Ryan Murphy & FX Chief John Landgraf On That ‘Grotesquerie’ Twist & Taking Risks In Their 21 Years Of Collaboration

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains major spoilers for Episode 7 of FX‘s Grotesquerie.

Audiences were probably wondering how FX’s Grotesquerie would sustain another four episodes when Niecy Nash’s Lois Tryon had seemingly caught (and killed) the serial killer on the loose.

Well, things take a massive turn in Episode 7 with the revelation that viewers have not known reality up to this point. Instead, the hunt for a serial killer that they’ve watched unfold has been happening in Lois’ head. Her husband, Marshall (Courtney B. Vance) isn’t the one in a coma. She is.

Sister Megan isn’t a squirly nun at all, but rather the new Chief Detective who effectively stole Lois’ job. Lois’ daughter Merritt (Raven Goodwin) is actually a well-educated cancer researcher, and the dreamy nurse Eddie (Travis Kelce) is her husband. At least, he was until he had an affair with Lois prior to her descension into a coma.

And we’ve barely scratched the surface of the truth, teases FX chief John Landgraf, who says “there’s more layers to come” over the remaining three episodes.

He and Grotesquerie creator Ryan Murphy spoke with Deadline about taking such a big swing with the latest project in their 21-year working relationship and the implications of this revelation over the rest of the series. They also explain how they’re pushing new boundaries, and in some ways revisiting their first project Nip/Tuck, with Murphy’s upcoming FX series The Beauty.

DEADLINE: Ryan, how did the idea for this reveal come about, where you’re simultaneously showing the end of Lois’ story in her head and also giving glimpses of what I would assume is reality? And especially, can you talk about that end fight between Lois and Sister Megan as a visualization of Lois emerging from her coma?

RYAN MURPHY: The thing I think that we were really interested in talking about was how the world we’re living in really is a horror show. We were very interested in writing about existential dread and calamitous things that are going around that I think everybody feels helpless about right now. So that’s really what it started off as. I’ve never done anything like this, where we wrote these episodes just to see what it was like. I’d never just done anything quote-unquote ‘on spec.’ When I finished them with Robbie [Baitz] and Joe [Baken], I called up John and I said, ‘I’ve never done this for you in our entire working relationship of 21 years, but I wrote somethingm and I finished almost an entire season — nine of 10 — and I’m sending them all to you.’ He was like, ‘Oh, okay, yes please.’ So he got through like the first three or four, and we had a talk. I’m like, ‘No no. Keep going. Keep going.’ So after seven, John called me and was really excited, just because it was such a big swing idea to create something like that. So that that’s how it all came about…to write about global warming, women’s reproductive rights, several things that are upsetting and dangerous right now. As an artist, that was what I was interested in writing about and trying to put them in a genre, or a different kind of horror than I’ve ever done before.

JOHN LANDGRAF: I have to say…it feels to me sometimes living in the world today like being trapped in a nightmare that you can’t claw your way out of it. Like you’re in quicksand and you can’t find the ground of reality, right? So that really, it just caught me, when I read it, as an extremely accurate reflection existentially and emotionally, of what it feels like to live today. Then I thought the idea of putting Lois’ character, especially after Niecy signed on to do it, in that center, was just so on point. Of course, we had no clue at that time that Kamala Harris would be the Democratic candidate for the President of the United States. But you could sort of feel the strange nature of reality, and so Lois juxtaposed against this nightmare trying to fight her way to life and to some sort of comprehension of reality, just the whole thing just really zeros in on that. I was shocked when I saw the sequence itself, because they it’s just a tour de force from a cinematic standpoint, and in terms of how they staged it and how they shot it, and it’s a very, very elaborately constructed piece. The whole thing, you’ll see Easter eggs. You go back, you’ll see Easter eggs all the way through all the first seven episodes, but then that is the fulcrum on which the whole thing turns, and it’s so beautifully constructed from a cinematic standpoint, it just shocked me when I saw it.

DEADLINE: Yeah, I’m curious how you felt seeing that sequence come to life? I imagine reading it is one thing, but seeing it constructed visually in that way is much more striking.

MURPHY: I wrote it, and I was even shocked. It was startling…what was important to me was to bring in a new generation of filmmakers, so Max Winkler and Alexis Martin Woodall were our showrunners, and they worked really hard on the visuals. So even if you go back to the first episode, what’s really fun about this process for me, I’ve never done anything like this, is every episode has probably 10 to 15 Easter eggs that tell you, ‘Oh, she’s in a coma.’ The first visual in the first episode is a hospital curtain on fire. We designed all the window treatments throughout many, many, many scenes of the show [to represent] Lois surrounded with that hospital scrim around her. In the first episode, people have gotten this wrong, but Lesley Manville famously eats strawberries — those were cherries and those were designed to be blood clots.

When we did seven, we built three different versions of that set, the kitchen set. So as it progressed, they were all different sizes. You got the sense of a lot of black surround with a white tunnel, which is that door of her in the coma, moving from a comatose state back into the natural world. So, I mean, every episode has so many of those, and by design. I’m just so proud that it never got out. The twist never got out. Some people did have to sign NDAs, but for the most part, I lived in dread every day that somebody who made it, was on the crew or something, was going to come out and reveal the twist, as often happens, but nobody did. So I’m really proud of everybody and thrilled about that.

LANDGRAF: That kitchen started out as a real kitchen, like a practical kitchen in a real house, and then they rebuilt it so that they could turn it into a liminal, sort of interior, metaphysical space. You can sort of watch the physical space of the kitchen transition through the cinematic, like you’re just gripped by the fight — the verbal fight that turns into this incredible, knockdown, drag out physical fight, but there’s an entire language of film that’s coursing under the bottom of it that’s revealing to you that that this is not a practical world. It’s not a real world. This is an imagined world that she’s either going to die in or find her way out of.

DEADLINE: Ryan, when did you know you wanted Niecy to play Lois?

MURPHY: Well, Niecy, in my life, is my oldest collaborator. John and I have worked together for 21 years now. I’ve worked with Niecy since 1998. I’m bad at math. What is that? 26 years? Niecy and I have done many, many things. Some things went, some things didn’t. But she won the Emmy for Dahmer, which was thrilling to me. After five attempts, she finally got her Emmy through my work. So she and I always had meetings about, ‘What are you working on? What are you doing? What are you doing?’ I had just started to do this, and just started to figure out what it was. She was riveted to it, because normally, in a piece like this, that part is played by a white male anti-hero, traditionally in the trope of that genre. She and I both really, really loved her in that part, which seemed very fresh to both of us. So what happened was, we wrote them all, and I sent them to her, like I sent them to John. John and I obviously talked about the casting of Niecy, and John had worked with Niecy before and loved her. So we were like, ‘Oh, that feels great.’ So I sent them to her, and I had no idea what her reaction to it would be, but she read them all…and she said, ‘Where do I sign? Is my contract on its’ way? I was like, ‘Oh.’ She said, ‘I cannot tell you, the opportunity for me to play a part like this — I never get offered anything like that.’

DEADLINE: And how did you find Micaela Diamond? Putting her opposite Niecy, especially with a scene like that, seems like it might initially feel like a risk, but she blew it out of the water.

MURPHY: She did. It was interesting. Micaela was the last person cast on that show, and John and I had talked for a long time about, ‘Well, maybe it’s this and maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s this person, maybe it’s that.’ I think ultimately, what I was looking for was someone that you had not really seen before. The surprise, right? You knew Niecy, powerhouse Niecy. You knew powerhouse Courtney [B. Vance]. You knew powerhouse Lesley Manville, but I wanted to do a multi-generational show. So what happened with Micaela was I did a series of auditions with her, and she was so great. In the last audition that I had with her, she said, ‘Have you ever heard about this serial killer nun?’ And I was like, ‘Wait, I don’t know about a serial killer nun. How is that possible?’ And she said, ‘Oh, there was this nun. And blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ So as soon as she said that, I was like, ‘Oh, you, you’re the one.’ So then what happened is I went back and I kind of re-tailored things for her, like the squeaky, fromm Disney character [line]. She was amazing and very collaborative. What I loved about her, what I loved about everybody who did this, is everybody knew going into it, you just have to trust, because you’re being pushed along with the blueprint. So example, with Micaela, the scene in Episode 3 where she’s possessed in the hallway, and she sort of vomits, and the white foam comes out of her mouth, that was written on the page: ‘Sister Megan walks down the hallway.’ That’s all it was. I was directing that and I’m like, ‘I have this idea. I have this idea that… it’s so crazy, but it’s what Niecy would have thought in a dream-like state.’ So she said, ‘Okay, let’s do that.’ And I kind of choreographed it for her, and then it was just crazy…I love doing that with young actors.

DEADLINE: So, what is the implication here? What does this mean for the rest of the story?

LANDGRAF: Well, this is like the first layer of baseline reality that starts to get revealed, and then the eighth episode, you start to unpack. Why were all these characters in Lois’ dream this, as opposed to who they really were? What did that mean symbolically? So it’s dealing with her symbolic world. But then the real world, which we have now reached, starts to come back in a really fierce way by the ninth episode…and that it imposes itself in an even more profound way in the tenth episode. So this thing is like a Russian nesting doll, where you just found out the doll that’s around the littlest doll in the middle. But, there’s more layers to come. I just love the level of ambition and the rigorousness with which it was constructed, both dramaturgically and from a character and thematic standpoint and cinematically.

So it’s like nothing I’ve ever worked on before. I think that’s probably true for Ryan, too, and I think both he and I are similar in that we’ve been doing this for a long time. We’ve had a lot of successes together. We’ve had a lot of successes separately, and we’re restless. We want to try new things. I think what I love about Ryan, and this is something that’s lost in the mythos of the scale of his career, and how much money he’s made, and how many Emmys he has. He’s an artist, right? He always was, still is, when he gets his teeth into something, it’s truly original. I think that’s what’s always interested me in television, is, what’s the new? What’s the thing that hasn’t been done before, hasn’t been tried before? We’ve done a bunch of those things together, and this is one of many.

MURPHY: I love working with John so much because our relationship — we’ve been working together since 2003—  is really based on the idea of, like, ‘Why? Why aren’t we taking big swings? We should do that.’ So if you look at what we’ve done together, Nip/Tick was a very big swing. It was really my first thing. I had one show before, but I got to direct it, and it was kind of auteur driven. It was a social commentary. Then we did American Horror Story, which was a huge swing, to let a company and let someone like John approve a show where at the end of the first season, you burn down the sets and you completely start over, and you ask an audience to invest not just in the show, but the brand of the show. That was new for both of us. OJ [American Crime Story] was new for both of us. That was kind of the beginning of a true crime, prestige thing that was interesting for both of us. Not a lot of people at that time believed in that project, but we did. I think Grotesquerie is in line of that stuff that’s like, ‘Huh?’ It feels like a really big swing to me, and it feels like it’s also about something, culturally. It’s deeply about something. With this episode, you have to do some work with it, and what I hope people can do is go back and watch it from the beginning knowing, like, ‘Oh, that’s what that was about, and that’s what that was about like.’ I love that as a viewer. I only make things that I want to watch, so I like that Easter egg approach, and every one of those episodes has those and that’s really thrilling to do as an artist.

DEADLINE: Speaking of the origins of your working relationship, have you discussed revisiting Nip/Tuck?

MURPHY: We actually have talked about that, because it’s now more [relevant] today than it was when we did it. When we did it, it was considered like, ‘What the hell is this thing?’ But it was prescient in a way, which I love, because my favorite movie is Network, the Paddy Chayefsky Network. When I saw that as a 12-year-old, it’s the only movie my parents ever walked out of. So of course, I had to go the next day and see it. As soon as I watched it, I was like, ‘Well, you’re my favorite now.’ You watch that, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that could never happen. That’s insane.’ The thing about Nip/Tuck is, it all happened and more and worse. And Nip/Tuck always had this sort of thesis statement about, like, tell me what you don’t like about yourself, right? That was the line in every show. It was a commentary about the beauty culture. Oddly enough, saying that, I think neither John or I wanted to really revisit that show and do a reboot. I really don’t like doing that. But the thing we’re working on now, which is The Beauty with Evan Peters and Anthony Ramos and Jeremy Pope, it’s not that at all, but it deals with the same subject matter today. So I think we figured out a way to have our cake and eat it too. I mean, I don’t want to speak for you, John, but that’s what I feel.

LANDGRAF: It was really fundamentally about narcissism, the culture of narcissism, the absurd idea of ‘fake it till you make it,’ or just change the outside of yourself, change your brand, change how you’re perceived and looked at in the world, and that will make you happy. If you remember, no character ever got happy on Nip/Tuck. It was always sort of these Grimms’ Fairy Tales, about the folly of that in various different ways. I mean, I could have never imagined that the world was going to go so far down that rabbit hole as it’s gone since Nip/Tuck to here.

I just find that Ryan often comes at things from a feeling, like a deeply felt sense. The business of television really, it chokes that impulse out…it just says, ‘No, no, we have to do this genre. We have to market it this way.’ I just have always found it interesting, and I’ve done more with Ryan than any other creator by a mile, but I’ve done this with so many different creators and so many different genres. Wait a minute. What are they feeling like? Follow that impulse. Where does it lead? It’s often very surprising where it leads, but it’s also fascinating.

DEADLINE: Do you have anything you’re cooking up that hasn’t been announced yet?

MURPHY: Always. That’s the joy of it. I love what I do, but I don’t take it for granted. I love working with John and Dana [Walden]. We’ve known each other for so long that we have dinners and we talk on the phone and we talk about, ‘Well, what are you interested in today?’ It’s not what I was interested in a year ago. So I’m always saying to John, ‘Well, what about this? Or what about that?’ John and I usually talk every Friday. We have a catch up, and we talk about how we are, how we feel, and what we’re interested in next. As an artist, and somebody who looks at John as the mastermind in many ways of what I’m trying to do with my creative life, that’s very thrilling. But we’re always talking about the future. Sometimes John will say, like, ‘I like that other thing more. Let’s go back to that.’ It’s a very give and take, and neither John or I ever make anything that we’re not passionate about. He would never make anything that he’s not interested in, and neither would I, and that’s that’s a very good place to be.