But she is so loyal through all the seasons. Would she really have fired him, though?
I don’t know. I’m going to ask her. I can’t believe I haven’t asked her this, but I keep thinking, “How much longer could you have gone with Billy as your partner/manager with his focus being the way it is?” Yeah, she’s such a people pleaser. She probably would have, but we tried the therapy, and we gave it the good old college try, and Billy’s just not interested in anything more than Billy.
I mean, that is one of the few moments I do think that Billy wanted to do the therapy for himself. I don’t know if Valerie wanted to do therapy.
Billy wanted to do the therapy because he saw it as an opportunity to sell a TV show where cameras would be on him. I mean, talk about a moment that has just ripped from season one of “The Comeback.” After all these years, we’re going to start all over again now with a character like Billy Stanton, who’s now going to do almost anything to just chase a little bit of a spotlight.
I do feel like I run into people, whether they are writers, who are actors, who get this bug and then decide that they need that spotlight. Whether it’s through a podcast, social media, or whatever. And it is sometimes startling. Is that just inherent to what the entertainment industry is? Can you just not escape it? By the way, big philosophical question there.
Dan Bucatinsky:
No, I know. I wonder if it is two things happening simultaneously. I mean, I think it is a convergence of many things. Our planet is a very scary place right now, and our lack of control…Look, in this business, as somebody who’s been doing it for 30 years, wearing lots of different hats, the inability to control whether somebody is going to buy something, air something, program it, program it on the right night, let you do more than one season? These are things that we’ve been battling forever. So, we have very little control. And so one of the things that you grab onto anytime you can is control. And I talk about this a lot. I talk about the notion of being a producer or anybody on this planet – the controllable variables versus the uncontrollable variables. You have to always be aware of and accept the uncontrollable variables. But what that does then is it makes you double down on the controllable ones. And where it becomes tricky is where you believe you have control over things you don’t. And one of the things that’s happened now is because our business is shrinking, and yet opportunities to express ourselves have doubled with YouTube, with Substack, with Facebook, with Instagram, with TikTok, you name it. There is an infinite number of ways in which you can put your face, your words, or your name out there. You can self-publish your own book. You can be the star of your own story in a way now that you couldn’t 20 years ago. And so I think people are grasping at the comfort of eyes on them to try to envelop them in some kind of security that doesn’t come from the outside world because it’s a scary place. So, I think people are looking for reassurance. And I certainly fall prey to that. I’m on Instagram all the time, and I’m writing, and we’re all looking for validation in one way or another. And sadly, the narcissistic journey that our business feeds is getting more so.
Totally agree. I know this is the last season, but in your own mind, Billy is a Hollywood lifer. He survived this industry for a long time. Where do you think he is in five to 10 years?
I don’t think he’s sitting at the fashion shows anymore. I think Billy will continue to chase opportunities for himself that put him front and center. I think the desire, when he admits to Valerie as this fascinator is falling down his face, that he is a star, that he’s been a star inside his whole life, and now he finally wants to give that voice. I think he’ll be chasing that voice for the next decade. I believe that Billy, like the Valerie of 20 years ago, is going to be right behind her, trying to sell a reality show, and being in multiple reality shows. I mean, I could totally see him getting his real estate license and trying to talk his way onto “Million Dollar Listing.” In a way, Valerie was his north star for 20 years, and you’re making me think of this just now, but I really do believe that his devotion to Valerie and getting Valerie work and putting her in the spotlight and then seeing her win the Emmy and being there that night has made her sort of the north star for him. I believe that Billy’s going to want to find a husband like Mark and find a reality show and cameras that are willing to follow him in his pursuits and chase the spotlight just like she did.
I see that 100%. I do want to ask, and I’m sure that this is a question that every interviewer has asked you, but out of all of Billy’s outfits this season, is there one you enjoyed the most?
All Tom Brown. They lent me, I think, five outfits. I wore five outfits. The one that when I missed the table read, which was like little Little Lord Fauntleroy. The little shorts outfit. And then I was wearing shorts and boots and a sweater for the 50 over 50, and then a skirt to the meeting, and then another skirt. Yeah, I wore five outfits, and Tom Browne in LA was very cooperative. It was fun to wear that stuff. I mean, I own now one of the sweaters that I wore in the show, and I wear it a lot, and I love it. I really collaborated with [costume designers] Audrey Fisher and Tom Broecker in the making of that Billy red carpet look. We went through many incarnations. I have the fittings to show the different versions of it that we thought we would go. Trying to be masculine and feminine at the same time was really important so that it would not just seem like Billy’s in drag. We knew that the notion of a sort of tuxedo top, but a corset and leather pants, and it was so fun to put together, and I was so invested in that look, and I loved wearing those seven-inch platform heels. So I have to say that was the most fun.
Did Billy do his own makeup in that scene, or did he just find a bad makeup artist who literally was like, I’m going to …
I love these questions that take place off-camera. We did makeup tests, and Michael had a really great visual that he wanted to chase. You know, the all-male “Swan Lake” from Matthew Bourne? The way the men were in that ballet was this gorgeous meld of feminine and masculine, which was sort of our inspiration. And so the makeup on those guys was also our inspiration. What’s the app where you can pay 60 bucks and somebody shows up at your house and does your makeup? That’s what I think, Billy did.
The final scene with Valerie doing the interview is utterly brilliant in my opinion. What do you think Michael, Lisa, and the show were trying to say about maybe the future of television entertainment and all of it in that context?
It was the last thing we shot of the series on purpose. There are a couple of things about it that I found incredibly poignant. One of them is this moment where Valerie is saying to Jane, “I’ve been here all along. I’ve been here all along.” It gets me choked up when I think about it. Valerie was who she was from the day we met her. We were like, “Oh, it’s so cringe. It’s so uncomfortable. She’s so humiliated.” She wasn’t. She didn’t feel it. She was a woman working in our industry for many, many years, even when we first met her. And she had a husband at home, and a house in Brentwood, and a stepdaughter, and she was just fine. She was making her health insurance every year. She wasn’t someone who was going to die without this, and just loved it so much that she just wanted to keep in it. And we imposed on her our feelings of discomfort, what it would feel like for us if we were in that situation. But when Valerie finally answers, she’s almost speaking to all of us in the audience, “I was never humiliated. You have to sign up to be humiliated, and I never did.” And Jane has been chasing a story to try to expose something since day one. She feels that the universe needs to see something important and something nefarious and something dark and something that will crack open. And sure, we need our documentary filmmakers to pull back the curtain on something. But I think Valerie is saying the curtain’s been open the whole time. The show has been on the whole time. You don’t need to open the curtain on Valerie Cherish. I’ve been here the whole time. So when she says those words, “Why don’t you tell the story of Valerie Cherish? You’ve been telling the wrong story.” Oh my God, it’s so beautiful because really what she’s saying is like, “I’ve been here all along. You didn’t have to look anywhere else.” And second, there is a spirit of that character that is about being able to pivot, being able to bounce back, being able to decide to be happy. We can choose to be disappointed or not. Our reaction to the slings and arrows that are thrown our way. It’s going to be hard, and we’re going to get kicked. And the only option we have if we really want to keep going is to get up. And she has an unbelievable ability to do that.
And there’s a calm maturity and confidence to Valerie in the last three minutes of the series that’s, I think, meant to not only inspire others, but also to leave people like, “Oh, I’ve been fine all along, and you didn’t have to worry about me.” And now that things are changing and life’s changing and technology’s changing, and people are going to try to take our jobs away. And it’s happened since the Industrial Revolution. There have been changes in the way the workforce is going to have to deal with the realities of advancement. We’re going to have to make a decision. Are we going to let it beat us, or are we just going to learn to pivot and work with it? And I think it’s one of the things that this whole AI episode, so many people said to me, “It’s such a scary season.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s scary.” But you think it wasn’t scary in the 50s? You think it wasn’t scary in the 70s? Don’t you think it was scary in the 1800s? The history of our nation and certainly of humanity has been f**king scary. And what are we doing? We get back up. It’s the only choice we have. And Valerie is the perfect embodiment of it.
“The Comeback” is available on HBO Max
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