Allison Miller interview: ‘Angelyne’ showrunner
“I think it’s very timely,” reflects showrunner Allison Miller about “Angelyne” in our recent webchat. She adds, “We like our celebrities to be very open and give us glimpses into their home life. We expect to see their kids, what they look like in the morning and where they grocery shop. Maybe we’ve lost a little bit of the mystery. We don’t necessarily need to know everything about everybody. Maybe part of the fun is not knowing and imagine that they have this life that’s not like ours. But most of them are people just drinking coffee and trying to get through the day.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
The Peacock limited series stars Emmy Rossum and tells the story of the real life celebrity from the 1980s who rose to prominence through appearing on billboards in Los Angeles. It uses talking heads to help tell the story and explores a Hollywood Reporter article on the celebrity from 2017.
Miller was co-creator and writer on the series. She explains, “As a writer I love biopics, I love to watch them, but they’re hard. I realized very quickly that they’re impossible to really portray a person with all their complexities. We’re not a collection of facts. What the article in the show kind of proves is that she’s not those things, she’s so much more. People are the space between those sentences. I think that the show ended up being about the failure of biopics and how we never can really know someone else’s story. We landed on leaving it in her hands to tell us who she is.”
The producer reveals, “My degree’s in poetry. When we were talking about the last episode of the season, which is very lyric and is very fluid, Emmy would sometimes say, ‘I feel like if I step on one part of the script another part kind of raises up.’ She had to walk lightly on the script because it’s a bit of a fever dream. You’re meant to roll through it and let it wash over you. I hope that at the end you will think if it’s worth knowing things about other people that they don’t want us to know.”
