Note: This story contains spoilers from “Only Murders in the Building” Season 5, Episode 1-3.
Before the cast of “Only Murders in the Building” get their scripts for the finale of each season, executive producer John Hoffman will take whoever is the next murder victim aside to tell them in advance. But for Teddy Coluca, who portrays beloved Arconia doorman Lester, that didn’t happen at the end of Season 4.
“We’ve all become family and Teddy Coluca is top of that list. I just adore that guy. He’s been the heart and soul of the show in many ways. So I fully intended before he got that finale script last season to have that talk with him,” Hoffman told TheWrap. “Somehow I missed that the scripts had gone out. It was only a day after and I was in the hallway where we shoot. I think I was in the kitchen getting a bagel and Teddy comes around the corner and says ‘John, last night I read Episode 10.’ I was like, “Teddy, no you didn’t.’
“He said, ‘I burst into tears at the end of it’,” Hoffman continued. “I said, ‘Oh, my god, I’m so sorry. I meant to talk to you about this.’ And he said, ‘No, no, it’s OK. It’s all right, because will it mean that I’m going to be back?’ And I was like, ‘Yes and I can’t wait, you’re never out’.”
Though he didn’t get the chance to have the conversation with Coluca before he learned the news, Hoffman said their talks about Lester afterward were very helpful in crafting the themes and direction for the season.
“Wait until you see Teddy and everyone else,” Hoffman said. “I hope it gives him great solace because he deserves it and he really killed it this season.”
Read on for the rest of TheWrap’s conversation unpacking the first three episodes of Season 5.
How did you decide Season 5 would be about the mob and the criminal underbelly of New York City?
It always starts for me with with let’s look at who we’ve killed. Who is the victim here and what themes and worlds does that open up? So with Lester, our beloved doorman, it’s a very storied job and very particular to big cities and a center of these pre-war apartment buildings in New York City. And if you’ve spent more than a few decades as he has in that position, he’s seen a lot.
He’s the protector and the connector to that building and to the tenants and certainly a doorman who’s gone through four murders recently in his building, he’s got to be thinking a lot of things about the way he’s done the job. But it’s also an opportunity to then look at, well what kind of nefarious things has he dealt with beyond murder, what power sources around New York City have come and gone and been trying to wield their own little ways.
And then you’ve got the world we’re living in now and how does that match up? We looked at the headlines of New York and what’s happening right now in the city but also across the country and shifts in our home. What does it say about us and what are we going to fight for? Those are the questions that felt really interesting springing off of this.
Talk to me about creating the flashback for Season 5, Episode 2.
I directed that episode and that was a very complicated episode to do. I wanted to really have it feel like the experience of a doorman. It can be almost a little disorienting through the years. You see some old faces, but they’re literally just passing through as they would. So that was the goal there, but also to ground ourselves in an understanding of what Lester was enduring through those years and open ourselves to the history of what was happening with what might be just underneath his feet in in the building itself.
And Bobby Cannavale as Nicky Caccimelio and Emory Cohen in that episode playing young Lester were a dream to work with. I just love the two actors so much.
We ultimately find out that Nicky Caccimelio will be another victim this season. What was the decision-making behind killing him off?
It’s a twist obviously, but we made a very clear decision to say at the beginning, ‘Oh God, this could be the mob we’re heading toward.’ And it makes me very nervous to head toward the mob. I don’t even know what the mob looks like these days. So we say a version of what the mob might look like today, which is hopefully a bit funny.
All of that felt fun, but then you really have to think like, ‘Well, if we’re going to pivot away from doing a more traditional mob story, we can.’ We have it already because we know that some of it factors into our ultimate mystery around Lester. We’re covering the old mob in that way, but they’re more in flashbacks so that we could focus on the new mob and look at those billionaires who are very present in the story.
But I really wanted to honor [Nicky Caccimelio] and I also like the idea that there was another victim suddenly in the season that they weren’t prepared for, and more importantly, they’d never met him. So they had to out of whole cloth, put together what we dealing with here. Who is this and what are our assumptions? Maybe we can’t rely on those. That all felt new and interesting as well.
You had the opportunity to film at the same house used for the Corleone’s mansion in “The Godfather.” How did that opportunity come about?
It was one of those odd things. Our producer Jess Rosenthal saw an old “for sale” ad or an article about it. And I thought, “What the hell is it doing in Staten Island?” But that was also intriguing to me and we reached out and there was this lovely family living in the house and they were absolutely great. They were welcoming and had a daughter who was a baker in Manhattan, there were all these baked goods for everybody.
There were aspects of this amazing home that were so interesting to me that we actually shot not just outside of the home but inside the home as well. So that scene [with Sofia’s sons] is really taking place there. Our brilliant production design team worked wonders to make that room feel much more dark. We were doing a big homage with the lighting and Kyle Wullschleger and his team set up a beautiful reenactment and tip of the hat to Francis Ford Coppola.
There was also an in ground pool that was a gift from the original production of “The Godfather” to the owners of the home for letting them shoot the wedding on an extended lot next door. I wanted to do more in that pool but we had to get out of there in one day.
You mentioned the billionaire trio earlier, who Oliver refers to as “the new mob” at the end of Episode 3. Which real-life billionaires are Bash Steed, Jay Pflug and Camila White inspired by?
Exactly the ones you’re thinking and then probably a few more. We did a lot of research on any of those AI, tech-involved guys, plus longevity guys. All of those were people that we went down rabbit holes of inspiration. And then put it through the filter of a character that felt most in our show and most fun to look at. And then when we married them with the brilliant actors that came along to play them, it was a matter of further honing it towards their strengths and things we hadn’t seen them do hopefully before.
[Renee Zellweger, Christoph Waltz and Logan Lerman] were absolutely game for everything and created their own universes, as billionaires tend to do themselves. You could probably point to many different versions of Camila White in either Los Angeles or New York through the years, but I wanted it to be our own singular thing that harkens to that. And Jay Pflug is someone who is sitting with frustrations about his family name and all of that money, and what do I do, how do I do good and all of that. Getting caught in the muck of that was interesting to me and they were just fantastic.
You’ve made it to Season 5, which can sometimes be rare for shows in the streaming era. What do you think is the secret to the show’s success?
For me, I just feel tremendously enthusiastic about the show. I think I’m surprised by the more limitless nature of a premise that feels very limited when you first hear it. But being able to examine it in each season and twist it into some other realm has been really fruitful and exciting.
I’ll keep going until they say enough. It’s the television industry and you never know. Hopefully we continue to be a presence that people like and want to keep revisiting. The other part of it is, of course, creative. Each season I have to ask myself, and I do, ‘Am I sparked in this way that excites me?’
I would not have predicted this. We all want a hit, we all want something that does well. That’s beautiful about this. But creatively it’s challenging. So I have to really look at it each season and go, ‘Is there enough? Is this fresh and different enough than other things we’ve done? Are we still plumbing more from these characters and more from this situation?’
Obviously, it’s a show about murders in the building, but it’s not really. It’s a show about how one death can reverberate and make you ask questions about your own life, and make you ask questions about the right and wrongs of defending somebody and finding out the truth and getting to the truth. It brings up all the questions that I would want to write about anyway.
If I can change each season and pivot to a different lens, a different aperture in looking at something else and I’m still with these characters but I’m progressing them, and we’re making new fodder either through a location or a new victim that gives us a whole new world to walk into, that is my barometer for continuing and boy, I feel great about it right now. I hope you like [Season 5]. But when we get to the end, there’s some twists that shake it up again in ways that excite.
“Only Murders in the Building” releases new episodes Tuesdays on Hulu.
