Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch on ‘Roar,’ Their Intimacy Coordinator for Ducks and the “Phantom Limb” of ‘GLOW’

Over Roar‘s eight standalone episodes, Nicole Kidman literally devours old photographs to connect with her past, Issa Rae is ignored to the point of real invisibility by white film executives and Merritt Wever, unlucky in love, slides into a toxic relationship with a verbally abusive duck.

An often bizarre exploration of the female experience through metaphor and magical realism, Roar runs the gamut from comedy to straight-up horror. For co-creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, who adapted the material from Cecelia Ahern’s short story collection of the same name, this mixed bag of tone proved to be the ideal next step after making three (almost four) seasons of GLOW. The pair recently spoke with THR about their new project, which indeed included an intimacy coordinator for Wever and her mallard co-star, as well as their take, two years later, on GLOW’s COVID-era cancellation.

Something that struck me watching Roar is how little magical realism is actually on TV. Any thoughts on why that is — and was that part of the appeal?

Carly Mensch It was something really different and new for us. We’re grounded, naturalistic writers. But we wanted to push ourselves. We were writing this concurrent with GLOW, and it felt like such a different brain space. I’m sure it’s a really complicated answer, as to why you don’t see more of it, but it may have to do with how difficult it is to pull it off. You need the resources and scale of film production.

Liz Flahive It’s hard to make a TV show, no matter what. But here we’re adding the technical dance of what we can do practically and marrying that with visual effects. We were really keen to do as much as possible, practically, but that puts the onus on the production in a way that is very intense. And we did eight stories. So, as we were trying to solve how the bite marks were going to work, we were also diving into a Western production and training seven ducks to interact with Merritt Wever.

Mensch We were asking this same question you are. Why aren’t there more stories like this? I think when we read the book, that literary quality was exciting to us. It felt like almost like a dare. Part of what drew us to it was there wasn’t much of a template.

I’m glad you brought up the ducks. Liz, that episode was your directorial debut. Had no one mentioned that you never work with children or animals?

Flahive Go big or go home, I guess? [Laughs.] I was not anticipating directing this episode. I thought it would be somebody else’s problem, and I was super excited to see how they solved it. Then it became my problem. I thought there was no way we were actually going to use real ducks.  But we did not use one CG duck in this episode. There was one duck that was really good at listening. There was one duck that was really good at walking. There was one duck that was great for the crazy sex scene. They all had different skills, and we just had to figure out which duck was going to play which scene.

Mensch We never treated that episode like a stunt. Yes, Liz had to figure out how to make seven ducks hit marks and where to put the camera — but so much of our intention of that episode was to examine something pretty serious: an emotionally toxic, abusive relationship. Every conversation we had about the intention of scenes was as grounded as if we were telling it between two actors. And we were. We had Justin Kirk, who plays the duck, on set with us.

Flahive What draws people in is maybe Merritt Wever dating a duck, but we were always aware that we were telling this really delicate story. I think that shows, especially during the sex scene. We even had an intimacy coordinator, treating it like any other sex scene that we would have on any show, making sure the actors were comfortable… even making the ducks were comfortable.

Another thing that occurred to me, watching Cynthia Erivo’s episode, The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on Her Skin, is that body horror is most often inflicted on female characters. Any takes?

Flahive I would love to see a male body horror story!

Mensch Would we consider like The Fly a male body horror story?

Yes.

Mensch The episode starts off with childbirth, which is just a messy and complicated body story in real life. We were taking a lot of inspiration from being moms. Giving birth as a body experience. Having to feed the baby — a very bodily experience. Liz has a daughter who literally pinches her skin when she misses her. Um, so we were drawing on kind of like the embodied experience of being a mom of young kids while working and how it feels, but I don’t at all think it’s the exclusive of women to have psychological horrors experienced through the body.

Tell me a little bit about casting. You got some great names on board.

Mensch We wrote all the scripts ahead of time and went through a list of people that we loved for different roles. We knew we wanted to try to go after some people we had worked with already. We also knew we needed some heavy-hitters in these roles because you do have to jump into these stories and get on the ride right away. And that takes a certain level of skill on the acting side to just immediately care, immediately buy in, immediately connect. We assumed people would be like, “No that’s too strange.” But they really connected with it.

How much did you talk about the order? It’s streaming and one could pick up anywhere you like, but people are conditioned to start at beginnings — and you did lead with racism and dementia.

Mensch We didn’t want to hide the fact that we’re taking on the big things. [Laughs.] What’s funny about an anthology is that people will kind of pick and choose where they want to start and kind of subvert how Apple has laid them out. The order was something that we decided on collaboratively with the producers and with Apple. But we didn’t want to hide the ball. These maybe have a light fluff veneer, but there’s some ambitious, thematic work in there.

Flahive Depending on who you talk to in this whole group of people making the show, there are many different orders this could run in. I don’t think there’s one way to do it — which is a different place for us to be, in terms of presenting work.

Betty Gilpin, who really broke out with GLOW, has an episode. Do you take some pride in being the ones who gave her big break?

Flahive The lucky thing about being a playwright in New York, which is how we both started, is that you have this community of weirdos. You get hooked into actors before they launch. Betty was somebody who was the workshop of my second play. Then she came into Nurse Jackie, and Carly and I worked with her there. Sometimes you just get lucky and see people before the world gets to see them. We always knew how much Betty had to give. And because she is a weirdo trapped inside the body of a bombshell, people aren’t always looking at her the way we are — which is she’s a strange monster chameleon who can do absolutely anything. One of the joys of making GLOW was getting to sort of kick her out into the stratosphere. It would’ve happened with or without us. We’re just glad we got to be first to that party.

Mensch It’s just cool to have an idea like “Oh, there’s a woman who’s going to be sitting on a shelf for a large poor of this episode.” When we started to think about the character as Betty, it cracked the idea open for us. She is a special bird.

Last Roar question: What was Nicole Kidman actually eating in The Woman Who Ate Photographs?

Flahive She was eating rice paper and marzipan.

This is your first project since Netflix canceled GLOW before you finished the final season. People in the industry still reference the surprise of that decision, not only because it was a well-liked show, but because I think it’s when a lot of people lost trust in Netflix as being purely in it for the creative. Two years later, how do you feel about what went down?

Flahive We knew stuff about GLOW would come up when we’re talking about another show. We were canceled during the height of a pandemic, when there were so many horrible losses in the world. We were incredibly sad not to get to make that final season in a pretty profound way. But things were just so much bigger than that. They always are. But, at that moment, there was just so much loss and change.

There are many times when the place you start making a show changes as you continue to make the show. I think it’s fair to say that kind of happened at Netflix with us. Also, initially, I think we had a really great creative time there. We got to do what we wanted with that show and make it exactly as we intended to make it. That’s something a lot of people making their first show don’t get to say. It’s a different place now. And I don’t think we’re the only people to have felt that change. It’s weird. I still think about those characters. I still think about that season every once in a while. Like my brain tricks me into thinking, in a weird grief way, that I’m still gonna get to make it. We both have that weird phantom limb feeling about it.

Mensch It’s an unfinished, unsettled feeling. There was definitely no closure. Two years later, we’re in the acceptance phase. It happened. But there’s also this strange dissonance because we got very far into making that season. We wrote most of it. We filmed two episodes. Sometimes, when you’re making something, you forget that the world hasn’t seen it. It feels so real. I feel like it exists. And then I remember it’s just a private version that never made it — like a stillbirth.

Liz and I sometimes take solace in the fact that it’s the most underdog move ever to get canceled in the same fashion as the show that you’re based on. The original GLOW, in the eighties, got ripped from the airwaves ahead of its time. We’re at least in good company.