Payton Russell

A conversation with showrunners, playwrights, and actors, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen.

---

There’s a rule in improv: the rule of “yes, and.” You take an offer and expand upon it. This principle shows up everywhere — acting, writing, philosophy, even arithmetic. It’s the foundation of building something from a seed of barely nothing.

In theatre practitioner, Stanislavski’s teachings, the given circumstances of a scene become the springboard from which all acting begins – the movement is not as simple as “she walks”, it’s “she walks, and it’s a brisk pace, because she’s late for the meeting that could make or break her job.” Meanwhile, Meisner teaches acting is reacting. When your scene partner nervously fidgets as he tells you, “I like your dress” – that’s an offer. You respond by building upon it – “Can I get you a tissue? You’re sweating.” For actress Uta Hagen, playing an image-obsessed aristocrat means you need to put yourself in heels, allowing the shoes to influence how you move about the world.

These acting methods ground even the most absurdist stories in the messy, specific details of real life. That’s the “yes, and” – taking an offer and building on it until it becomes something unique and deeply human.

Sitting across from Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen – creators of Somebody Somewhere, writers of their feature film, Driveways, and writers on Mozart in the Jungle and High Maintenance – it’s clear they’ve mastered this collaborative method of creativity.

In conversation, Hannah and Paul bounce off one another effortlessly, taking each other’s offers and coloring them. Like Sam in Somebody Somewhere, Hannah has an easy, sarcastic charm, as well as a keen eye for small beauties (right before we sat down, she purchased a special pencil set). Paul, like Joel, is upbeat, encouraging, and a generous listener – always clarifying and anchoring the discussion when needed. After talking with them, it’s clear they brought their friendship into Somebody Somewhere, both intentionally, and likely through small, unintentionally specific offers.

The writing team got their start in playwriting and acting, including studying Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre. Unlike some commercialized aspects of Hollywood, it’s clear that Hannah and Paul are true artists – folding their curiosities and interests into their work, instead of chasing what’s “hot”. This humanity shows in everything they do, from small, Austin Film Festival interviews, to their award-winning HBO series and films.

Below, we discuss their partnership, Somebody Somewhere, and the many plays they wrote before paving their way into TV.

---

Start of the Partnership

Payton Russell (PR): How did this partnership begin? 

Hannah Bos (HB): We met in college, became best friends, and started writing plays together. Our senior thesis was our first project, and after, I went to grad school for acting. We didn’t really know how to write, but we wanted to write for ourselves because we were actor-writers and had trouble getting cast. So, we wrote this play together. We didn’t know what we were doing—like many steps of our journey we were just figuring it out by trying it. Then, after he went to Minneapolis and worked at a theater company, both of us went to Russia to study Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theater. Then, we moved to New York at the same time. We didn’t have connections, so we self-produced our senior thesis play, and that sort of sprung into this theater company, The Debate Society.

Paul Thureen (PT): We wrote and self-produced ten plays over about fifteen years. Slowly, over that time, we met people who would introduce us to someone else, who would introduce us to someone else who liked our work.

HB: It probably took us seven years in New York to make a little dent into things. It was pounding the pavement – we would do chili cook-offs to raise money, pay for the shows ourselves, or write grants. We worked in a honky-tonk restaurant called Rodeo Bar. We were roommates, collecting props off the streets for pieces. It was about a fifteen-year journey.

PR: What was that first play you wrote for your thesis about?

HB: It was about Daniil Kharms, a Russian absurdist writer who wrote tiny little incidents—

PT: We put it up in a squash court, just the two of us. It was very physical, weird, funny, dark, very Russian, and we played all these different fairy tale–like characters… but dark.

Theatre and Acting

PR: I feel like your work is so personal and grounded in humanity. I was wondering how you bring your acting experience and craft into your writing.

HB: We think about it like it’s a full 360 degrees. We’re always reading stuff we write and thinking about how it would be to say it out loud. Then we think, “that sounds like a play, that sounds like a TV show—we got caught up on that line.” It’s nice to try things on a little bit.

PT: We’re always writing at the same time. We don’t divide and conquer; it’s always us in-person or on Zoom, but still together. When we’re writing, you’ll see us zone out and acting in our heads to feel how the words fit in our mouths. When we were writing plays, we’d ask, “What would I love to see? What would I really love?” As an actor, when you get a script you love – it feels special. We want every moment, every line, to have that care. A lot comes from that actor’s ear and curiosity about people and the world. When we were making plays, it was always, “What are we going to dream about for the next two or three years?” It’s the same making a show— “What would I love to think about and make with my best friend?”

PR: Were you acting in most of the plays you put up?

HB: Yes, but it changed, slowly. At first, it was just the two of us writing and acting. Then we started writing for friends who, like us, weren’t getting the parts we thought they could play. We wrote against type for ourselves, so we started doing it for our friend Michael Cyril Creighton. We wrote parts no one would cast him in, and he was amazing. We kept doing that, and then hard cut to Somebody Somewhere. It was similar– writing for Bridget Everett and thinking against type for her and other actors.

PR: What typecasting were each of you trying to write against?

PT:  In college, we were cast as old people, dead people, ghosts—because I was tall, had a beard; she had crazy hair, so the professors were like, “Oh, they’re going to be the weird characters.”

HB: If you’re not an ingenue, then you’re just in this other category, you know?

PR: What characters did you like to write for yourselves?

HB: In that first play we each played probably 30 characters. It was us saying, “Oh, you think we can’t do anything? Then we’re going to play them all!”

PT: And then, our second play was an hour and a half long with maybe ten words of dialogue, set in a post-apocalyptic world.

HB: I played a little girl growing feathers out of her back at the end of the world. She lived in a floating house. We put it up in a big warehouse. It was pretty. I can’t believe we had the balls to do this—

PT: Looking back, those scripts feel like they belonged to different people, but there were nuggets of who we are now. In that Russian play, we talked a lot about collisions—no transitions, just sharp changes in emotion. And that’s something we still think about that in our work and with Somebody Somewhere—

HB: You can cry after you’re laughing and then fart. It’s the collisions of all the different things you go through—that’s life.

From Theatre into TV

PR: How did that time in New York lead to staffing on Mozart in the Jungle?

PT: We sold some pilots before that, but staffing on Mozart in the Jungle was because they read one of our plays Jacuzzi, which was about musicians in New York. And I think they were like, “We need some starving artists who can talk about what that’s like.” And so, we were like, the go-to team for answering – “What would a starving artist do?”

HB: We were hired as a team. We had always been sort of reluctant to leave our theatre scene. So, that was our first time staffing in LA, and since then, we have only been in mostly non-traditional rooms. Mozart in the Jungle was in Roman Coppola’s home, with Jason Schwartzman and all the creators. It was really wonderful. We learned very quickly how to dive in, and we learned a lot.

Somebody Somewhere

PR: I think one of the struggles I have as a writer is getting too caught up on plot, so in watching Somebody Somewhere, I was really, really impressed by the stillness of it. You really live with the characters and follow the relationships without having to have all these things happening externally. It’s all more internal. And so, I’m curious, like, when you guys approached each season, how did you plot out those arcs?

PT: I think that for us, Carolyn Strauss, our producer, said, “The show happens in the cracks.” We all liked it to breathe—easing into beginnings and ends of scenes to catch human behavior. We’re very structural, but we tried to bury the structure. If a line sounded like a line in a play, we changed it. It’s the same thing with a TV show, if something happens only to advance the plot, and you can feel the author’s hand, we try to bury that. You know, Somebody Somewhere is probably about as slice-of-life as TV can get, but you still need drive and structure.

The funny thing is that HBO was so supportive that in Season One, when we were finding the show, we put plot things in because we felt we had to, and then in post, we’d cut them. HBO was totally on board, and by the second and third season, we just wouldn’t write those scenes because we knew we’d cut them anyway.

We had to make sure there was drive, but I think we wanted it to feel more like life than a TV show. I think you have to find that barometer for whatever the project is, or whoever you’re working with, because sometimes you have to push drive a little bit more. I think we love if we can find the details in the moments of life and then hang that on a structure that has enough propulsion.

PR: After being playwrights for so long, how did you wrap your head around TV structure versus writing something contained?

HB: I think we’re still sort of figuring it out. I think we still sort of work intuitively. We know there has to be drive, but I think the beauty of coming from the playwriting world is that it teaches you how fun breaking rules can be. Lean too far into the rules, and you can see the format, which isn’t always the work I like watching.

PT: Our very first pilot we wrote was adapting one of our plays, and we worked with Carolyn Strauss, who ended up being the producer on Somebody Somewhere. Writing that first pilot over the course of the year with Carolyn Strauss, was like getting an MFA in TV writing.

HB: Put that on your blog, all caps—

PT: CAROLYN STRAUSS: THE GREATEST MIND IN TV.

HB: She’s so smart and just the classiest person ever.

PT: And then, being in the Mozart in the Jungle room, Adam Brooks was a more established writer who took us under his wing and encouraged our weirdness. 

HB: It’s always wonderful when someone’s like, “Hey, you’re doing something special. Don’t dim your light. Here are some things you should know, but keep being you.” I feel like that’s a great way to be pulled in. 

PR: I read that you were asked to pitch a show for Bridget, and it used elements of her life. But looking at you two, I feel like you are also the main characters—Joel and Sam. How did you bring yourselves into that pitch?

HB: You know, we were just looking at the timeline, and some projects take forever to pitch; this took a few weeks. We jumped at it.

PT: We found an email Bridget sent after we pitched it. We knew her a little, but not super well, because we’d only seen her live shows. She thanked us and said she didn’t know how much we knew about her life, but she connected with it. A lot of it was just intuitive, connecting us to Sam and Joel—we wanted a love story about friendship. Bridget talks about how friendships can also be central relationships. For us, our friendship is central. We share Midwest roots with Bridget and cared about representing where we came from.

PR: I feel like all the characters are so perfectly placed in the world. I was curious, if you’re starting with Bridget as the central character, how do you build out from there and populate the world?

PT: When we pitched it, we already had the idea of Joel. We knew that this was Sam’s story, but we also knew this friendship with Joel would be the central love story. We had Fred Rococo, played by Murray Hill, already attached. Murray had been an important person in Bridget’s life, so together they fit the idea of having this “found family”. Then, Sam’s dad, played by the late great Mike Hagerty, was very much inspired by my dad, who was a quiet farmer. We’re big into unexpected heroes–finding characters you often don’t see in shows, and populating the world around Sam with those with those people.

HB: After the pilot, HBO really liked her family and her relationship with her sister. We kept leaning into that, and the grief and slowly built out the Joel friendship and what that did to Sam’s character. Everything was always in relation to Sam and how it affected her.

PR: Final question: You’ve now built out three seasons of Somebody Somewhere. When starting a new season, what’s the hard-and-fast rule? Create a new problem? How do you create a new season that’s different but still honors the show?

PT: One thing HBO gave us after Season One was: How much time passes? And then intuiting what happened in-between.

HB: Amy Gravitt was brilliant. She said, “You can start it anywhere you want.” That was freeing, because I always think, “What are they doing in the last moment?” But because our show is so much like life, she said, “See where you want to start.” I was like, “Oh my God! They could have a summer vacation, and you just drop into this world somewhere else!” So that was the most inspiring thing ever. 

PT: And then we thought, “What’s the problem of the season for Sam?” We wanted real growth at the speed of life: two steps forward, one step back. The big themes were someone who is shut down opening up to friendship; then becoming jealous; then feeling left out when friends partner up. Where is Sam in this journey of coming back to life?That’s where we started each season. Carolyn Strauss would say, “We want each season to be better, a moment in time. Don’t fall into recreating what you did.”

HB: It’s a slow-growth show, but growth at the speed of life.