Martin Short’s athleticism was put to the test in Tuesday’s episode of “Only Murders in the Building” as Oliver volunteers to reenact how Sazz Pataki’s killer was able to murder the Brazzos stunt double, clean up the crime scene and bring her down to the incinerator all in 12 minutes.
The sequence sees Short decked out in athletic wear as he races from the window of Dudenoff’s apartment (after an assist down from Mabel and Marshall P. Pope, the screenwriter of the podcast’s Hollywood film portrayed by Jin Ha) to Charles’ apartment. After hilariously sliding down a stair bannister and yelling at a group of leash children for getting in his way, Oliver is confronted by none other than former tennis player John McEnroe, who chases after Short as he runs away screaming. When a roughed-up Short finally arrives back at Charles’ apartment, Mabel informs him its been 38 minutes.
“The John McEnroe homage came at the very 11th hour and I was like, ‘Oh no, we can’t, this is crazy, what?’ But he’s really good friends with Marty. He lives right on the Upper West Side. He said, ‘I’m coming back from Flushing Meadow, actually, when you’re shooting.’ And so we were setting up, and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, he’s five minutes away.’ He was just coming home,” John Hoffman told TheWrap in an interview. “So we just basically threw him into the show because Marty was wearing something that was such an homage and he’s an Upper West sider. So it was a perfect moment.”
Hoffman said there’s tons of footage that was left on the cutting room floor of Short in the activewear beyond the physical comedy.
“He was just in his wheelhouse. It’s always that dance of keeping him as Oliver Putnam through that. But God love him, he’s the funniest man in the world,” Hoffman said. “A great couple of outtakes are the versions of him going down that stair railing and how he did the speed, the screams when he hit the end of it, the variations on falling over the edge of it. It was unbelievable. And then him coming out and tripping over those children on leashes. There were many takes of that, until one of those lovely children started to cry, it was a whole thing. And he was like, ‘Oh no, what have I done?’ And he was so sweet with him, but it was really a day. That whole sequence was just vintage Marty Short.”
As a defeated Charles mourns the timeline he created, Mabel discovers that a boot print left behind at Dudenoff’s apartment matches one of the pictures the trio took at the production office for the film – meaning the killer has infiltrated the ranks of the film.
Once at a photo shoot for the film, Mabel and Charles learn that one of the Brother sisters has the same boot print, raising the possibility that there may be more than one killer. But before they can find where the other Brother sister has disappeared to, gun fire and screams erupt at the shoot before the episode quickly cuts to black.
“The photo shoot was an idea that we’d had in the room for awhile. The idea of the whole season being doubles and creating a sense of confusion that becomes overwhelming at a moment when things get really out of hand, that feels like something we hadn’t really done yet before,” Hoffman said. “It’s been seeds of that all along – how could one person do this? So that felt like a good moment to hit that idea.”
New episodes of ‘Only Murders in the Building’ drop every Tuesday.
