The Scene The Flight Attendant Season Two Episode One
In the first season of HBO Maxs The Flight Attendant Cassie Kaley Cuoco is frequently pulled back into her mind—called the mind palace by those who work on the show—where she has conversations with the man she found dead in her bed in a Bangkok hotel Michiel Huisman as a way for her to work out her past trauma.
When that mystery wrapped up at the end of the season coshowrunners Steve Yockey and Natalie Chaidez had to figure out if the mind palace would return and in what form. They eventually came up with the idea that the person opposite Cassie in the mind palace this year should be…Cassie. Chaidez says the idea came up after watching Cassie go to the journey of admitting she was an addict and then thinking about her character and thinking about What do you do with that other piece of yourself that dark part of yourself? So they decided that in season two Cassie who was on her sobriety journey while also working as a flight attendant along with a side hustle as a CIA asset would meet other versions of herself in the mind palace.
I think it was just a really cool way for us to truly see inside her mind and what shes going through says Cuoco who was nominated for a lead-actress Emmy for her work on the first season. Every person has multiple parts of their personality that they dont want to show to the world. We hide a lot of things and we try to show the better sides of ourselves. But at the end of the day we cannot escape who we truly are.
In this scene from Seeing Double the first episode of the second season Cassie is dropped into the mind palace for one of her first confrontations with gold-dress Cassie the version of herself who used to like to drink and party—clad in that very familiar ensemble from the first season. Its a quick scene but to pull it off the Flight Attendant team along with star and executive producer Cuoco had to carefully choreograph every moment and use demanding technology to get it to look as seamless as it does onscreen.
Image may contain Human Blonde Teen Kid Person Child Furniture Couch Sitting and Kaley Cuoco What I wanted to do is win over the audience both with performance and the technical component says the episodes director Silver Tree. For the first scene with both Cassies the team chose to use a special-effects technique called motion control which allowed them to film Cuoco as the different Cassies and then layer those into a single image. So Cuoco films one Cassie while a body double stands in for the other and then she changes and films the other character. Cuoco assumed this would be like any other day on set and so she was surprised at first when she was told there would be a day of rehearsal dedicated to just learning how to use this new technique.
So I go to the stages for this first day of rehearsal and I open the stage door and—Im not joking—I actually thought I was on the wrong stage she remembers. I thought Id walked into a Marvel movie. It was like this giant camera which is a motion-capture camera which Id never seen in person before. I was the size of a T. rex. It was so big. And I saw like five blonde girls that were rehearsing these moves for me.
She soon realized this was going to be a very different experience from the way that she usually shoots the show. A physical actor who often enjoys finding the scene and the emotions on set Cuoco is known for her ability to step into a scene and energetically try a lot of different takes I was worried that the process would bog her down and make it less fun and interesting and inspired says Tree. And as all things were with Kaley theres a very very quick learning curve and then she gets really into it and excited. She really rose to the occasion.
Cuoco filmed the gold-dress version of Cassie first for the scene. She would then rush back to her trailer to change looks and return immediately to film the other Cassie. She had these sort of Herculean sprints back to base camp to change says Yockey. Shed be like Im going to make this change in 20 minutes and then shed run. And so if someone happened to be on the Warner Bros. studio tour riding by theyd see Kaley Couco in that gold dress and sneakers sprinting across the parking lot to base camp to make a change. He adds that by the time Cuoco returned she was back in character as the next Cassie. We would see her a lot with her headphones listening to music. Or shed kind of set herself off to the side. And I think it was to kind of protect those changes.
The toughest part of this process is that any inconsistency between takes—from light to Cuocos movements or eyeline—might make it completely unusable. The team even decided to up the difficulty by having gold-dress Cassie walk around real-world Cassie an incredibly challenging task in motion capture. The whole point of motion capture is you cant cross another body. So if you cross you almost disappear if that makes sense says Cuoco.
Having gold-dress Cassie remain a part of the story in season two allows the current-day Cassie who is trying to live a sober life to face off against her biggest adversary—her own inner demons. It also allows the audience to enjoy Cuocos performance as the more off-kilter drunk Cassie. While the alcoholism was such a serious part of season one there were also really a lot of fun parts to her as a drinker. She was bubbly and outgoing and had all that charm that we love when Kaleys putting it on where she can just wind anyone around her little finger says Tree of gold-dress Cassie. So we got a little bit of our cake and eating it too here.
In the scene real-world Cassie insists that shes making strides toward improving her life but gold-dress Cassie is able to put some doubt in her mind. Cheers to making better choices baby! says gold-dress Cassie as the scene wraps up and she heads back to the mind palaces well-stocked bar. The character may have made a welcome return but
Cuoco jokes that shes ready to leave her signature ensemble behind. I never want to see that gold dress ever again she tells Vanity Fair with a laugh adding that they had five of those dresses at the start of the first season and each is now on their last leg. Gold dress came a long way. It was great while it lasted.
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