The surprises in “Only Murders in the Building” Season 4 continued in Tuesday’s episode as Paul Rudd made a stunning return that left Charles, Mabel and Oliver wondering if Ben Glenroy came back from the dead (again).
Rudd turns out to instead be Glen Stubbins, Glenroy’s Irish stunt double, who the trio meet while following a lead at Concussions, a bar frequented by murder victim Sazz Pataki.
“I love Paul Rudd and Paul Rudd loves being on the show and we’re doing a season about stunt doubles. We had a season last season where Ben Glenroy died, and who was Ben Glenroy’s stunt double is not an unfathomable question. And we have dopplegängers all throughout the season,” showrunner John Hoffman told TheWrap. “It just like like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s how we bring him back!’ All of that paralleling with Charles and Sazz felt sweet and right, and a beautiful opportunity for Paul to come back.
“And there’s a lot going on with that character beyond this episode,” Hoffman added. “There’s more to come.”
When Sazz’s stunt doubles are unable to mourn her due to her missing body, Charles steps in for his friend in a full circle moment, in which he lies across a pool table and has beer bottles smashed against his head. Hoffman revealed that the funeral scene pitch came from writers’ assistant Alex Bigelow.
“She’s wicked funny and smart and made a good, strong pitch presentation of this entire idea that the way he can feel like he’s honoring Sazz is to give his own body after realizing the ways in which she battered hers for him all of her life. So there was an emotional hook to it,” Hoffman said. “But then it just seemed hysterically funny. I like to ride the line with the show of heartbreaking and hilarious simultaneously as much as I can.”
Martin had to go through multiple takes of having a bottle smashed into his head, which Hoffman says the 79-year-old was “game for.”
“We have about 40 reactions of Steve looking like he just got hit on the head with a bottle,” he said. “So it was a matter of picking and choosing and limiting ourselves with how many reactions we could give of him there.”
Hoffman also revealed that the portion of Stubbins’ eulogy where he says Steve-O called him Lucky Charms boy was an ad-lib that Rudd came up with during filming.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute, what do you want to say?’ And he just said, ‘Well, what if I did this?,” Hoffman said. “I said, ‘We’ll do that.’ And then we ended up cutting the other thing we did.”
While Charles steps in for Sazz, Oliver (Martin Short) stresses over his long-distance relationship with Loretta Durkin (Meryl Streep). As a way to keep tabs on her, he creates a finsta persona named Ronnie.
“There’s always the innate challenge of carrying on a relationship from afar, and it just felt so right to have Oliver deep in his obsession over what is Loretta doing over there in California, she’s becoming a mega star in his mind and the paranoia and various jealousies that could come up just felt great to explore,” Hoffman said. “Our show has always been about that intergenerational conflict with technology in certain ways, but Oliver feels so proud of the fact that he figured out how to do a finsta, and it just delighted me.”
While Short had to ask a few questions about the intricacies of finsta, Hoffman said he “jumped all board.”
“In the first moment when he’s talking about Ronnie from Joliet, Illinois, he got in the elevator, and he just started speaking as he would normally speak. And I just came over to him and I said, ‘I was thinking Ronnie might have a slight accent.’ Now, I said this, knowing this whole episode is filled with a big time accent going on, and it’s not Ronnie from Illinois,” Hoffman said. “He said, ‘Oh my God, that opened everything up.’ It was very sweet and a great moment for me to give one little note and watch the spark of brilliance for Marty Short.”
New episodes of “Only Murders in the Building“ drop Tuesdays on Hulu
