Michael Waldron chats with THR at the Disney Upfronts and shares the challenges he and Glen Powell dealt with in writing 'Chad Powers.' Plus, he talks shooting during a Georgia football game for the finale of the show.
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00:00I feel like everyone's already buzzing about this show.
00:02There's been clips going on on social media of some of the things being shot,
00:06but this is based off a fictional character played by Eli Manning at first or created by him.
00:13So how did these conversations start to now bring this with Glenn Powell on screen?
00:18Glenn and I are great pals. We're both big college football fans.
00:23And this opportunity came to us to adapt this crazy sketch.
00:28And we thought, yeah, this is a really cool chance to make a show set in the world of college football.
00:36And we thought, well, how do you, it'd be sort of insane to try and make a TV show out of this sketch.
00:43And that was exactly what drew us to it.
00:46It was just how insane it seemed to be.
00:49And so, yeah, we had a blast.
00:51How would you describe Glenn as a friend and collaborator?
00:54He's brilliant, so sweet.
00:56And he's a co-creator on this.
00:59He's an incredible actor who got to really stretch himself in this show, playing a dude, playing a dude.
01:07But also just his writing ability.
01:13Yeah, he's too talented.
01:15It's frustrating.
01:16Oh, my gosh, a hard job.
01:18But it is to be able to kind of create this from scratch just based off of the sketch.
01:23What were those conversations like with Eli?
01:26And were there any challenges that you were like, oh, actually, I didn't consider this?
01:29And how is this kind of going to be put up on the screen?
01:33Well, I think the big thing was I said to Glenn when we first started, I said, well, couldn't actually try and do a Mrs. Doubtfire thing in the world of college football because how would you sustain that?
01:45And Glenn said, exactly.
01:48That was exactly the game of the show.
01:51And so how would this guy, Russ Holiday, the character he plays, if he was going to disguise himself and walk onto a team, how would he maintain that over the course of a season?
02:02And so those were the fun sort of almost Breaking Bad-like corners we got to write ourselves into and problems we got to solve in the room.
02:12And you actually got to shoot a couple of scenes during a Georgia game.
02:16What was that like?
02:18That was amazing.
02:18That was during the finale that I directed.
02:22And I went to University of Georgia, and they were amazing partners.
02:27And, yeah, we got to run our guys out there, full team, our cast, our coaches.
02:36And we had about five minutes at halftime, and we got it done.
02:42And we had our ADs with, like, flags directing traffic, and I was hidden with our DP behind the goalpost with a monitor making sure we got what we needed.
02:54So it was really exhilarating.
02:57And what would be your best TZ tagline for what this series is all about?
03:02It's a blast.
03:04Whether you like college football or football or not, I think you're going to have a lot of fun.
03:10And it's probably not what you expect.