The Point Radio: THE LEAGUE Makes It Up as They Go

If there is a comedy line, THE LEAGUE has crossed and then some. we talk to they cast and creators on how improv takes the FXX show to new levels every week. Meanwhile, actress Jacqueline Bisset is part of an all star cast on the new Starz mini-series, DANCING ON THE EDGE. She  talks exclusively with us about this role and recalls some of her most memorable parts. THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other  mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

I'm Mike Raub. When it comes to outrageous comedy, nobody outdoes the League. We talk to the cast and creators about just how they get over that line and keep on going. Plus, actress Jacqueline Bessette has had a great movie and television career. Now she's got something new she's pretty excited about.

We'll tell you exactly what that is. Let's get to the point. This is the point. The point radio. Get the point radio.

Get the point radio. Dancing on the Edge is a lush new miniseries running right now on stars. And with a cast that includes Matthew Goode, John Goodman and accomplished actress Jacqueline Bessette who talked to me a little bit about her role. Basically the story is about a black jazz band trying to get going in England.

We're having difficulties. They're being subjected to various racist attitudes and apparently at that time the upper classes were many people were quite racist and there were a lot of snobbish lifestyles and not very pleasant attitudes. But my character is playing an aristocrat.

She's a very grand woman who has lost her three sons in the first world war and has been for about 15 years has been really right out of the scene. She's just been a reckless living in a very large house. And she meets Stuart L. I. Joffor. I mean, no, she doesn't meet.

She meets Matthew Goode's character at a funeral and he pushes to meet her because he knows a lot about her. Because apparently she knows she knows everybody. She's being very well connected in her life. She's always been a kind of benefactor to the arts.

And he tries to get to know her because he wants to introduce her to some singers and get get some push from her. He knows that she might be able to connect them to important people. And as I find him quite amusing, this pushy young man played by Matthew Goode, I invite them for tea.

And from a rather stiff beginning, we start to get close and I get pulled into rather enjoying my life again. And John Goodman, who plays from somebody I know, but he's a very, very wealthy man and has a lot of power and a lot of peculiar personality traits. He's got this rather peculiar life.

One wonders a lot about him. What's he up to? He's pulled us all into a sort of a kind of web. So we all sort of end up being almost working for him on some level. And I'm missing where I am.

And Stuart L. I. Joffor, who plays in, he's going through this great success now, this great month with the 12 years of slaves. He plays the band leader and he is doing fairly well with my help, with the help of his enthusiasts, the royalty who he's being introduced to. The music's going well, the singers are singing well, but then there's a murder.

And the murder starts to change the rapport of people and some of the old racist attitudes start to come out. And I don't want to tell you the whole story, but he is in a real quandary at that point because even though he has a good life, relatively speaking to what it was in the beginning of the piece, things are starting to shift.

And I'm going to leave it at that. Being set in the 1920s makes dancing on the edge of period piece. And I asked Jacqueline if she enjoys doing that kind of work. Yes, I do like doing period pieces. I like it, first of all, because normally, at those times, people spoke, they used language

more clearly. They didn't just say, you know, like, cool. They said things. So they used language. And I like to use language.

That's part of the reason I wanted to be an actress, is I love words and I like expressing myself in the character. You just get the feeling that you're living a richer life on some level, sometimes. And my character had a lot of subjects, but there's a lot going on behind her and a lot of pain and then a lot of rebirth and a lot of questions.

And the costumes, of course, are always fun, too. You know, they're getting your physical look together. And in this case, I look rather different than I do normally. But all those little points, and that's part of the fun of acting, is the dress up and the play and thinking about other people's lives so that you can feel them from the inside.

I'm quite a psychological person and I enjoy listening to people and I enjoy observing people. So gradually, you put your character together, obviously led by the script, because the script tells you what you've got to do. You can't do something unless it's in the script.

You can't be better than the material, really. If there's no scene for you to be brilliant in, you can't be brilliant. You can only do what you're told. And the film is a collaborative medium. And we're all sort of in a sense, one is a puppet for the director to move around.

So you hope that you won't be treated like a puppet. You hope that you'll be given a chance to flesh out your character. And I've done a few period pieces that I really enjoyed. I did Napoleon and Josephine years ago, which was fun. And I did Anna Coretta and what else have I done, period.

Well, I've done quite a few. And I think I'm good at them. But I also like playing modern. I like to play a nip tuck with a good fun character for me a few years ago. I play the real baddie.

With such a rich resume that includes movies like Murder on the Orient Express and Bullet, I asked Jacqueline how she manages to choose just the right role. I think one tries to avoid playing some generic kind of character that you've seen before. You need some conflict. You need some conflict.

You need some things that are going. You don't just want happy times unless it's a comedy. You need meat and potatoes, scenes of confrontation, difficulty, things that you can get so you can find other things that you haven't done before. I really hate repeating myself.

And when you've done a lot, it's quite hard to find things that you feel like you haven't done before. You need to dig. You've got to be able to dig into your human experience and find stuff that has not been exposed.

And it's a constant thing. I think some actors work too much and there isn't enough time between. I think some actors, they work so often that you have no real desire to see them. They're always there. And I think that's a tendency that people do nowadays between their duty commercials

and all the things that people do to sell stuff and everything. You really don't think of them as actors. I would tend to be of the school of being a bit more private in one's life so that when you do a performance, there's a chance that the audience might believe you in that character. That just happens to be the way I feel about it.

Amongst all the projects, which ones were the most memorable? Well, I think I've been lucky. I've had some very well-written bits. I mean, I think a little movie that nobody hardly saw was a movie that I considered memorable. It was called The Sleepy Time Gal.

We made it for very little money. We did it over a three-year period. And I thought it was an absolutely brilliantly written piece. And one of the most difficult roles I ever did, I'm very, very proud of that particular piece.

Unfortunately, it didn't end up in the big blockbuster-type films. But it doesn't make any difference. It's like a kernel of joy for me to have attacked that role and to have pulled it off. And I think I got probably the best reviews of my life for that film. But there's lots of bits of things that I like doing.

I did a movie called Another Volcano with Albert Finney and John Huston directing. And that was an interesting character. And you're playing with light and dark when you're acting. You really have to open your body up to feeling and honesty. You really need to be honest when you're…

The process of acting is really about being honest, even though you're lying, because you're not in the situation. You really need to believe that what you're doing is true. So that's the process that we deal with. But there's honesty with intrigue and there's honesty with no fascination at all.

So finding the lines of texture and layering and having things that are going on in your head that are not necessarily obvious, that make the audience have to ask questions. What's she thinking? What's he thinking? What's really going on?

You need all those subtle things. And Lady Cremon, who I play in Dancing on the Edge, has got layers. Her layers are based on having had a very fortunate life, having lost everything with losing her three sons, and having withdrawn. But so just pulling back into the story.

I liked it. I cared about her. Dancing on the Edge with new episodes every week on Stars and catch up on what you may have missed right now at stars.com. Here we go with the latest in pop culture.

New season of Duck Dynasty's come to a close. And if you're already missing your show, well, you can play the game A&E and Red Interactive. I've introduced Duck Dynasty Battle of the Beards. It's a game available only in the App Store. And it challenges you to do things like duck hunts, chili eating, or blowing up beaver

dams. Again, it is available in the App Store and it's called Duck Dynasty Battle of the Beards. It should be interesting to see how long time TV fans are going to react to this, but CBS is colorizing a couple of episodes of I Love Lucy, including the Christmas episode, which has not been seen very much, and the popular Lucy's Italian movie, the one where she stops

grapes episode as well into one holiday special. It'll be coming up on CBS. It's airing on Friday, December 20th at 8 p.m. Out goes Jax and in comes the Huntsman. Jamie Dornan is now going to be playing Christian Grey in 50 Shades of Grey.

You know, Jamie from his role in Once Upon a Time as the Huntsman. And as you also know, Charlie Hunnam dropped out of the project a few weeks back, citing scheduling issues. The much talked about adaptation of the book is said to be in theaters next August. We're a couple of weeks away from, of course, the debut of Thor Dark World, so there's lots

of Marvel information coming out of the studio. Among the most interesting bits is a confirmation that the Black Panther film is in development. Of course, no casting or scheduling yet, but it's good to know that the film is on Marvel's serious list. So what do you do when you have a television pilot and the network doesn't pick it up?

Well, in the case of Sarah Silverman, she's putting it up on YouTube. The episode, the first one of her proposed series, Susan 313, will be on Sarah's YouTube channel. It's produced by 20th Century Fox and they've given her the blessing to put it up there. In the meantime, on some more positive news from TV, Showtime renewed Masters as Sex for

a second season and Homeland has gotten the blessing for season four on Showtime. The marketing continues for Anchor Man 2 with a new flavor at Ben and Jerry's just in time for the movie called Scotchy Scotch Scotch and a new trailer as well, which we put up for you to check out at GetThePointRadio.com. Anchor Man 2 is set to premiere in theaters in December.

There's been another setback in the quest of the heirs of Jack Kirby to get the copyright to the characters he created for Marvel Comics away from Marvel and Disney. The New York City Federal Court of Appeals has denied the latest petition for her rehearing of that judgment, saying that the heirs have no right to issue copyright termination notices to Marvel.

No word yet on exactly if there'll be any more legal steps taken in this long-running case. The point is ready. There's one thing that's certain about the FX comedy The League and that is after five seasons there's no way to predict what the characters will say or do.

And part of that comes from co-creators and writers Jackie Marcus-Shafer and her husband Jeff, who taught to be a little bit about how the creative process goes. Well we write single spaced 12, 15 page outlines that have scene numbers and locations and lots of dialogue in them. And then it's our responsibility as showrunners particularly of a show that's made probably

for a lot less money than any other show that's coming through here. We only have three and a half days an episode to shoot. So you don't have a lot of time to get in there and just stick around. You've got to get in there and know that you're going to be able to shoot that episode in three and a half days, which is pretty fast.

So I think where the improvising begins is we put stuff in there in those outlines, but unlike most network shows or some cable shows, we're not married to every single word and all the punctuation that goes with it. And so people get to say it in their own way and they can beat the joke. And if you've got a better take on that line, if you've got a better joke, bring it on.

And often they do. And from there? Yeah, in every scene that we shoot, there's an outline and then there's the live rewrite that happens on camera. And so between the first take of the scene and the sixth take of the scene, that scene

is getting rewritten many times and then it's getting rewritten again in the edit room when we have to take all these choices and all these amazing guys have said, we're throwing lines out and they're throwing lines out and we're trying all this stuff. And in the edit room, you've got all these choices and you sort of figure out, okay, what's the absolute funniest version of the scene?

We're only going to be able to use 30% of it for air. And, you know, we use the best 50% for the DVD. And sometimes somebody will improvise a line and it's a great idea, but it's not exactly what's going to work. And we'll sit there and say, okay, take a little bit of that, but then do this instead.

And so it becomes this collaborative process of, you know, a really terrific kernel of a new idea that then, or sometimes it's just terrific dialogue that just replaces what's already there. Rafi, played by Jason Mandzukas, is pretty much the most over the top character. And I asked Jason, is there anything here that's taken from real life?

Sure. I mean, not like line for line or anything like that, but I'm certainly, you know, like I think everybody does it, but I get a lot of feedback from fans who are like, oh, one of two things either. Oh, I'm the Rafi in my league or, oh man, we've got a Rafi in our league.

We hate him. So like, I feel like everybody has, every group has that friend who is just a little crazier than everybody else and just a little more unsettling. And I definitely have a bunch of friends who are like that and have over the years. So there's a lot of Rafi specifics that are drawn from real people.

Yeah. So with so much of the show, depending on improv, well, what if one of the actors shows up on the set and just isn't on their game that day? Katie Assleton, who plays Jenny, told me how that goes. But that's the great thing about being a part of an ensemble, you know, and it's also

like these guys are really great. They're very cool about like, you know what you should say, you know, it'd be really funny for Jenny right here is like this or like, you know, Nick will have a line that, you know, Mark will scoop up and no one really cares. You just sort of want the scene to be as funny as it can possibly be.

So if you have an off day, it's okay. The other day I said to Steve, I was like, I'm a fratata today. Like I have got nothing. I am so sorry. I was like, please just say the line that you're going to say every time because I can't

bounce around you. Just say it. And he was like, okay. Mark Duvelas, who plays Pete, told me that it doesn't take a whole lot for him to step into character.

No, not really. I mean, if it's not like this is a very emotionally deep show, this is about people being casual with their friends and telling hopefully some highly refined dick jokes. So that doesn't require too much prep. We've got more with the cast and the creators of League.

Meanwhile, catch new episodes every week on FXX. And of course, see more at FXnetworks.com and catch the first four seasons right now on DVD. That does it for now. We're back in a few days more on the League.

And I sat down to continue the funny with Alex Borstein. You know her as Lois from Family Guy. That's a wonderful idea. Now Alex is out to make a different name for herself with a cause that's pretty close to her heart.

In the meantime, keep in touch with all pop culture and Get the Point Radio. Listen for free on your laptop or your desktop and get the point radio dot com. On your mobile device, either Android or iPhone, you can listen with an app from iNet Radio or with our app in the Apple iTunes store under Pop Culture and The Point. Or for the Android device, there's an app called TuneIn Radio 2.

All makes it easy to take us anywhere you want to go. Of course, the podcast turns up twice every week on websites like ComicMix.com and Michael Davis World.com. We're in the iTunes podcast directory. We love it when you subscribe.

We also kind of get off when you follow us on social media too. We're easy to track under the point radio on Facebook and Twitter. Talk to you in a few days. Thanks for watching.