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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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Today, I m joined by the Oscar-winning screenwriter and showrunner Akiva Goldsman, creator of the much-acclaimed show The Crowded Room, which comes to us on Apple TV+, and stars Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context, the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks on their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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I think what s interesting about healing, psychological healing, is there s always a narrative.
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And that narrative helps.
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So sometimes when you go to therapy and you tell a story, and in the story you locate your despair, and it s a knot.
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And then with the therapist, you work through the knot.
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You feel better.
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Was all the pain really attendant to that knot or did you just kind of load up that knot with some of the despair that comes from being alive and you kind of work through it and that story helps you live life better.
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And I think that s true also this idea of how we look at the different personalities takes and we can name them and we can give them ages and it s a story that helps us understand ourselves.
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So says Akiva Goldsman, an Oscar, Golden Globe, and WGA award-winning screenwriter whose credits include A Beautiful Mind, The Client, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill, Practical Magic, Cinderella Man, I Am Legend, The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Insurgent, and iRobot.
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He s on pulling the thread today, though, to talk about Apple TV Plus s The Crowded Room, a psychological thriller starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried, in which he was both the writer and the showrunner.
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So first, some warnings.
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Yes, there are spoilers, though in my opinion, nothing that will markedly change your experience of watching this show.
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In fact, knowing the backstory made it easier for me to get through the first, very stressful episode.
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It does get easier, and by episode three, I was riveted.
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And also, a trigger warning.
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The crowded room in our conversation today explore childhood sexual abuse, which is also part of Akiva s personal history.
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Okay, let s get to our conversation.
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Do you live in New York?
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Yes, I return.
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I moved to California for, you know, two months and stayed 30 years and it was enough.
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And now you re done.
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Now I m done.
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I know many screenwriters.
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I ve never actually interviewed a screenwriter, so I apologize in advance for whatever I may get wrong.
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But for The Crowded Room, you were also the showrunner, right?
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So were you on set?
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I was.
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Oh, but that was in New York.
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It was every second of every day, but it was all here, yeah.
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OK, got it.
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Yeah, it was almost a condition of sale, actually.
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I batted my eyes and said, really, we must do it in New York.
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Is that where the original book is set?
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No, the actual story, his story is in Iowa, which is really flat and apparently has a lot of corn.
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I know nothing about Iowa.
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And since I was smuggling my story into his story anyway, I moved it to where I knew, which is New York where I grew up.
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So I like writing in New York for New York.
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It s better.
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Yeah.
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No, I get it.
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But even starting there, smuggling your story into this story, and I know, obviously, A Beautiful Mind is also about mental illness, but so much of your work is fantasy, right?
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You know, I do.
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I like fantasy, although when I dig in, almost everything I do has a sort of real reversal of narrative firmament.
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Like, you think you re on the ground,
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You think you re hanging from a ledge, but actually it s a brick and you re falling.
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And it s only since doing this that I have started to say out loud why that is.
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And it was because I was very close to someone from the time I was eight until I was 18 who was abusing me sexually.
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And he was somebody who was a very close family friend and I loved him.
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And then I got it, took a long time to get it.
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And it was like the world had gone upside down, right?
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And so that paradigmatic shift, I ve actually noticed in my work without doing it on purpose.
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So it could be nobody s real in A Beautiful Mind, or a similar sort of version of that in Crowded Room, or it could be like the shark eating the lead
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in a movie called Deep Blue Sea, or the monsters actually not being the monsters in I Am Legend.
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For me, it s all kind of the same story, which is, you think you know it, I think I m working through it.
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Is this the closest thing that you ve done, The Crowded Room, to your own story?
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Yeah, yeah, 100%.
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In Beautiful Mind, there were two elements to my childhood that have found their way most explicitly into my work, and it s in the mental health stuff, the most overtly mental health stuff.
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One is the very first
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group homes for what used to be referred to as emotionally disturbed children, which is when, amazingly, the diagnoses of childhood autism and childhood schizophrenia, which no longer exists as a diagnosis, by the way, were grouped together.
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We d never think of putting those two populations together today.
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It was in my house.
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My parents founded it.
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It was in Brooklyn Heights.
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And my mother, who was an amazing woman,
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And she was a Holocaust survivor.
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She had me when she was older and for a while was, you know, one of the world s leading authorities on autism back when autism was not how we understand today.
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And she used to write about these kids that lived in our house.
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And there was always somebody hanging the baby out of the window or banging the baby against the wall.
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And I was the baby.
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So for me, like I grew up with a very labile definition of what is sane and what isn t.
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And so that helped me
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with Beautiful Mind, but I was really abstracting.
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I was taking this beautiful piece of reportage that Sylvia Nasser had written, but that John Nash hadn t really participated in terms of his inner life and made one up.
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So I was like, well, this is what it would feel like having been around people with this diagnosis.
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Maybe this is what it would feel.
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So it was really sort of more, it s an impressionistic view, but it s sympathetic and it generates understanding, I hope, it seemed to have.
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When I got to Crowded Room, I started working on the story of Billy Milligan, and he, as I said, is contemporaneous with me, to me, anyway, we re the same age, and I don t have multiple personality disorder.
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or what is now called disassociative identity disorder, but we had this overlap in terms of sexual abuse.
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And as I started writing it, my story kept finding its way into it in a very direct way, in a very kind of like moments and songs and things that mattered to me and city blocks I grew up on.
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And so it really became
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much more autobiographical than I had intended.
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And then when I wrote it, I said to myself, I guess it s an exploration of all sorts of trauma.
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And I was in the world as we all are today.
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And I said, and then I will talk about what happened to me, which is not something I ve hidden.
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I ve said it before on record and years ago in a documentary, but it s not something I typically put forward.
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And I sort of thought, well, if you re going to write about Shane and you re going to write about
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and if you re going to write about how we wear the mantle of responsibility for our own abuse psychologically and what we can do about that, then you better butch up and say it out loud about you, because otherwise you re kind of an asshole.
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And so that s been this journey, which is not one I planned to take, but I guess I did.
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I just didn t tell myself.
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So go back, if you don t mind, into your story and you talk about this presence of love that didn t seem to be part of crowded room.
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There was an idea of feeling protected or in need of a savior, but it didn t ever seem
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seemed to me like that he loved Marlon.
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Is that a parallel?
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For me, I don t think he did love Marlon.
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I think that for me, the piece that was most useful about the understanding of love was less about the relationship between the protagonist and the abuser and more in the relationship of the healer and the healed.
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Amanda gets to say a version of it, if love can break you, love can fix you.
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And it sounds simple, but I really believe it.
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that if shattered relationships can create trauma, we can have better ones and they can help us heal from that trauma.
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So Billy s or Danny s reaction is really about the sort of hardwiring of what it s like to be abused by a mother or vicariously by a mother who is allowing a father or a stepfather to abuse, right?
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And so by allowing, and it s a loaded word, but you know, who is,
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They re tacitly part of the system.
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And the hardwiring between mother and child is so intense that there s hardwired love.
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You know, the child needs mother to survive and can t reconcile with this picture of mother who child needs, this idea that mommy s hurting you.
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So that s where the split starts to happen.
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For me, the part that was important to bring in was that if you have even one good grownup,
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Studies indicate just one good growth, and you have a way out, you know?
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And the fuel of that is love.
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That s actually required for the remediation, I think, of the suffering, pain, trauma.
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And so for Dani, for the Amanda character, is she real?
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No.
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She s not.
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She s a composite.
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My mother s name was Mira.
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Her sister s name was Raya, which is where I took that from.
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And she s a composite of a couple of women in my life who raised me and who loved me.
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And that idea that you can be loved
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was really important to me.
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And there was also a moment in psychotherapy, just before the world went into behavior modification, and then came back, and then medication, and now it s coming back out into some sort of slightly return to a more touchy-feely paradigm.
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You know, that was a time where you could get away with saying that.
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You could get away with saying you loved your patient.
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You know, it s just coming back to that now.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wildcard, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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Join me on Wildcard wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR.
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So speaking of your mom, and both of your parents, right, were child psychologists.
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And when you think about what happened to you, was that in their presence or were they completely oblivious because they were more focused on this home in your home?
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They were completely oblivious.
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I mean, and I think that what s interesting about, you know, childhood sexual abuse is it s often somebody who the child knows.
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I colluded.
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I was told this was a secret.
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And if anybody were to find out, terrible things would happen.
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It was our special relationship.
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And wasn t I special to have a special relationship with a grown-up when I m just eight and little and struggling?
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And I ve watched the polarization of the reactions to the show, and I ve seen some people look at it the way I might look at a Saw movie.
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Like, I can t watch them.
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Like, for me, and by the way, you know, I make horror movies sometimes.
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There s a line I can t cross.
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Somehow, here we have this thing that is so
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widely occurring, so many children, and we can t see it because it s too hard to them.
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It s almost impossible not to look away.
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And of course, it s in that looking away that all this happened.
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So I think they didn t see it.
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Years later, I told my mom,
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you know, literally had to hold on to, I have children.
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Boy, oh boy, that s not something you ever want to hear that your child and on your watch, you know, you have to help them get through it then.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And the guilt and the complicity and yeah, I recently published a book and in the book I write about
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nothing that was longstanding, but a molestation event with a friend of a family friend.
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And I m a little younger than you, but in many ways, it was a different time, right?
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Nobody was watching us.
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Nobody was paying attention.
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And when I had originally told my parents, they knew exactly who I was talking about.
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He didn t live in our hometown.
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And the response was, oh, yeah, we always thought he was really weird.
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But we were unsupervised.
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in his presence.
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And it s been interesting to watch that, again, it wasn t a grievous assault as far as I know, but to land in the community and to have the consternation of the other parents around this, and they re more affected in a way than I think I am, if that makes sense.
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I had this revelation when I was doing a therapeutic MDMA session.
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And so as it came up, I did not feel re-traumatized.
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So maybe I sound insane talking about it.
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But I was able to be with myself and recognize what happened and downstream effects of it without feeling like, I need to know where this guy is.
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And I need to persecute him and justice.
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Similar to you, I, in that moment, felt my own power.
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my own complicity in inspiring his attention.
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And very dark.
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That s hard.
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Very dark, and extraordinary, and interesting.
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And of course, we re children.
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So we should be protected from the entire range of exploitation.
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And so often, children aren t.
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This idea, which is what you re talking about, I think the MDMA part of it is significant because I think what s really important is to begin to be able to look at yourself with compassion and forgiveness, right?
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Like this whole thing is about compassion and forgiveness.
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We feel such shame and that shame becomes toxic and you can t ever really fully be with yourself if there s that sort of ball of shame in there.
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So I think what s really interesting about MDMA, you know, there s something called EMDR, which is a kind of tappy, tappy thing with, you know, clicks in the ears or whatever.
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But there are things that allow you to process or re-literally re-member it without re-traumatizing.
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Because the trick is to be able to look at it, and to look at it with love, compassion, forgiveness, or at least neutrality, so that you can start to integrate it.
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Because right now, until it s integrated, it s radioactive, right?
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We take the things that are our secrets.
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and we just hide them.
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And we spend all our time consciously or unconsciously protecting them.
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So in a weird way, the secret becomes the knot around which the tree grows.
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And it s not until you can kind of neutralize it.
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Making the show in some ways was at times vaguely re-traumatizing because
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really just because of the editorial process.
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Because what you have to do when you re cutting a scene, especially like a scene where Emmy and Amanda are talking about like the cycle of abuse, all I can do in the editing room is sit there when Tom is confessing as Danny at the end of his feelings of complicity as Adam at the end.
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All I can do is keep watching it to see if an extra second here will make it hurt more or less.
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And so you want it to hurt as much as possible.
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That process was a little bit
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I would never do that again.
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But, you know, mostly I m like you.
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It s a thing to say so that people can understand so that it doesn t have to live inside you in a way that is protected.
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It s just a way of saying, hey, it s OK.
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Things happen to people.
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This happened to me.
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Let s talk about it.
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So how did you, when you had this moment when you were 18, and you had some sort of revelation, what did you do then?
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And what was that experience like?
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And then how have you healed?
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Or is it an ongoing process?
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Well, I think it is.
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I think healing is, I think for me, it s a journey.
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But one that I ve attended to with gusto.
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I ve been very lucky, for the most part, to have found really good therapists.
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I love a feeling.
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There s no feeling I won t talk about.
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So I like to talk about a feeling.
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I am interested.
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I try to remain curious over periods of time and looked at myself and said, oh, so thought that just because you separated from that person, you re fine now.
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And then I m in my 20s and I m like, well, you re doing a lot of drugs and you re drinking and you re basically sleeping with any woman who will look at you.
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So maybe you want to look at
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at that, right?
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And so you process that.
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And then, you know, and over time, you work through all of it enough to be able to integrate the pain.
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And for me, finally, to turn it into an object.
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You can t fix it, but you transform it.
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My wife died seven years ago, and it was clear to me that if you don t actually turn that into something that you can find grace and courage in, you don t stay alive.
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It s too hard.
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You know, so if you get lost in the pain of having been abused, it s too hard to be on the planet.
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It s why some of us don t.
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Instead, recraft it, if you can.
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Like, try to get your hands around it.
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Turn it into a painting, a song, a scream, a screenplay, a conversation.
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And that changes.
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It takes the energy that was
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so hurtful and converts it.
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You know, and I get all the other things that you do.
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I reported the person.
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Somewhere I have, I found it recently, the framed notice of the report.
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And you do all these things that acknowledge to yourself that you re healing, I think.
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And then you just do the work.
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Yeah, I want to talk about Danny s diagnosis.
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And in the context to have you encountered IFS internal family systems and Richard Schwartz s work, speaking of MDMA, because I think before they submitted it to the FDA for the protocol, IFS work was supposed to be the sort of therapeutic partner, I think it s
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what works, which is this idea that we all have parts.
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We all have these parts in us that we cordon off and protect.
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We have these firefighters, we have managers, and then we have these abandoned parts from our childhood.
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So in some ways, it s an argument for some variation.
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on a spectrum of multiple personality.
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And Richard Schwartz, who s amazing, if you don t know him, would be a fascinating person for you to talk to because he does a lot of work or has with pedophiles and other people who are locked up, literally, but doing parts work to access where they invariably
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were injured and traumatized and what part is sort of like loose in their psyche, inflicting harm on other people.
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So it s a really interesting system that I think can help anyone understand the on-ramp to how you get to splitting in the way that Dani has split.
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Was that part true?
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The show is sort of a reflection in some sense of exactly what the verdict was, which was there was no way to sell it scientifically, so the jury was sold emotionally, right?
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Again, multiple personality disorder, as you know, no longer even exists, right, as a diagnosis.
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It s disassociative identity disorder.
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And, you know, and so what we had to do in this, and which is why we had a council of really good psychiatrists, was to try to be true to the diagnostic criteria and the knowledge that we had then.
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but also not steer somebody way wrong because, you know, these things are also helping objects.
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That s the outcome goal is that somebody will see it and understand themselves or someone else more as well as be entertained.
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So we wanted to be careful not to suggest something that might no longer be clinically indicated.
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today, and this is in line with what you re saying, you know, certainly there s a notion that fusion is not really necessary.
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In fact, there are stable systems, you know, that function quite well.
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That just wasn t the notion then.
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When it comes to sort of the map of the mind that you re talking about, which is the idea of sort of personality states or
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the anthropomorphization of pieces of us and our feelings and our emotions.
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I think it is a good precursor to understanding splitting, but I don t think it s the same because I think that we all actually develop different pieces alongside other pieces, but there s a semipermeable membrane.
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I think that in the case of splitting, it s starker.
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It s sort of a process that s been
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jury-rigged because of trauma, which is different than having some trauma in a system that s trying to deal with it relatively organically.
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You know, and I think what s interesting about healing, psychological healing, is there s always an error.
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And that narrative helps.
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So sometimes when you go to therapy and you tell a story, and in the story you locate your despair, and it s a knot.
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And then with the therapist, you work through the knot.
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You feel better.
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And
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was all the pain really attendant to that knot?
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Or did you just kind of load up that knot with some of the despair that comes from being alive and you kind of work through it and that story helps you live life better?
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And I think that s true also this idea of how we look at the different personality states and we can name them and we can give them ages and it s a story that helps us understand ourselves.
2
SPEAKER_01
One thing that I thought was really beautifully explored, and I m assuming it s somewhat accurate, is the way that, one, I think it s beautiful that Danny is a boy, because I don t think that we spend enough time culturally acknowledging the fact that this happens to many boys.
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and men.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t know quite the rates.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it s more likely to happen to girls, I would imagine, but it s very common, right, for boys and yet often totally stuffed and not discussed.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then I thought that there was a really beautiful way
2
SPEAKER_01
that the show explored homosexuality and the way that showed up in different parts, I thought was very deft.
2
SPEAKER_01
Can you talk a little bit about how you guys determined to do that?
2
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you know, it s very interesting because Billy Milligan, the character who Danny is based on, you know, had
2
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at least one female alter who was a lesbian.
2
SPEAKER_00
construct and how she felt about sex.
2
SPEAKER_00
And there s a lot of interpolation here, because Daniel Keyes writes the book.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s not tremendous amounts of documentation.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re starting to see a very different, forgive me because I m stereotyping gender-wise, but a much more female, a much more open, a much less predatory kind of relationship to sexuality from this boy
2
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Who s been raped.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the splitting is so interesting.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s always this interesting need to protect what s good in us.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know why or where it comes from, but as if there s some light in there that doesn t want to be snuffed out.
2
SPEAKER_00
So this idea of
2
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being able to bind sex and sexuality away from what had been done to him, that it was, to me, sort of a promise, again, of there are ways through this.
2
SPEAKER_00
For me, Danny s neither straight nor gay.
2
SPEAKER_00
Different pieces of different parts of Danny are all those things.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think if you were to take a very clinical view of the diagnosis and go away from having any sort of
2
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empathetic response, you would still admire it.
2
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Because in a weird way, it s all the things a human being can do.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s why it s often been the source of movies about magic and monsters, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because it reaches beyond what we think of as typical.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s why at the end of Split, James McAvoy is crawling out of the ceiling.
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Legend has it that, you know, M. Night was going to make this movie and then he made that one.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because what happens is you sort of get this sense that
2
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We are capable of so much.
2
SPEAKER_00
And in the shattering of the psyche, some of those fragments become revelatory.
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to be one thing or another.
2
SPEAKER_00
Straight and gay becomes, I mean, obviously it s politically charged right now, but I d like to think over the course of a lifetime, you know, those distinctions start to blur and people are just people.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, I think that everything becomes more mutable, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s true.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like within Danny, you have a straight kid, you have a lesbian, you have a heterosexual.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you have every variation of expression within this one child in a way that I think was fascinating and really well done.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a charged moment, of course.
2
SPEAKER_00
Never has the internet reacted more
2
SPEAKER_00
Really?
2
SPEAKER_01
What was the reaction to that?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, so much of the show polarized.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was, but wait, no, and oh, God, thank you.
2
SPEAKER_00
This has been my experience with the show in almost every facet.
2
SPEAKER_00
Kind of rage and a kind of gratitude.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, Beautiful Mind was a different time, and there was no internet, but people have reached out to me and to Tom and say the show saved their life.
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, and I remember that from Beautiful Mind, but it was anecdotal.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is now there s a flood, right, and you re
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s people telling you, but they re typing it, so they re not looking into your eyes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they say stuff that s amazing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was around the idea of being complicated sexually, which this show touches on, you know, but with sort of a white male straight.
3
SPEAKER_01
Icon is too strong a word, but, you know, Tom s a movie star, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, they think of as Spider-Man, you know, and suddenly he is there in a men s room, you know, in makeup, having sex.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s either thank you or how could you?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s been a lot of that.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s been fascinating.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the show is about integration, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s about reclaiming wholeness and bringing all of these parts back into a functional whole.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we re just not good at that culturally, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
All we want to do is excise and project and disown the parts of us that we think are unsavory or bad or gross or demonic or monstrous.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ve never seen more of that than we re seeing in the collective, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, I don t want this, you take it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I disown these parts of myself, you take it, so that I can despise you.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I think I m not surprised that the response is polarized, because I think that there s a certain subset of people who don t want to live like this anymore and are tired of demonizing the other and or ourselves.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then there are people who feel like they will literally die if forced to reintegrate.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think we are as confusing to them as they are to us.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I hate to use the we and they, but I know the whole purpose of storytelling is to be an antidote to otherizing.
3
SPEAKER_01
That the reason you tell stories is to climb into other people s skin.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you can approximate what it feels like outside of your own experience so that you can connect with someone who you think is different, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s the exact opposite vector.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like it s the intention is entirely different than
3
SPEAKER_01
What is so common culturally now which is exactly what you re talking about which is how do we take that which we don t like or don t understand make it outside of this make it other and not look at it ever again and if we could lock it up and set it on fire that would be better and I don t understand it and yet.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t understand it with the same fervor that someone doesn t understand my desire to include.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t know what happened.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t know how to bridge this gap, but it is as prevalent as I, you know, I m 61.
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SPEAKER_01
At least you felt in the 60s and the 70s, there was an intention to heal.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like I m not even sure that s there anymore culturally.
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you think has changed?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it because we used to sort of watch these movies in the theater or our TVs in our homes and be able to process them in silo and read some critical coverage and in some ways be told how to think or contextualize what we re experiencing?
3
SPEAKER_00
And now it s just so fragmented, so fast, so there s nowhere to hide.
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you think is happening?
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think that part of what s gone on is a need for immediacy.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think that there s something fundamentally damaging than we think when the distance between stimulus and response gets so, so tiny.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, my girls just are used to pressing this thing and getting it out there and getting it back and getting it out there and getting it back.
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SPEAKER_01
I would never have been a writer if I grew up today because I only wrote because I had no friends.
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SPEAKER_01
There was no way to talk to people.
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SPEAKER_01
So I would go and sit outside and like write on a napkin and hope somebody thought I looked cool, you know, and then maybe they would talk to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s in the time between things that we used to form opinions.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there is no time between things.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think that what s happened is instead we have kind of
3
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unconsciously or de facto curated a set of responses that we re supposed to have based on some clever algorithm.
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SPEAKER_01
And so what happens is before I know what I think of a thing, I m told what everybody in my cohort thinks of a thing.
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SPEAKER_01
And frankly, it s quicker and easier than figuring it out myself.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think some of it s just speed.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe two generations from now, the kids will be able to process in that new gap, but we can t.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we were raised that way.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, and the ones that are young now can t either.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe we will evolve, but it s easy to say people have stopped thinking for themselves, but people have stopped thinking for themselves.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that s true.
3
SPEAKER_00
I also think that we re engineered to sword and categorize, and we want simplicity, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And we want to understand things in the most binary black and white ways.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then you have these stories about a kid like Danny, and he s a victim and a villain, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
He s oppressed and he s an oppressor.
3
SPEAKER_00
But even thinking about you telling your story and talking about your own complicitness and your abuse,
3
SPEAKER_00
These things are so complicated.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I could argue, we could argue with you about that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Your perfect victimhood.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just not satisfying.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just too overwhelming.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think when all we want is certainty.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like, tell us who s good.
3
SPEAKER_00
Tell us who s bad.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think obviously why we like fantasy, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And horror.
3
SPEAKER_00
The heroes are clear.
3
SPEAKER_00
The villains are clear.
3
SPEAKER_00
Don t make me, not even think, but don t make me empathize when I ve been told there s nothing worse than empathizing with an oppressor, particularly in this moment in time.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I think that s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think it is fascinating that we are, for good or ill, hardwired
3
SPEAKER_01
to believe in this kind of binary world and fairness, this kind of, I think to myself, you could fix everything if you just instituted a rule of fairness.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like forget nice, forget compassion, forget all the things that I, if everybody was just, if the world was just fair, it would be so much better than it is, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
The world s never been fair, but it s built into us.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the upside of that is the striving for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
The downside is the blaming when it doesn t happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so this idea of, it s what you were talking about earlier, of sort of taking that which is not what we want and not taking ownership of it, but making it someone else s fault.
3
SPEAKER_01
And this is a complicated, because without the desire for fairness, you wouldn t strive for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you can t tolerate the disappointment when it isn t fair, then you ll turn the world into an enemy.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s what it feels like today.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like the world is everybody s enemy.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you think about, I m sure you re exhausted from this particular piece.
3
SPEAKER_00
I also want to know if it was hard to convince Tom to do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that must have been an incredible workout for him.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m sure Amanda was like, this is the dream role.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Tom was like, I mean, I don t know how he did that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tom had never done television before.
3
SPEAKER_01
By the way, I haven t done that much television, but I knew what television was.
3
SPEAKER_01
Apple s like, it s like a 10-hour movie, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And Tom s thinking it s a Marvel movie, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
What I mean by that is, you know, you shoot 30 days and some days are green screen and some days are crawling up a wall and a lot of days are stunt doubles.
3
SPEAKER_01
And this kid is in here and he s now doing 135 days or 137 days where he s in almost every scene.
3
SPEAKER_01
You remember, for the same amount of shooting days, basically, you re getting 10 hours, not two.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the number of scenes you re doing every day is tremendous.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s carrying all of them.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s playing umpteen different people.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I have said it before, this kid can do anything.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was so awesome.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it was so hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was so hard, this show.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he s got this work ethic.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, everybody else who came, I always say about Star Trek, you only work on Star Trek because you like Star Trek.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s self-selected, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So the same thing about the show about trauma and sexual abuse, which is you only show up because you got a story to tell, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Everybody, the grips, like, God forbid, we should stop for a minute.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everybody s like in an encounter group, get a social worker on set the whole time, except Tom.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tom s just like a decent kid from England who s like, how did I get here?
3
SPEAKER_01
But he has this amazing kind of like, we re going to get through it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he s really talented and he s kind.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he really started to understand the character in a way that we wanted the audience to understand the character.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that became the gift of him because he was learning and creating in the same way that we wanted the audience to feel and react.
3
SPEAKER_00
So he had no attachment to this material, as far as you know?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, none at all.
3
SPEAKER_01
I reached out to him when I had started.
3
SPEAKER_01
I had written a couple of scripts and Apple had said, let s make it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he was the guy I went to.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he was like, yeah, this seems fun, mate.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s important.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Tom, he does have
4
SPEAKER_01
have mental health charity, like he really cares about mental health issues.
4
SPEAKER_01
He didn t know this piece, but we talked a lot about what it was going to be.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he ended up being a co-architect of it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he too wanted that really noble thing of, if we do it right, somebody who didn t think they could talk about a thing will talk about it after.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I m sure it s the sort of show that s very, I mean, you ve mentioned the word polarizing, but it s probably magnetizing, I would imagine, or incredibly repellent.
4
SPEAKER_00
When I started, I had to stop halfway through the first episode, and then I had to go and I was like, I need to understand what s, I need to read.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I felt equipped.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then it started moving really fast for me.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I can imagine a lot of people are like,
4
SPEAKER_00
I m out.
4
SPEAKER_00
I cannot.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t know how that coincides with whether the people who have been abused are more likely to make it through or the opposite.
4
SPEAKER_01
My anecdotal poll, my non-scientific poll, if you have abuse in your past or in your family, you stay with it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it matters to you.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you are female, you re more likely to stay with it than if you re male.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you re gay, you re more likely to stay with it than if you re straight.
4
SPEAKER_01
white men, straight white men was probably our smallest demographic.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that doesn t surprise me.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s tough.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s really tough.
4
SPEAKER_00
You don t write rom-coms.
4
SPEAKER_00
Have you ever written a comedy even?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, never.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re like, I m not funny.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m not funny.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m not funny.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I am not funny.
4
SPEAKER_01
I can write a funny line.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I m funny at dinner, but no, I m just not good at it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is that what you wish you could do?
4
SPEAKER_00
After a project like this, how do you restart?
4
SPEAKER_00
Or is this just a continuation of your own exploration of identities?
4
SPEAKER_00
Where we started growing up in a house full of other mentally ill children and not even having any idea of normal, I would imagine, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Or quote, unquote, normal.
4
SPEAKER_01
No idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, I still find the definition vaguely dubious.
4
SPEAKER_01
I am so lucky that I get to do it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And by it, I mean, it s a little bit of, and it s funny, I was talking to somebody today about how the entertainment business and sort of the movie business itself and would be in TV keeps shifting.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in the late eighties, nine, I got into the business in the nineties, where if you could, you alternated and you
4
SPEAKER_01
Today you re supposed to have a brand, you know, and people are identified with a kind of a thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
Crowded Room was in some ways the hardest thing I ve ever done because it was that personal and it meant that much to me and it was an attempt to say out loud a thing I hadn t really said in that kind of form and to open up in that way.
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SPEAKER_01
And
4
SPEAKER_01
That was really extraordinarily complicated.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I am grateful for the chance to have done it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I do not want to do it again.
4
SPEAKER_01
Certainly not now.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now I want to, you know, have some zombies take over a city and have Will Smith chase them.
4
SPEAKER_01
I want to have Keanu Reeves have some magic.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know what I mean?
4
SPEAKER_01
And just live in the make-believe of it, and smuggles the stuff in that matters.
4
SPEAKER_01
In five years, if I have another step to make on this other, more personal journey, and somebody wants to let me make it, and I know what it is, I will.
4
SPEAKER_01
Or else I ll write a book.
4
SPEAKER_00
All right, I know we re almost out of time, but I need to understand, as someone who has never... I ve seen maybe two episodes of Star Trek in my whole life, and I think both of those were when I was a kid.
4
SPEAKER_00
But what is that?
4
SPEAKER_00
What is the appeal?
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it the sort of thing if anyone starts watching Star Trek, you will become a Trekkie?
4
SPEAKER_00
But what is it?
4
SPEAKER_00
What is the mental
4
SPEAKER_01
Definitely it started, I think, as like the Outsiders Club.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was, you know, back before being a nerd was cool.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was really not cool.
4
SPEAKER_01
I know it s hard for people to remember that, but it was full on, like,
4
SPEAKER_01
very sci-fi, what passed for intellectual on television.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a refuge where, you know, if you were teased all day at school anyway, this would be the place where you would go and maybe talk to other people ultimately who were also teased at school and liked it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Over time, I think what really sort of abided is it s utopian, and it s stubbornly and beautifully utopian.
4
SPEAKER_01
It
4
SPEAKER_01
suggests a framework for a future where, and it has always been, multicultural, everybody is at their best, and yet within that structure things are bad and we have to fix them, and science fiction then becomes this great version of an allegory generator.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because you go to a planet, there s a very famous episode of the original series, which is really quite good.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s this giant fight between these two last survivors of a race, half black on one side, half black on the other.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they re fighting, and they re all the way through.
4
SPEAKER_01
And finally, by the end, Captain Kirk says some version of, I m going to get this totally wrong, some version of, well, why do you hate him so much?
4
SPEAKER_01
You re the same.
4
SPEAKER_01
He goes, the same, says Frank Gorshin of Riddler fame.
4
SPEAKER_01
She s black on the right side, and I m black on the left.
4
SPEAKER_01
And for that, they had destroyed each other s race.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so it was like the Twilight Zone, in that it was very happy to wear the moral of the story on its sleeve.
4
SPEAKER_01
They were cautionary tales.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they said that in the future, we will fix the problems that we have today.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the future will also be a way of looking at the problems we have today.
4
SPEAKER_01
and seeing them from a safe distance so we can learn how to fix them.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s fun in that way.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s delightful.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s the opposite of dark.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s hopeful.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s the medicine, maybe, that we need.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we didn t know we needed it.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I m going to start watching Star Trek from the movies back.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re going to watch Strange New Worlds.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the show that you want to watch.
4
SPEAKER_01
Watch episode nine of season two, because it s a musical.
4
SPEAKER_00
OK.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s where I m going to start?
4
SPEAKER_00
You re going to start.
4
SPEAKER_00
The Crowded Room is not an easy watch, but it is a beautiful story that s complex and confusing at times, although the resolution is near.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that Akiva and Tom and Amanda and Emmy, who s amazing as the mom, really stunning performance,
4
SPEAKER_00
create something that is alternately incredibly complex, which is hard to do in a culture that is engineered towards certainty and all the black and white thinking that we were talking about in our conversation.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it does cut through with a type of moral clarity while also giving voice to the fact that life is so messy.
4
SPEAKER_00
So messy.
4
SPEAKER_00
So if you re looking for something to watch, I recommend and would love to hear your thoughts about the show.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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SPEAKER_00
You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
4
SPEAKER_00
While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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SPEAKER_00
I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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SPEAKER_00
Or follow me on Instagram at EliseLoonan.
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SPEAKER_00
And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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SPEAKER_00
It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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SPEAKER_00
Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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SPEAKER_00
Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Allie Brockman, and the entire Kedans13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valero Duval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next time.