kind of try to have your little go to. One of my go to’s was an old saying that I’m sure a lot of you have probably heard that goes like this: it says, “We all have two wolves inside of us, one evil and one good, and the one that wins is the one we feed.” So that was my little sound bite for my people responded to that. I think that’s the journey that David’s character goes through. You’re constantly wondering how far is this guy willing to go to get justice for what happened to him? I’m sorry I blew by it, because Demetrius, I just talk a little bit about Terry.
Demetrius Grosse: An actor always wants to play a role that’s provocative, that imbues a risk and that maybe is a little dangerous, and that’s who Terry Bosch is. While he’s sophisticated and very intelligent, here is a guy who will stop at nothing to secure his own kind of justice in this world. I was blessed with this opportunity because I love roles that challenge and that challenge the audience. Terry is a guy who is, maybe ostensibly, your antagonist. He’s very dimensional. He’s one of those characters that while he’s a villain on the forefront, you see he has elements to his persona that make him very relatable. That’s a hat tip to you and Carol and Julie and the whole creative team in terms of the way these characters have. They kind of touch a lot of different demographics. What our audiences will see is that they can plug into all of these storylines for different reasons. They’re very dimensional and dynamic people that we’re going to explore.
Larenz Tate: Yeah. It’s a testimony to the show itself. You have a guy, like Terry, who, like you said, he seems to be this big, bad guy, but he has a lot of human qualities about him, and the show itself has a great deal of humanity. Each character possesses that humanity that we, as actors, always want to get up and go to work to find something that’s real, that poses a challenge for us, something that we can really embody and own. We always talk about owning certain things that each character will do and sort of come into our own, that humanity is displayed across the board. So there’s, again, balance.
Carol Mendelsohn: Deidre, did you want to talk about your character, because it’s a question of survival.
Deidre Henry: You know, Liz, when I first read the character, there was something about the fact that she was felt that she was formidable. I felt that she had principle. What I was very fortunate to discover is that she’s also complicated, and she’s conflicted. I think many of us come up against decisions many of us come up against situations that make us decide who we’re going to be and how we’re going to sleep with ourselves at night. That’s what happens with her, and I think just the opportunity to dig into a character that is complicated is something that every actor wants to dive into.
Larenz Tate: Is Detective Liz good or bad? Let’s get to the real deal. Is she good or bad?
Deidre Henry: Detective Liz is. She just is. She’s a woman who is striving to maintain her integrity.
Demetrius Grosse: I think what is going to be really exciting for our audience is to see how all these different characters kind of flow together. It’s very Shakespearean in a sense how in the beginning of the first act, you see all these people from different walks of life. And then by Act 3, Act 4, you see how they all just incestuously interwoven in each other’s lives, and they’re bedfellows in the most expected ways. That’s an element to the writing on the show that’s going to be really fun for audience.
Julie Weitz: David told a story, too, about how the friends that you have when you’re young stay with you for the rest of your life. You may not see them for many years, and when you come back together, it’s almost like you go back to the age you were when you were friends. I think that is so clearly wrought in the relationship to these people, including Demetrius’s character. They came together in a very difficult and impressionable time in their lives, and it stayed with them. So when they find each other again 20 some odd years later, you can’t take that away. You can’t take that out of them, and you watch that. People relate to it. We’ve all had a friend from childhood who maybe got us into a little bit of trouble, and yet as we come back as adults, are we still at that place?
How would you describe these guys? Are their friendships real?
Michael Raymond-James: Absolutely. I would argue that they are the most real. They’re the most raw. Friends are relatives you choose for yourself, and these sort of friendships have seeped into the DNA of who they are. They can’t take away their past. They can’t take away that trauma that happened. That’s a bond that will forever hold them together. They have no box to sort of put that in and move forward without the survival instincts of collective group. We each bring something to the table in terms of how we handle it, how we deal with it. Together as a group, it sort of makes a whole.
David Lyons: The group is greater than the sum of its part. Like friendships that you’ve had for 25 years or 30 years, you don’t really know where your own heart ends and theirs begins. They’re so entwined. With these guys, and we’re lucky to have such a cast that gets along so bloody well, that there’s enough said in a look. That’s all that is needed. There’s so much shared history there.
Michael Raymond-James: Which isn’t to say that there isn’t friction, because there is. There is no book on how to deal with it, certainly not that any of these characters are aware of. None of us have gone and gotten therapy to handle all of this. So there is friction, but it’s all in trying to move forward, pick up these pieces collectively.
David Lyons: The same thing that draws them together also repels them because it’s a secret they don’t really want to be dealing with.
David Hudgins: What was fascinating for me and gratifying as a writer and a producer was watching all of these people, and especially these guys, find their characters over the course of the pilot and then as we went on in the season. One of the things we did, which is just part of my process, is I invited all the actors to come into the writers’ room at the beginning of the process just to talk about the character. Sometimes that can be a very awkward thing to do. Everybody’s just sort of sitting there, and these guys engaged immediately, all of them. I think one of the things Michael said that I really took to heart, and we talked about it in the room, is he’s talking about Gil, his character, and he’s like, “I see this guy as a hurricane. You never know if he’s going left or right.”
Michael Raymond-James: Do I sound like that?
David Hudgins: No. But as soon as he said that, it really struck me because that Gil — his unpredictable nature. It’s so watchable, by the way, knowing that, and they all did. You came in and talked about the columns in the basement and there’s certain things that Jackson will allow others in his life to be in on and things that he absolutely will not. So the collaboration for all of these people with their characters I think is what really makes the show watchable. Thinking about Conor playing this character is very challenging, a very sort of slippery guy, and Conor brought a real humanity to this character that times I’m watching, “I’m fucking rooting for him. I’m not supposed to be rooting for him,” and it was that kind of layer and nuance to the character that I’m very appreciative of.
Larenz Tate: As an actor, when you have that on the page and it’s there, to go into the room, which we don’t always get a chance to do, the idea is for us to just sort of flow in and going nonstop. It was kind of spoiled in a way to be able to come in and sit there with you all and kind of get our thoughts, and once again, own these characters. Sister Bre, you was going to say something and I rudely jumped in because, as David Lyons likes to say, I talk too much. I like to talk a lot.
Bre Blair: We love you. I was just saying I think for each of us, while we’re going through different things and obviously coping in different ways, something that you can relate to is that we in whatever decisions you’re making, whether they’re good or bad at the moment, we’re all trying to protect the ones we love, and that kind of completes the bond through us or whether if through your relationship, all of us have that element, and I think it’s watchable. Gives the show a heartbeat.
Carol Mendelsohn: Sorry. Just especially for your character, you were there during the accident. Yet you didn’t go Quitman. So that’s someone that didn’t experience that but still feels that they didn’t what price did you did your character pay for your best friends and brothers going to Quitman?
Bre Blair: There’s so much guilt, and there’s secrets that my character has that are later revealed. She’s in a complicated relationship between two men in her life that she loves, or old love, but that’s complicated because there’s just a huge amount of curiosity there because of the history of friendships, and it’s all kind of…
Larenz Tate: She’s definitely a major part of our dynamic, because before the big accident and secrets that had happened, we were bonded anyway, as young kids.
Michael Raymond-James: Four Musketeers.
Larenz Tate: It was the Four Musketeers, or Five. She definitely represents that, and even in a present day, she still fits right in like a family. Whether she has a relationship with one person or not, that doesn’t matter. The friendship is most that sort of fraternal thing that we all have is what really hits home.