Making of ‘Paradise’: How a White Lie and a Far-Fetched Apocalyptic Natural Disaster Birthed the Thriller

One theoretical question after a meeting with a wealthy businessman led Dan Fogelman to the concept for Paradise. “I was very overwhelmed by him and his life, and I started thinking about this guy and how many people must be doing his bidding and what would happen if the shit ever hit the fan,” Fogelman recalls. “Would those people really stay with him or would they take care of their own, which is what I suspected they would do.”

Put that theory within the context of the American government with the president of the United States and the “people who are literally employed to take a bullet for that person,” as Fogelman puts it, and you have his postapocalyptic thriller that sees Secret Service agent Xavier Collins, played by Sterling K. Brown, lead a revolt in his pursuit of answers following the death of reluctant President Cal Bradford, played by James Marsden.

“He’s kind of a perpetual kid in some ways, where he’s like, ‘Well, if I’m here, I’m going to have a good time with it and I’m going to try to do the right thing,’ ” says Marsden of his character, who’s only seen in flashbacks. “It wasn’t devoid of humor,” he adds of the role. “I had latitude to actually provide some levity to this pretty heavy story by his nature and his shoot-from-the-hip playfulness.”

The initial shit-hits-the-fan moment for the Hulu show was the eruption of a supervolcano, which sets off a series of global natural disasters, including a 600-mile-per-hour tsunami and an 8.9 magnitude earthquake, the details of which audiences don’t learn until episode seven. The domino effect leads to the demise of several countries and the relocation of 25,000 preselected American citizens to the underground bunker city in which the story takes place.

Fogelman says he and his team of writers, which includes Stephen Markley, author of the dystopian climate change epic The Deluge, met with a number of “very scary” experts in the fields of psychology, sociology, archeology and architecture — “people who sit and do TED talks on how the world is going to end” — to come up with the right doomsday event to build the series around.

“We wanted it to be something that’s still in a television program that could speak to the issue of climate change in a natural disaster while being kind of far-fetched enough that it’s not the number one way the world is necessarily going to end,” he explains.

Julianne Nicholson’s Sinatra was the chief architect of the man-made city in the old world and continues to pull the strings behind the scenes in the new one. Fogelman pulled a few of his own to get the actress —who was already booked for another project that would begin filming at the same time — locked in for the role. “I basically called the television studio and lied to them and told them we needed to spend some money to buy a couple more weeks so we could get all the departments ready, when the truth was, I was mainly doing it to stall so that I could get Julianne from the U.K. over to the United States,” he admits.

Scheduling conflicts aside, Nicholson was in from the moment she was sent the scripts for the first four episodes. It’s in episode two, titled after her character, that viewers learn Sinatra’s backstory: how she was a tech billionaire — “the richest self-made woman in the world,” to be exact — before the cataclysmic event. How she met her future husband. How she once smiled before the death of her son, that loss coloring the austerity with which she now exerts her authority. “I had never read an episode that so beautifully and delicately picks over these important moments in a woman’s life,” says Nicholson.

Despite declaring, “I’m not a monster, even though I seem like it,” Sinatra is the show’s central villain — at least in season one (the finale foreshadows she’s met her match in Nicole Brydon Bloom’s agent Jane Driscoll, an assassin who earlier in the season kills her own boyfriend, beloved Secret Service agent Billy Pace, played by Jon Beavers). It’s Nicholson’s embodiment of the chilling authoritarian that makes her fans and even co-stars love to hate her.

“I’ve had an acting crush on her for a long, long time,” Brown says of Nicholson. “She’s so good at making you detest her,” he adds of her portrayal of Sinatra.

Brown, on the other hand, who starred as lovable father and husband Randall Pearson in Fogelman’s NBC family drama This Is Us, has a knack for making audiences root for his characters. Collins, the protagonist of Paradise whom viewers see desperately try to get his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), on board a plane in Atlanta to make it into the bunker with their son and daughter, is now among them. In episode six, Collins learns his wife may not have perished along with the millions of other Americans left behind, with his decision to leave the bunker to find her in the season one finale setting up a major plot for season two.

“I never said it out loud to myself, and I don’t even know that I processed it myself, but by the time I started giving the script to a couple of core confidants to read, they were all saying, ‘Have you sent this to Sterling yet? Is he going to do it?’ And it started occurring to me, not only had I written this thinking of Sterling the entire time, but if he doesn’t want to do it, which I found very possible and even probable, I’m not sure I’m going to move on with the TV series without him,” Fogelman admits.

That was never a question for Brown, who’s also an executive producer of the series. “As soon as I read the pilot, I was like, ‘Ah, shit that’s easy. When do we start?’ ” he says. “One of the other things was having Steve Beers, one of our producers, be able to get our crew together. The crew for This Is Us is 80 percent intact for Paradise. It’s like a homecoming.”

Production designer Kevin Bird, one of the rare new faces on the Paramount lot, where the show is filmed, was tasked with building the look of the fabricated two-and-a-half-mile-wide city set in the Colorado mountainside.

“We landed on this sort of New England architecture, but Disney-fied,” Bird explains. “Creepy-perfect.”

Fogelman initially had a very different idea for the show’s setting. “At one point, I toyed with the reveal being that they weren’t underground but in fact were on a space station, but that just seemed really hard, so I abandoned that,” he says.

Much of the design was informed by a 25-page scholarly paper on how to govern such a city, written by a professor of sociology specifically for the show.

“That rule book gave us our guide for when we were building and location scouting,” says Bird, who built most of the series’ interior spaces — characters’ homes, the library, the diner — on stages. “Obviously there’s no shortage of mansions in L.A., so for that we were good,” he adds of the exterior facades for the wealthy homeowners. For the suburban neighborhood where characters like Collins and Pace live, the crew shot north of Los Angeles in Santa Clarita.

To add to the uniqueness of the city, composer Siddhartha Khosla, who wrote the score for the show, also created the sounds that are heard when residents swipe the electronic wristbands they wear, which is how they pay for everything and also receive special alerts. “I was on the phone once with [editor] Howard [Leder], and I had this omnichord, which is like this ’80s synth [musical instrument], and I just started tweaking it a little bit and playing little bleeps and bloops from it and he’s like, ‘That’s cool, send me that,’ ” Khosla recalls.

Part of the season finale was shot inside a quarry, with the episode retracing the steps of President Bradford’s killer, revealed to be — spoiler alert — the city librarian (Ian Merrigan), a former project manager who was fired when he sounded the alarm on construction workers being exposed to arsenopyrite poisoning while building the underground city.

“It had a 180-degree huge rock wall about 250 feet tall,” says Bird. “We found this unbelievable blimp hangar, which is an existing location from World War II, and decided that that would be an amazing entrance into the mountain.”

Shooting on location limited the amount of VFX used in the series, and Los Angeles, with its diverse terrain, proved ideal for making Paradise look as real as possible.

“If it was all stage builds, in the end it does start to feel like that if you can’t pop outside and see a real world we’re building,” says Bird. “And the scale, we’d never be able to build onstage, so in the end [shooting in L.A.] helped, actually.”

Filming for season two has resumed in Los Angeles, the location a priority for both Fogelman and Brown, who want to see more production brought back to Hollywood.

“Now that we still shoot on the Paramount lot, we can pretty much use whichever [stage] we want because there’s just not the same level of activity in the city anymore,” he says, in comparison to when he filmed This Is Us there from 2016 to 2022. “The $750 million, the infusion, I hope it’ll be something,” he adds of the proposed new cap for the film tax credit plan that has passed in the state Senate. “I hope it’s not too little, too late.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.