RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Margo's Got Money Troubles .]
In Margo's Got Money Troubles , 20-year-old Margo Millet ( Elle Fanning ) is struggling with the financial and emotional hardships of raising a baby as a single mother after becoming pregnant by her English professor.
She has some help from her father, Jinx (Nick Offerman), a former pro wrestler and recovering addict, and her mother, Shyanne ( Michelle Pfeiffer ), a former Hooters waitress and now-reluctant grandmother, but both bring added complications. And so, Margo turns to the only solution she can find to support her child: becoming a creator on OnlyFans. Related Stories Beyond the Book How 'My Life With the Walter Boys' Became Netflix's "Unicorn" YA Hit TV More than 50 Dishes Were Created for 'The Bear' Season Four, and 5 Other Fun Facts
The show is based on the book by Rufi Thorpe and was scooped up by A24 after a bidding war, with David E. Kelley coming on as showrunner.
Kelley, who also created series such as Ally McBeal, The Practice, Big Little Lies , spoke with THR about working with his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, getting pulled over while filming and what to expect next season.
The book, and Rufi [Thrope's] writing. The dimension of the characters. They just spoke to me and resonated with me once I finished the book. I think the tonal blend of humor and then, some severity to the stakes, dramatic severity. That's something I've always loved to do in my other projects, and this seemed commensurate with that. You're always looking for something fresh and different, new, and I'd never explored this world before, so when I read it, I was hooked.
I just channel the characters. I know it sounds a little schizophrenic, but they speak to me. I'm never truly able to describe characters with the necessary clarity that I should, but I've always had a pretty good compass of how they would behave in a certain situation or how they would sound. Rufi was very specific in the book, so that was a great jumping-off point. … I know that's not a real answer, and it sounds like I probably should seek out therapy, but there is a fusion between me and the characters when I write.
Did you think of this as a comedy or drama, or somewhere in between?
In between, but more toward the latter. Start with the dramatic through lines. The book was funny. The characters are funny, and the situational things that they find themselves. I felt confident that the humor would reveal itself, but we really didn't want to be funny at the emotional stakes of the piece. So if we were going to air on the dramatic side. I felt that we would find the funny, especially with the actors we had with Nick Offerman and Elle and Michelle.
You and Michelle had only briefly worked together in the past. What was the conversation about working together on this?
Before, the movie world and the TV world were two separate lanes; she was doing well in hers, and I was doing well in mine. And we also just figured, we don't want to bring work home with us, and how can we both be in the same project and avoid bringing work home with us? So we just decided, let's keep those worlds separate. But, I always like to say that my number one job on any series or show is to be the chief guardian of that show. How do you make it the best it can be? And putting that hat on, there was no denying that Michelle was the best person to play Shyanne. So we put that domestic policy on hold and went for the greater good of Margo .
It looked like you were filming some episodes live on the Las Vegas Strip. What was that like?
Vegas doesn't shut down for anybody. They will give you permits to film what you need to film, but they don't stop what they're doing. So we were in casinos, bars and on the Strip. In fact, the scene where Michelle and Elle are riding down the Strip and they stick their heads out of the limo, they actually got pulled over by [real] police. I think Elle and Michelle thought, "Oh, this is a nice touch. They've added police chasing us." But the police were in fact doing their job. You're not allowed to stick your head out of a sunroof while going down the road, [and] they got pulled over. I think they got a warning.
Outside of those scenes, the majority of this is shot in L.A. at a time when there's a production exodus there. What went into that decision?
We try to do that with our company anyway. We're trying to preserve whatever production we can, to the very point you mentioned, that there's just been too much of an exodus, and so that's our mindset going into any project. Is there a way we can shoot in L.A. and keep the business and the work? This particular project, it was organic because it takes place in Fullerton, so it was California in the book, and we kept it so on film.
You're approaching a number of sensitive subjects with this show, but one of them being sex work and people who work for OnlyFans. How did you go about writing about that?
I was terrified of it, and I never would have done it, but Rufi's research on it was so impeccable. So I trusted her. I knew that we needed to be responsible about it. But between Rufi and Elle, because Elle did a lot of research, I felt that we would be responsible. And then Eva Anderson, who was my first lieutenant co-writer, when she came aboard, I said, "Look, you're taking charge of the OnlyFans side of it because it's not a world I know. And I was late '60s at the time. Now I'm 70, but I think you know whoever is meant to write this part of the story, it's probably not a 69-year-old man. So you run with that." And she did.
When you were writing season one, were you thinking there would be a second season?
We wrote season one to have closure at the end because season one was the book, but we always intended to go further should we get that opportunity, and we were lucky to do so. We felt fairly confident that this story had a fertility to it that we could keep going because it's really about Margo's...
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