“And yet the actors on “The Good Place” seem to coexist in a spirit of radical egalitarianism. The younger actors notice Danson arriving early to obsessively work on his scenes, despite the fact that he is literally Ted Danson. And they notice that Kristen Bell memorizes not only her own lines but everyone else’s too, and that she reads all the crazy philosophical course packets Schur sends out, so that she can discourse at length about moral particularism vs. the categorical imperative. Making a sitcom is incredibly tedious. Every scene is repeated infinite times, with tiny variations — and then the cameras are moved and the scene is repeated infinitely again. On set, Bell is a technician, precise and rational and systematic. She has a bright, quick energy, and she can change direction, multiple times, in a single line. In the mansion, I watched her working and reworking a scene in which Eleanor has a meltdown — a moment of insecurity that escalates into an angry retreat. Bell is small, barely five feet tall, and she was dressed that day in jeans and a pink sweatshirt. In the middle of the mansion’s chaos, she seemed like the rock-solid center around which everything else rotated. I watched her perform the same scene over and over, take by take, as if she were slowly turning up an emotional dial… After many takes, Bell reached what she called her “big” take — one in which her rising anger basically blew the gilded doors off the room. (Later, editors would patch pieces of these performances together, deciding which precise emotional shades served the episode best.) Before storming out of the room, Bell had to rip out a chunk of a giant cake with her hands, and she approached that task with similar precision. She tried it standing on one side of the table and then the other, with one hand and then two, pulling the chunk violently up or dragging it straight back. ‘I want a rough rip,’ she declared finally. The cake was huge, and there were only two backups, so it was important not to mess it up. But Bell needed only one cake. The rip, indeed, was rough.”
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