Filming the Peacock sci-fi series “Teacup,” in which residents of a farm in rural Georgia must band together to survive after a series of bizarre events, meant a lot of night shoots and frequent use of gas masks.
Neither aspect was easy, but the cast — including Scott Speedman, Yvonne Strahovski, Rob Morgan and Chaske Spencer — found ways to cope. Speedman, who plays father-of-two James Chenoweth, said that “your brain turns off” at some point when filming goes all night.
Morgan, perhaps best known as Officer Powell on “Stranger Things,” is McNab, the mysterious man who shows up at the Chenoweths’ farm in a gas mask and warns them not to cross a blue line he’s just painted around their property.
Although we don’t see the actor’s face for most of the series, the striking image of him in a gas mask has become a compelling poster for the thriller, which is based on the novel “Stinger” by Robert R. McCammon.
“When you get introduced to McNab in the mask, that’s a very eerie and chilly scene. And that poster’s kind of iconic,” Spencer shared.
Here’s more of TheWrap’s conversation with the cast about getting through those night shoots and acting from behind a mask:
TheWrap: It looks like there were a lot of night shoots on this.
Speedman: For me, it felt like a lot. The first two or three weeks, I was trying to learn how to ride a horse, too. So, after we were done shooting, I would drive home, and it was like an hour to my house from the location, and then I’d sleep for a couple hours and drive another two hours to learn how to ride a horse and go to work. So it was quite intense for me.
Does the disorientation help you get into a character as a guy who’s dealing with a bizarre situation?
SS: I love shooting at night in that way. First of all, it really bonds everybody. It’s a weird experience. But also, your brain turns off. At some point, you stop questioning everything, and it gets weirder and stranger and more fun in a certain way, and you’re able to dive into the circumstances and do it.
Strahovski: The rules for a night shoot are never, never ask the time and never go sit in the dark corner, because at some point, once you hit four o’clock in the morning, you’re dying. So you need to keep going, keep the spirit alive. But yes, your brain eventually does turn off and you just have to keep going.
Morgan: When it’s four night shoots back to back to back, you have to know how to rest for those kinds of shoots; when to get up, when to eat, when to go to sleep. Because, literally, you could work from the sun being up, sun going down, to the sun coming back up, then you go home, do what you got to do, to come right back. It’s a skill to know how to work night shoot stuff. And I think my prior experiences on other shows where they had heavy night shoots taught me that.
Spencer: I hate night shoots. It throws my sleeping [schedule] off, especially with long night shoots. I am already an insomniac, so you put me in a night shoot, I might not sleep for days. I don’t like them.
How difficult is it to act while wearing a gas mask?
RM: That mask carried a lot of weight. Because even when the camera wasn’t on me and it was on the actors opposite me, I would still have it on, just so they can get that feeling of what they’re looking at and responding to. So even when the camera wasn’t on me, I’d still have the mask on.
It just became a part of my character. And it was like, “I’ll walk around in it and just keep it on [between takes].”
YS: There are big challenges in wearing a gas mask. You can’t rely on your [facial] expressions when you’re shooting something like that, so it has to be limited. But I did find myself trying to physicalize more with the body, make it more three dimensional, because that’s really all you have. But then, thankfully, the surrounding scenes really pay off in other ways.
I do own a gas mask only because when I did ADR with some additional dialog recording, I had to do some of it through gas masks. So I took it home, to add to the non-existing kit that I have for survival.
Rob, did you also get to take your mask home?
RM: Well, maybe I need to put in a request to get mine.
The first two episodes of “Teacup” are now streaming on Peacock. Two additional episodes will drop every Thursday through Halloween.
