Billionaire heiress, Molly Novak, has everything she ever wanted: a happy marriage, a cushy lifestyle, and not a single care in the world. That is until she doesn’t. Her life hits a screeching halt after she finds out that her long-time husband had been cheating on her. A post-divorce Molly, while rich, is nevertheless left in emotional dire straits, until an important phone call changes everything. Investing time and effort into an overlooked charity, Molly finds purpose in life once again and sets out on a path to self-discovery. In this Goggler exclusive, we speak to series creator Alan Yang (Master of None, Tigertail) about how he crafted the portrayal of billionaires in Loot.
Umapagan Ampikaipakan: I recently watched WeCrashed on Apple TV Plus and it made me think about what would happen if Rebecca Newman were on her own. What would she be like if she left Adam and was a billionaire in her own right? Was that on your mind when you were writing this? How challenging was coming up with incredibly rich people who are also likable? And I ask because in the public sphere, billionaires don’t necessarily come off as so.
Alan Yang: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s a fine, fine line. We’re trying to thread that needle. It’s not like we’re saying, “hey, love this billionaire.” In this specific instance, this is not a person who built this empire and stepped on a bunch of people along the way to get there. She was married to someone, and yes, she’s complicit in some ways, but we felt like this was an opening, and a way to talk about, and to show, a character who has the potential for seeing how unequal the world is.
I think that was sort of the basis of what we were trying to do. I think even by the end of this first season, there are elements of the character that are likable and funny, primarily because it’s Maya Rudolph, and because she has that charisma. But we’re also trying to show glimmers of change within her and just the realization that she is recognizing something about her life and the world, and the existence she’s lived. Something’s going on there.
UA: Which might seem obvious to us…
AY: A lot of it seems obvious to us, but for someone who’s been living in that bubble for so long, I think there was something interesting about it for us to show her interact with quote-unquote “normal” people and have her talk to people who live lives like we do and just have her interact with them.
Can that enact any sort of change in her life? And if we’re lucky enough to get future seasons, there’s no way one person, even if they’re a billionaire, can change the entire world. But we want to show a window into that sort of growing awareness and what that means for society in general. I know that sounds highfalutin, but we’ll get there, hopefully.
UA: I was also really excited to see that you guys got to use “The One” as Molly Novak’s home. Can you talk to me about how you got permission and how you ended up using the house?
AY: It was the greatest thing. I think it was one of the greatest production things that happened to this show. We had to find Molly’s house and we got to tour Los Angeles and see a bunch of beautiful homes. But our line producer and our location person, Chris Lieber and J.J. Levine, they said there’s this house we got to show you. And we’re almost afraid to show you, but it is truly where a billionaire would live.
And so we walked to “The One” which is this 100,000 square foot house that was put on the market for $500 million. And we walked out and were just like, “Oh my God, this is it!” And it is the craziest house. Any picture you’ve seen does not do justice to how crazy it is. It has a nightclub, it has five pools, it has a juice bar with 20 seats. For some reason. I don’t know why you need 20 seats for a juice bar. It’s the wildest place you’ve ever seen. And I always say that I was impressed by it and disgusted by it at the same time.
And so that is what I think people feel about billionaires sometimes. So it felt like it really reflected things we wanted to say about the show in the place where Molly starts at the beginning. Yeah, it was such a coup to get that location.
AY: But just a little Easter egg. The house is so big that we didn’t even shoot all of it. Like there’s 90% of the house you didn’t see, and because it’s so big, we used it for other locations in the show. We’ll see if people pick up on where that is. But there’s parts of The One that we used to shoot for all their other houses and stuff. And by the way, there’s a scene where Maya’s crying and eating candy in a room that is just specifically a room for candy. The candy room. That room already existed there. We did not believe that it was already there. We just filled it with candy. So that was that. That room was specifically a candy room outside of the movie theater. That’s in the house.
UA: I want that room. I was watching that, and I screamed out to my wife that we need a candy room in our house. Speaking of which, given that none of us has that kind of money, how did you go about imagining that world? Was it just a matter of pushing everything up to 15? Was it just about going nuts?
AY: That’s exactly it. And our production team really helped a lot too. And so in the writing, and in the producing, and shooting of the show, you would typically take a rich person thing like a private jet and then be like, “Well, you know what? She would have a jet that’s three times that size.” So we would look at private jets. We’d go to the private jet hangar, we’d look at private jets and be like, “You know what? We need this to be so big. We need it to be bigger than Logan Roy’s jet. It’s like this is a 737 which is essentially a passenger plane.”
And so we would take whatever seemed like a rich person thing, and like you said, turn it from 10 to 15. And you really have that luxury because we made this character not just a billionaire, but someone who is on the upper upper echelon, who’s one of the richest people in the world.
And by the way, a lot of this is fantasy, right? People don’t really know what their lives are like. I’ve never been to any of these guys’ houses, so it’s all a little bit of speculation. I’m sure they vary, but it was fun to imagine and fun to collaborate with our production crew on how to make this world come to life.
UA: Thank you. I’m still waiting for that next season of Master of None, Alan.
AY: Maybe. Maybe we’ll get one. We’re talking.
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