HBO's Avenue 5, the newest show by Armando Iannucci (Veep), is one of the darkest, silliest, and most cutting comedies on television. Set in a future where space travel has allowed for luxury star cruise lines, a series of mistakes on the maiden voyage of one such vessel puts it radically off-course -- and inadvertently sets the stage for a mess of chaos both on the station and back on Earth.
Scrambling to contain the problems is the nominal authority on the ship. Characters like Hugh Laurie's exhausted "captain" Ryan, Josh Gad's shortsighted billionaire Judd, Lenora Crichlow's sardonic engineer Billie, Zach Woods' friendly nihilistic head of customer relations Matt, and Nikki Amuka-Bird's overwhelmed head of mission control Rav do their best to keep a very difficult situation from escalating any further -- and often fail in that task. Ahead of Avenue 5's return to HBO on Oct. 10, Woods and Crichlow sat down with CBR to discuss how the sci-fi/comedy became particularly prescient of recent events. The pair dove into the surprising shades they discovered with their characters in the new season and the importance of developing rapport within the comedy to really make it land.
CBR: The first season of Avenue 5 came out shortly before the lockdowns for the Pandemic went into effect -- and as a result, the show about the affluent guests on a luxury spaceship being locked down together started to feel a lot more prescient and very relevant.
Zach Woods: Well, I would like to issue a request to the world... Let's stop living up to the expectations set by a fatalistic space comedy. Let's take our cues off something like This is Us. We'll just have a bunch of emo moments of human catharsis instead of mimicking Lord of the Flies.
Lenora Crichlow: Like what you said, I think all of us recognize the relevancy of [Avenue 5]. For me, at least, suddenly, the very, very absurd world of Avenue 5 did not feel as absurd. People willingly jumping to their death or denying what's clearly in front of them -- suddenly, that didn't feel as far-fetched. So, I think it just took on a whole new sort of poignancy, and I think all of us were aware of that. For me, at least, coming out of lockdown and going into a show like you [find] with this cast was like heaven, to be honest. It just felt so lovely to be back working with people I really enjoy and then just processing the awful time we've all been through and hearing everybody's ways of coping and people who've been sick and people who had lost people.
There was something really powerful about coming back to a show or coming back to a group of people that I had already worked with. In between the seasons, I shot another show that we shut down while lockdown happened. Even just that... Even though I wasn't on that show for very long, because it was such a big thing it really bonded us together. So having done Season 1 already and gotten to love and care about everyone, to see them again in Season 2 and hear how they had experienced all that time was really lovely -- not to mention having fun shooting the show.
Zach, you've spoken in the past about the collaborative nature of working with Armando Iannucci on shows like this and Veep. With so many storylines and balls in the air this season, did that element of the show change?
Woods: That's a great question. I think we haven't actually seen the episodes, so it's hard to know what made it in. I wouldn't say in the experience of production there was less improv, but it's possible that what would actually make it into the show has less improv. I think the feeling of the second season was so freewheeling, to the extent that you'd sometimes even know it'd be like... I think Armando keeps this kind of like zoological chaos in his head. Sometimes you're just sort of a hired gun, and you're doing a scene, but you're not even exactly [sure] what episode it's gonna end up in. I think all of us kept playing around a lot. How much of that ended up being usable is a question for another day.
Lenora, for all intents and purposes, Billie is the show's ultimate straight man and bounces off of so many different comic tenors depending on the scene or character she's interacting with. How did you approach that element of her comic interplay in the show?
Crichlow: I think she has a very... She would treat everyone the same. I think if it served a purpose, I think whenever you see [Billie] switching up her tact, it's because it's just that it's a tactical move. So she has... I remember in Season 2, she's got to sort of partner up with Judd, and so the way she treats him and appeases him -- and it's not easy for her to ever stroke someone's ego -- but if there's an ulterior motive, she can get on with it. So I think it's agenda-driven, how she treats people. What's nice is she finds a rhythm with Ryan's character eventually, where they actually end up just being themselves, and their partnership can kind of find its way through to whatever needs to get done. Otherwise, I think she's just very practical. "What do I need from you?"
Woods: One of the production drivers was this guy, who drove me to work, named Lee [Pellett], who was also an actor. He told me the story about someone who had worked on a production and had played a really scary character, and how afterward he got all these kind of plaudits for how scary it was as his character. He said, "You can't really play scary. You can't play powerful. It's all in the reaction shots. So it's my co-stars who made me scary. It's my co-stars who made me powerful in their reaction to me. They're the authors of the character more so than I am."
I think in scenes where I think we all take different turns, sometimes each of us is a straight man. Sometimes Billie's the funny one. Sometimes Ryan is the straight man. I think that idea is really right on the money. The reaction shot sells the comedy as much, if not more, because that tells the audience where to kind of land in a way... If it is a situation where Billie is sort of anchoring reality, she's also anchoring and facilitating the comedy by reacting with a particular and unique brand of peak consternation.
Looking back at when you first got the scripts for the season versus where they've ended up, what would you say surprised you the most this season?
Woods: It's my favorite Mike Tyson quote: "Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face." I think that that applies to production, too. Hey, I think this Season 2, for Matt, it probably doesn't materialize too much in the first four episodes, but his kind of rage... The first season, in the way I conceived of it, Matt was this sort of friendly nihilist who is humanistic and nothing else. As the story continued into the second season, there was a kind of righteous -- well, I don't even know if it was righteous, just a kind of fury that emerges that hopefully doesn't contradict his humanism but supplements and complicates it in some way. I think that was surprising to me.
Crichlow: I think for me, just what a team player Billie becomes -- I think in the beginning, she's just so intolerant of everybody and their incompetence. I think there's part of her that wishes she could just be one woman on an island by herself and run the world. It would be all a lot smoother, but she really does become a team player. There's a fancy dress party at some point on the ship, and I was really surprised to see that she participated. She actually really bought into her costume. I was like, "Huh." So there is this side of her who actually, I think, starts to really invest in the people of the ship, not just the mission of getting home, which is lovely and really nice for me to play. That's both surprised me and kind of made me smile because I think she does it despite herself. I don't think she necessarily wants to jump in the pool and splash around, but she does.
Avenue 5 returns to HBO on Oct. 10.