Good Omens NYCC panel recap
- Guests: Neil Gaiman, Douglas Mackinnon, Rob Wilkins, Maggie Service, Nina Sosanya and Guelin Sepulveda, it is said that Michael Sheen will join at the end over Zoom.
- What do they miss most when S1 wrapped and before S2:
Douglas: All the cast and all the crew. We were very big and cuddly family.
Rob: David Tennant and Michael Sheen.
Nina: Missing the mentioned family and being part of the nuns sisterhood.
- At the beginning they shared several bts stories from season 1 and the book:
First day of shooting in the bookshop was cancelled because of the blizzard and the second day they were foreced to shoot interiors because outside there were people with flamethrowers trying to melt what was there. So they build the set of Soho 2 inside.
Rob kept a lot of the vehicles from S1 and S2, all the motorbikes, the cars, and now I have topped it with Crowley’s Bentley.
A lot of nuns including Maggie had warts, but Nina didn’t want one.
Neil about Nina’s audition (read more here).
That both Michael and David both independently suggested that he might like to write a Good Omens stage play so they may swap roles each night.
About Michael originally being Crowley (more here and here).
About Terry and Neil being Aziraphale and Crowley - Neil: In the creation of Crowley Terry took the things that I did that he thought were hilarious, like wearing sunglasses indoors when I didn’t need to. He put a lot of me into Crowley but then we both put a lot of ourselves into both of them. (here, also this).
Michael Sheen is amazing mimic, Neil recalls that during one of the final scenes he had producer headphones on, the guys were acting and sitting on the bench and all of the sudden David Tennant started saying awful things about Michael Sheen, just, you know, there’s Crowley and Aziraphale talking and Crowley is saying all this stuff about how Aziraphale is fat Michael can’t act and all the stuff and I’m like ‘Whaat?! David is the nicest man in the world…’ and then the penny drops and it’s Michael sitting there doing pitch perfect as Crowley.
- What was like for Quelin to join the show:
She was a fan. The very first day was a bit like out of body experience, there was a scene where she interacted with David and Michael. So it was like, ‘Concentrate, Quelin, concentrate! It’s okay, it’s okay!’ And it was just overwhelming in the best of ways, honestly.
She plays angel Muriel. When Neil and John Finnemore talked about season 2, they realized that they didn’t have another nice, well-meaning angels except for Aziraphale in Heaven, all they had were bastards, all awfull, so they thought ‘Let’s have a nice one’ and so they created angel Muriel, curious, gullible, well-meaning and chatty angel that spent 6000 filing in the same office in Heaven hoping that somebody would come in and the day would get more interesting and it doesn’t.
She’s a 37th order scrivener, bottom of the pily, it’s her first time to Earth.
- They felt Terry’s presence also during filming S2.
- Douglas said that they started doing the ADR post production and that the difference between David and Michael is that David looks at the monitor and whatches what he’s done and Michael never watch, so now Michael saw himself for the first time and he was like a fan doing, ‘Oh look we’re back! And there’s Aziraphale!’.
- Neil about Maggie and Nina returning:
It was a thing where one of the things I was very very certain before I started writing season 2 that there were two characters in it and I wanted them to be played by Maggie and Nina, so in order to make it clear to everybody reading the script, that they were going to be played by Maggie and Nina, I called the characters Maggie and Nina. Maggie and Nina liked being Maggie and Nina so the names stayed.
Douglas joked that he thought that a bit lazy not to think up new names and it was hell on set. Later he jokes that since Muriel is an actual angel name, that Neil didn’t make that one either.
Maggie runs a record shop which is beside Aziraphale’s bookshop in Soho, Mr. Fell is her landlord, shop passed through the generations. Her shop looks across shop where Nina works.
Nina works in the independent coffeeshop Give Me Coffe or Give Me Death, she is good with dealing with people in Soho who come in, not afraid of dealing with them. Wears great cardigans. Her character is quite grumpy. There is a scene where at the start her love life is doomed and she is getting passive-agressive texts for Lindsay - Neil says writing the texts was some of the most fun they had - maybe there will be a hope for her love life.
Neil didn’t want to lose people because they are such a family and wanted Miranda Richardson back but Madame Tracy’s story had really finished and couldn’t think of more for here and her story had ended so beautifully so he wrote a new part for Miranda - she plays Shax, demon that was sent on Earth as the replacement of sacked Crowley.
Anna Maxwell Martin couldn’t make the filming (was in two shows and a stage play when they needed her), so Beelzebub is played by Shelley Conn. She demanded a lot more flies.
Donna Preston plays Mrs. Sandwich, and We’we never quite sure about Mrs. Sandwich’s profession but she’s definitely in Soho.
-When Neil started writing S2:
In August 2019 he told Amazon and BBC at fancy breakfast, ‘This is the plot.’, and they said, ‘Oh, we like that plot.’
In December he and John Finnemore got together and Neil told him the plot and he said, ‘That is a good plot, but how does it end’ Neil said that he doesn’t have ends until he gets there but John needed one so Neil said, ‘How about this?’ and told him the end and John said, ‘That’s a good end.’ And that is the end we’ve got.
He started writing it in the middle of the pandemic Summer 2020, writing with pencil to his notebook the first scene which is the first scene.
- Neil what will S2 be about:
Six episodes, each about 45 minutes.
There are some love stories in it.
We will learn a lot about Jane Austin we didn’t know before.
There is a lot more Heaven, a lot more Hell.
- What could be more eras for Aziraphale and Crowley
Douglas: 19th century Scotland, Neil: Edinburgh perhaps around 1827?, Douglas: That would be good, can you write that?, Neil: Oddly enough, episode 3 will take us to the little stint of body snatching in the era. For me it would be like 1941 and we’d go back to those Nazis. Douglas: That would be good and what about something biblical as well, could we do something? Neil: Bible’s good. Yeah back to biblical times, that would be really fun, we could do one of those in episode 2. (they are obviously talking about minisodes :))
- There was a clip from the show but only sound for those watching the stream.
Description from twitter ‘Crowley rushes into the bookshop holding plants and it’s so cute’.
This pic should be from it :)
- Season 2 Release Date: Summer 2023
- At the end on the zoom dropped not on Michael but also David and Jon Hamm! :)
Watch here :), their banter was written by Neil, Staged-style.
Michael and David found out that there’s going to be S2 probably at the same time from Neil. There was always sort of hope after the end of S1 that there might be more story to tell. Jon found out about it from Neil during press for S1 as potentiality and then during covid Neil said an idea to Jon that we would start by walking down the street in Soho completely nude and he send me the beggining of the scene where Gabriel does not recogni- and the rest is deliberately cut with ‘Lost connection’, to the nude part Neil said, I knew that if he said yes to that he’d say yes to anything and then he says it is not actually there.
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