Katie Lowes and Guillermo Diaz continue to prepare the second episode of “Unpacking the Toolbox”.
The best friends vibes between Katie Lowes and Guillermo Diaz grow stronger as the Scandal pals dive into the show’s second episode and set a beat for the podcast. For their first episode, they had the unstoppable Shonda Rhimes as a guest. This week, Lowes and Diaz are on their own, giving a more detailed breakdown of the episode they’re watching again, as well as daily behind-the-scenes details.
Huck reveals the piece of scandal he brought home.
The wall of cracked windows in the conference room is a centerpiece of the OPA office and was frequently used to paste pictures of clients or various suspects – a kind of highly symbolic (those cracks!) version of a wall of yarn. Diaz was granted permission to take home a souvenir window panel, which he still has in his home.
“It’s right at the entrance of the house, on the wall… It’s one of my favorite things I have in my house,” he said.
“It makes me sleep better at night knowing you have one of the panes,” Lowes said. “And our OPA conference table office is the main conference room table at the Shondaland offices in Hollywood…I was there once before COVID, and I walked past the large conference room, and this is the conference room table. OPA conference on which you and I boned! »
They cracked. “We did it,” Diaz teased. But that’s for a much, much later episode(Opens in a new tab)!
The writers room was psychic, maybe.
“You know what’s so nice (about seeing each other again), I can see what the writers were seeing about Huck taking Quinn under his wing,” Lowes said, “You can already see I’m still going to you.” Abby is so mean to Quinn, it’s crazy and awesome and lovely and I love it, and Harrison just doesn’t have time because he’s Mr. Man About Town, and you’re really the only person – ”
Diaz added, “Katie, remember we used to talk while we were shooting the show, like, how do the writers know and how does Shonda know our relationship? Because you and I started getting really close, and then we were like, are there microphones in our trailers? And then we would see it… reflected in the scripts, right? We were like, how did they know?! »
“They must have bugged the makeup trailer! Lowe agreed. “On film sets, makeup trailers are where a lot of the crap gets done, and that’s mainly because you’re there at 5 a.m., your makeup artists and hairstylists are the ones who are the most close to your face. times — like, when you’re on your period, when you’ve had a rough night… So the makeup trailer kind of becomes that place — and I was like, this shit needs to be bugged! Because… we would have relationships forming and trusting things happening, and then we would see that 100% reflected in the scripts down the road. »
How did Scandal find its breakneck pace?
Shonda Rhimes and the Scandal writers room had nothing on the Gilmore Girls when it came to packing a lot of information into a short amount of screen time. Lowes and Diaz discussed the time they spent running the lines backstage and during their downtime.
“We were really studious, and we were doing lines (in the makeup trailers)! Laughs Lowes.
“We had to do it! We had to rhythm Scandal our dialogue,” Diaz said. “It started because the scripts were so long, right? And there were so many words that I think it was Shonda who said, ‘You have to talk fast to get this all out,’ and that’s, I think, where it started. But then we all gradually discovered that the faster you speak – I mean, the intention (is important), and we always act under the fast pace, but each time it made the scene better. Everytime ! Even beyond Scandal. Sometimes I’m on film sets, I’m like, ‘You gotta speed this shit up!’ »
Diaz admitted that while they had a lot of fun during filming, he spent a ton of time shooting the lines. “There was no place to mess it up. »
Lindsay Dwyer’s secret was that there was no secret (yet).
The ongoing Amanda Tanner subplot forces Quinn to make a small confession to the young woman about her own dark past, in an attempt to get Amanda to trust her – and return to the OPA, of course. The title of the episode is, after all, “Dirty Little Secrets,” and Quinn certainly has a few of those herself.
Lowes recalled, “Amanda Tanner and I meet, I think, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and we get a glimpse of Quinn’s past, which is Lindsay Dwyer, and I say, Quinn says something like, ‘I’ got in trouble once. A lot of people wanted… I was in trouble. I was alone, and it was awful. Now you think we have a glimpse of Quinn Perkins’ past, but at this point the writers room didn’t know what Quinn’s past was! »
“No one knew where this was going to lead! Diaz exclaimed.
” They did not know ! Lowes said. ” They did not know ! So what I think is interesting is that things were already being built, but I also sometimes wonder if I had played it differently. Like, I played it like the truth, like, Quinn has this thing, this secret. But I could have played like that, I’m wrong. As if I were inventing -“
“Just for her to be a client, yeah,” Diaz agreed.
“Because Olivia told me, and I always think, wow, if I had played (like that), would things have been different? Who knows. »
The secret behind the Scandal shooting that fooled us all is in plain sight.
Most of Scandal was actually filmed in Los Angeles, on various sound stages, so scenes like the ones described by Lowes above were filmed in local parks, with landmarks added later with digital effects.
“When you see the Lincoln Memorial and other historic sites in DC, everything is green! The team that did this was also very talented, because remember people were coming up to us all the time saying, ‘Are you shooting the show in DC? ‘” Diaz gushed.
“People still think that now! Lowes exclaimed. (Uh, I sure did!)
“We would still be out in parks, all over LA, and then they would have this massive green screen that they would then overlay, as you say, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, whatever, the Mall, and we would be dressed in coats, sweating balls,” laughed Lowes.
“To California, where it never gets cold, check out for today,” Diaz agreed.
“And Lyn Paolo – we’re going to have her too, she’s an amazing costume designer – Lyn Paolo, I think she just created the world. I don’t know if it was her choice or Shonda’s choice, that it was just an “eternal fall”… which means that we are as always in cabans, a scarf. Olivia is obviously wearing the most incredible gloves you’ve ever seen in your life that go all the way up to her elbow, but often we’d be 110 degrees, in a wool coat – the friction that was going on in my pencil skirts! I deserve all the acting awards, people! Lowes joked.
The Toolkit unboxing ends with a few more facts about the show, a continuity error or two, and a throwback to some tweets from the show’s live stream. (Remember when live-tweeting was so fun because Twitter actually worked and wasn’t a broken toy abandoned in a tantrum by its owner? Sigh!)
New episodes of Unpacking the Toolbox(Opens in a new tab) drop off every Thursday. Scandal is currently streaming on Hulu.(Opens in a new tab)