Legacies bosses, stars preview the imaginative film noir episode

Legacies isn't afraid to let its imagination run wild when it comes to settings. So far, the supernatural CW drama has visited an alternate reality and an '80s video game, and in the March 12 installment, "There's a Place Where the Lost Things Go," it sends its characters into a film noir world to deal with their trauma.

"Legacies is doing its first and maybe only film noir episode, which is born out of the brilliant mind of [executive producer] Brett Matthews, who actually studied noir in film school and is a huge fan of the genre and knows it intimately," said creator Julie Plec when she and the cast dropped by EW's studio at SCAD aTVfest 2020 Saturday morning. "We just wanted to dive into a fantasy world we hadn’t done before."

When the writers started breaking the episode, they didn't intend to set it in film noir; however, that location ended up being the best fit for the episode thematically.

"It was just a genre that stuck with me for a long time," said Matthews about choosing the film noir location. "Actually, we had the episode broken and we didn’t know conceptually what we wanted the world to be. There were a lot of ideas on the table. There was Western, there was steampunk, there was Victorian. Film noir just became the perfect storm of producible and fit the tone of the season and that particular episode."

The episode's premise gave the cast an opportunity to play alternate versions of their characters. For example, Lizzie Saltzman (Jenny Boyd) is a movie star, and Quincy Fouse's MG is a gumshoe detective and the narrator of the episode, which Plec said was a "good look" on him. "It was very fun, very different," said Fouse. "I personally had some trouble getting over how different it was, because MG is this bubbly charismatic guy and now he’s in the film noir universe where that person does not exist at all. So who is this guy now?"

Sideways adventures like this are what keep the show interesting for the cast. "It was a change of pace, which is nice," said Hope's portrayer Danielle Rose Russell. "I feel like a lot of our episodes gives us the go-ahead to break it up and so we’re never feeling super stuck, I feel like. Oddly, it felt like some of the most grounded stuff we’ve done because we were talking about real person things."

Watch the video above.

Legacies airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on The CW.

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