‘The Franchise’ Is So Meta That Background Actors Got Mistaken for Crew Members
“The Franchise” may not be about a healthy, well-functioning film set, but it did require the appearance of a functional set. The show has a rich cast of beleaguered heroes — Daniel Brühl’s artsy, anxious director, Himesh Patel’s too-exhausted-to-despair first AD, Lolly’s Adefope’s snarky yet still chipper third AD, Jessica Hynes’ gently grating script supervisor, and Aya Cash’s producer with the studio’s ax (or, if you prefer, its staff of maximum potency) aimed squarely at her neck. But the giant stages making the fictional superhero epic, “Tecto: The Eye of the Storm,” needed to be filled with fictional crew members, too.
This is where crowd second assistant director Adam Foster and his team came in and, over just four weeks, prepped a background cast full of fake costume, hair, and makeup teams, grips, drivers, and craft services. Foster built a background “Tecto” crew of around 75 actors — about two-thirds of whom would be milling around the “Tecto” stages at any one time — all outfitted with fake radios, phones, and lanyards so that they could look either busy or idle, as the on-set morale demanded.
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It is a mark of just how successful Foster and his team were that there was a bit of bleed between the background “crew” and the actual “The Franchise” crew. “We had many occasions where extras got confused, as real crew members would go up to extras asking for help,” Foster told IndieWire. “I think on the first day of filming, as we were filming some of the unit base scenes, an extra got approached about the power going out in one of the trailers and if he could come in and fix it.”
The extra in question, of course, had to beg off doing anything other than acting, but Foster said that momentary confusion was a funny experience every time it happened while making the HBO series.
Foster credits his crowd third AD, Callum Dawson, with helping sort the background players so that it would seem obvious at a glance what department they’d belong to on the “Tecto” set. But the work was more specific than simply stereotyping bigger, older guys as grips and skinnier kids as PAs.
“Most jobs, when I start casting, I do lots of research into the era or the period [for the project]. But on this, everything I knew was there in front of us. So we had fun with the casting, because we were finding characters in the crowd that we knew had faces that look or resemble people we actually knew,” Foster said. “There’s a lot of hidden jokes to us, my team and the costume and hair and makeup, [because] there are people [in the background] that are based on people that we know.”
There were also some instances where using the actual “The Franchise” crew in specific sequences made sense. While sometimes the folks manning craft services were extras with barista training, for lunch sequences when more cooking was needed, Foster brought in real ramen and Turkish food trucks to prep their food on camera.
“They were real because they were going to use woks and all sorts,” Foster said. “Then we used other SFX crew with woks and some other things, so there were real people and crew members and then we had the extras as well. It was essentially three layers of mixed people.”
Authenticity guided Foster and his team in casting and organizing the crowds for “The Franchise,” but some of the most fun was bringing that groundedness to the more absurd challenges on the “Tecto” set. For instance, the writers came up with the idea to have a pigeon infestation on one of the stages and tasked Foster the day before shooting with finding someone who could read as a pigeon wrangler, armed with an (extremely humane!) laser-pointer to oust the birds.
“I remember those conversations for the Pigeon Man, like, ‘Would this person be wearing a hi-vis jacket?’ Would they be in some sort of gear?’ Our department, hair, makeup, costume, we all had to work quite quickly to do it,” Foster said. “But we knew [what to do] because we have that set experience; we have that world in front of us. So it was the best job and story and environment to recreate quickly, because we were part of it.”
New episodes of “The Franchise” premiere on HBO Sundays at 10 p.m. ET through the season finale November 24.
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