“I’ve always wanted to make a sort of surreal, Twin Peaks-y show,” Gregg Araki says about his new series, Now Apocalypse, which premiered Sunday night on STARZ. The director, known for cult films like Mysterious Skin and The Doom Generation, created the show alongside Slutever’s Karley Sciortino, citing it as “one of the best creative experiences I’ve ever had.”
Now Apocalypse follows Ulysses (Avan Jogia), a 20-something gay stoner who spends his days goofing off at his security job, getting extremely high off his vape pen, and trying to make sense of the strange visions he’s been having about mysterious alien-like creatures roaming the show’s stylized version of Los Angeles. Like many gay men in metropolitan areas, he’s looking for a “real relationship” but has no problem hooking up with hot strangers in the meantime. He also likes discussing his hookups with his best friends: Carly (Kelli Berglund), an aspiring actress and part-time webcam model, and Ford (Beau Mirchoff), a delusional screenwriter whose family wealth and charming good looks (a “cornfed, all-American Abercrombie type,” in Araki’s words) get him much further in the world than his “talent.”
Bathed in rich, highly saturated colors, Now Apocalypse is exactly what you would expect from a millennial sex comedy by Gregg Araki. The dialogue is hilarious, the performances are spot on, and its portrait of young adults as aimless dreamers with uninhibited sexual appetites is perfectly relatable. The plentiful sex scenes are hot — at least, when they’re intended to be. Even if the show doesn’t have anything particularly grand to say about the human mind, it’s an enjoyable watch with a very fresh perspective, effectively transposing the feel-good vibes of a low-budget stoner film onto a cable television show.
them. hopped on the phone with Araki to talk about his long journey to television, writing sex-positive stories before anyone else, and why so many of his characters have been potheads.
Warning: Mild spoilers to follow.
Where did the idea for Now Apocalypse originate?
I’ve wanted to do a TV show for twenty years. I’ve been making these indie movies for 25 or 30 years, and I had been toying with the idea of doing a TV show for a long time — I’ve always been secretly fascinated by the TV medium. But in the past few years, I’ve been able to direct other people’s episodic shows — like Riverdale, 13 Reasons Why, and American Crime — and having worked with all these amazing showrunners, I was like, “God. Creating and running a show is so much work.” They literally never sleep. I thought the only way it would be worth it is to do something that’s my dream, something that’s everything I ever wanted it to be. So a few years ago, I started thinking, “If I ever get to make my all-time favorite dream show, what would it be?”
I always wanted to make a sort of surreal, Twin Peaks-y show. So I started thinking about this story and it started germinating. Around the same time, I met Karley Sciortino and we really hit it off. I called Karley and asked if she would like to write the show with me. We wrote it, and it was exactly what I wanted the show to be, and if it was too weird or too crazy to get made, then fine. I didn’t want to do a watered-down version. But I showed it to Greg Jacobs, who I worked with on Red Oaks, and he just flipped over it. He’s partners with [Steven] Soderberg, who has this deal with STARZ, and it just sort of happened almost overnight. The stars aligned. I just got creative carte blanche to do whatever I wanted.
Your vision of modern-day millennial life is so spot-on, particularly with regard to sexual fluidity. How are you able to get into the minds of today’s 20-somethings?
It’s funny. Karley and I just got back from Sundance with the cast, and when we had our premiere there, she was like, “I saw Nowhere when I was 19 and it blew my mind. It was such a big influence on me, this world of free sexuality.”
I feel the same way about the first time I stumbled across Kaboom in high school.
Exactly! And it’s funny because the world has sort of caught up with those movies in a way. Sexual fluidity existed in the ‘90s, but it wasn’t as widespread and prevalent as it is today. There’s a line in episode three where Carly says, “Well, I’m a millennial. Sexual fluidity is a requirement.” That specific attitude is very new. But writing those characters is not hard for me because it’s where my head has always been. They really just speak to me in a very strong way.
You also tackle the dark side of sex, too. There’s an assault plotline, which also feels very relevant to our present-day discussions — about #MeToo, consent, abuse of power, and more.
There’s a lot of observation there in terms of things I’ve actually seen in Hollywood. Like I said, this is my dream show, so I was able to put so much stuff into it that was really personal to me — things I’ve seen through the years, things I’ve always wanted to put into a movie. I mean, the Barnabas character is based on numerous people I’ve met through the years. I wouldn’t say this show is autobiographical, but it’s definitely very “lived-in.”
I think it’s funny that Ford, the only main character who’s a straight white male, is almost cartoonish, while everyone else gets to be quite grounded.
Beau Mirchoff does such a fantastic job with the Ford character. He’s so funny, but at the same time, he’s so heartbreaking. I think his journey ends up being so much more emotional than I thought it was going to be. You really end up feeling for him with the way he’s dragged into this non-monogamous relationship because he loves his girlfriend so much. I also love how close he is with Uly. It’s so cool how this queer guy and his straight friend can be so bonded together. I think Beau and Avan did such a fantastic job fleshing out that relationship.
In addition to making one of the most influential stoner comedies of all time with Smiley Face, a lot of your filmography has featured marijuana. That continues in Now Apocalypse, with Uly wondering whether his visions are just the effects of “smoking too much weed.” Did you want this show to have that stoner comedy feel?
It’s funny. I didn’t really realize how much of a stoner movie this show is, like how much pot there is in it. That was one of the things I noticed the most when I saw all the episodes put together. But Smiley Face is definitely a big influence. I’ve always been really interested in surrealism and this sort of stylized and heightened reality, and the psychedelic, hallucinogenic parts of the show are such a big part of the whole universe of Now Apocalypse that it just all kind of fits together — Uly smoking pot all the time and not being sure what’s real and what’s not. Also, it’s set in Los Angeles, which is a place where fantasy and reality blur together. Things don’t always feel real here. They feel very surreal and you don’t really know what’s going on sometimes.
Earlier, you said you put every possible idea you had into this show. Do you have anything left for a potential second season?
I was just telling Karley, “This show is so crazy, who knows if we’ll get a second season!” But STARZ loves it and they’re so behind it. They’ve already asked us to write season two. We don’t have a greenlight or anything yet, but we’re in the process of writing it.
The thing is that a lot of these millennial sex comedies like Girls or Insecure run out super quickly. Everybody sleeps with everybody, everybody cheats on everybody, everybody breaks up with everybody, and then they run out of story, and it’s like, “Oh. We’re only two and a half seasons in.” But the universe of Now Apocalypse is so wide and crazy and unpredictable that the story could go on forever. I mean, that’s the beauty of the aliens and the conspiracy and the dreams and the David Lynch/Twin Peaks part of it. It goes to this whole other level. The setup of the show really means that the possibilities are kind of wide open. So I really hope we get a season two because it’s going to be ten times crazier than season one.
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