“I was soaring with pride and emotion,” she recalls, pointing to Tom Pelphrey’s performance.
“Just amazing.”
“Towards the end of the script I was having a hard time seeing the words.”
Credit: Netflix
And when I went to write it, I honestly just wrote my heart.
I relate to Ben.
It was a real meeting of character, actor and me."
“I absolutely, 100 percent, wrote that monologueforTom Pelphrey.”
“Because there’s so much to memorize and all this stream of consciousness.
I knew that there was something special there.”
But the timing did give Pelphrey the advantage of multiple weeks with the script.
As much as possible I didn’t want any of my mediocre ideas being opposed to what was there.
I’ll tell you right now, never as good as you thought it was!"
“I don’t want to tell the actor what to do before he does it.”
He says that made it all the more easy to “extract the depth of the performance.”
The duo had a short discussion beforehand, with Pelphrey showing what he was thinking.
“The rest was just performance,” he says.
“And allowing the actor to really blossom and take shape, take after take.”
In the end, they’d need only four takes.
“Every single time he ran it he just nailed it,” says the director.
This direction proved crucial when it came to editing.
And the reaction to Pelphrey’s performance was similarly quiet on set at least at first.
But once things were over, Sakharov says the volume jumped up a few decibels.
“We did a standing ovation [for Pelphrey],” he reveals.
“Not only because of how beautifully he performed the scene but how beautifully he performed the entire season.
That man was an absolute showstopper.”
