In the opening scene of the new HBO series “Betty,” premiering Friday at 11 p.m., a young female skateboarder (Nina Moran) weaves around cars and through the traffic down Madison Avenue — unmasked, unbothered and unafraid.
There’s a sense of freedom that, since we’ve been on coronavirus lockdown, feels like light-years ago now. But the show — about a diverse group of five young women cruising around New York City on their skateboards — was just shot last summer.
“I think there’ll be a real nostalgia for this city that we love so much,” says “Betty” director Crystal Moselle about the series, which is based on her 2018 film “Skate Kitchen.” “In the show, New York City is its own character. And it’s sad to not be able to connect with the city like we once were. Now it’s almost, like, scary.”
“Betty” — which stars Moran, Dede Lovelace, Moonbear, Ajani Russell and Rachelle Vinberg playing fictionalized versions of themselves — will definitely make you long for the good ol’ days when we could all be outside and enjoy the city in all its gritty glory. And if you don’t already live in New York, it just might even make you want to move here post-pandemic.
“I think anything that portrays New York in a romantic kind of way always gets people wanting to come here,” says Moonbear, 26, who plays Honeybear on the show. But staying at home now, the Brooklyn resident, whose real name is Kabrina Adams, admits that she is missing the city that she knows. “I would be out more, because I like to start skating again around spring,” she says.
But “Betty” — which refers to “a girl who skateboards or surfs, so it’s like a Surf Betty or a Skate Betty,” explains Moselle — captures a lot of what we’ve all been missing, in scenes that go from Washington Square Park to the Williamsburg Bridge. A big setting for the four-wheeling action is the LES Skate Park.
“We shot there so many times, and it is the most difficult place to shoot at because there’s a train going overhead every 30 seconds and there’s the traffic on the [Manhattan] Bridge,” says Moselle, 39. “It’s so loud that it, like, vibrates in your head. At first, we’d try to shoot in between the trains, so that the audio would be good. And then we just said, ‘F - - k it’ and we just [kept] shooting, and we’d bring in dialogue later. But it’s like a cathedral of skateboarding.”
Another “epic” place where they shot was the Maloof Skate Park in Queens, with the Unisphere providing a backdrop in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. “It was beautiful,” says the Brooklyn-based director. “A lot of the boys in our [show], they grew up in that area, so they would skate there. The angles of the park are incredibly big, so that’s why that group of kids, they’re really good, because it’s challenging.”
They continued to location-hop around the city to Golconda Skate Park, also known as Fat Kid, under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. “That’s a beautiful park as well. It’s, like, very gritty,” says Moselle, who made sure to respect the skateboarders’ space.
“I didn’t want to just take over somebody’s park and tell them they had to leave,” she adds. “We were constantly working with the locals from each of the parks and hiring them [as extras] for background, so they got to skate for the day and get paid. I wanted to make sure that we would bring people from the park into the show, so that we were giving back to the community.”
For Moonbear, a special location was Chelsea Skate Park, where they shot under the lights at night. “I used to go to that park a lot, but didn’t really go too much right before filming that, so it was kinda like, ‘Oh, we’re back here again!’ ” she says. “When we were filming the overnight scene, I was actually really tired, so that part where I fell asleep, I was basically sleeping.”
But Moonbear’s favorite moment to film took place at Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick, where the girls were grooving instead of skating. “We’re all dancing in the park,” she says of the scene that was inspired by the Soul Summit outdoor parties. “And it was my birthday that day.”
At the end of the day, though, “Betty” comes back to the girls on their skateboards riding through the concrete jungle without worrying about social distancing.
“The girls have such a connection to the concrete, the shapes of buildings and the shapes of curves and grates and all these things that they can play with on their skateboards,” says Moselle. “I hope that people can get lost in it and feel the love that they have for the concrete and being outdoors and connecting with people. You know, being around people.”