Rebecca additionally offered viewers several books to immerse themselves further into Hetty’s time period. “A book I read in high school that I can’t stop thinking about, especially after this episode, is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. It’s a really moving story about the psychology of a woman trapped by society and men’s expectations in the late 1800s — and that’s vastly underselling it.” “There are lots of etiquette books primarily written by men in the Gilded Age period. But there was a writer named Eliza Barton Lyman, and I’m looking forward to reading her books.” “There’s The Coming Woman and Hermaphro-deity: The Mystery of Divine Genius, which is a treatise suggesting that hermaphrodites were the most evolved form of human beings. It’s possibly some of the earlier writings about pro-trans writings, which I found exciting to hear was happening in the late 1800s.”
Interview Excerpts
- (Source) Whilst visiting the Library of Congress, Rebecca believes that “we’ve all become kind of armchair historians for our own little time periods. To walk in and have such talented curators and historians who have spent weeks putting together these really inspired, creative pastiches of not only what was literally happening politically at that moment in time, but also tangentially the years-ago story that relates. It was really thrilling.” She also shared her interest on a particular item on Hetty’s desk, ”The leading etiquette book of the time was written by a man, but there were also some women doing some really interesting work in writing in that time period, as well, that was very much about health and sexual empowerment. I don’t want to misquote it, I have it written down, but [it was about] the hermaphrodite being the most idealized, perfect form of human, and I did not know that.” Rebecca continued:” One thing that’s been really interesting for us, as well, is with this show, you’re able to watch a character with the benefit of hundreds, if not thousands of years of retrospect. You don’t get that in the real world. So, to watch the lessons that those characters can learn only through then meeting future generations that have watched those mistakes being made or heard about those mistakes being made.“
- (Source) Román fell quite emotional at Sasappis‘ table that was prepared for him, as the curator shared the story of her Munsee ancestors, and what they went through, whilst showing a listening to a wax cylinder recording of somebody singing . She thanked Román for the representation that Sass’ had brought her as someone who was Lenape, causing him to hold back tears.
- (Source) For Alberta’s table, the Library of Congress had on display several artifacts relating to the legendary jazz singer Albert Hughes, of whom Danielle‘s character was loosely based on, who’s history had clearly inspired Danielle the day she learnt of him, saying ”This is unreal to be here, and just being in the catacombs of the Library of Congress feels like such a special moment for all of us.[…] just understanding the relationship between the gangsters and the mobsters and jazz singers, and all the artists of that time. I had no idea. It’s just been fabulous. Today has been amazing.”
- (Source) When asked for anything to add onto a wish list for ghosts, Rebecca stated ”we should definitely do a musical episode.” , to which Asher Grodman lit up and said he wished for one too, alongside the desire for more conflict in the Ghosts storylines, particularly with his own character, Trevor. ”Something that he did, come back to haunt him. […]Because none of us are in a situation where we are grappling with the sins we made in our lives because it’s too far away.” Circling back to the ideas of a musical episode, Rebecca suggested, “We’ve talked about, what if we could do a thing where it kind of parallels a Shakespeare play? Like if all of a sudden we’re all somehow doing some version of The Tempest together? I think that would be very good.“
- (Source) Richie Moriarty also offered up a pretty entertaining idea for an episode, which hinged around a throwaway line. “I have one, and it’s so stupid. It’s not tied to history at all, but Pete mentions that he was in a barbershop quartet. I deeply want to do a song for my barbershop quartet with no one else, so that it’s just Pete being like, “Bum, bum, bum,” and just the sporadic noises he’s making as the other singers would be singing.”
- (Source) When questioned about when they will ever get around to doing a musical episode, Moriarty explained. “We bring it up to our showrunners all the time. I feel like neither of them are probably naturally musically inclined, neither of the Joes, so I think they’re kind of like, “They really wanna do this,” but they’re trying to figure out how we’re going to do this.” Naturally, Danielle suggested who they should get in to do the music, “Call Lin-Manuel Miranda!” Román pointed out that they ”have a lot of people from theatre. We have some singers.” to which Richie added how they are all ”are musically inclined, so I think we’d love to do it. Maybe Season 4.”
- (Source) In an interview with TellTaleTV, Rebecca reveals “Hetty is prompted to reveal the secret at great cost to herself to prevent her friend from being as alone for all eternity as she felt in her life. That felt incredibly powerful to me,” Rebecca confirmed that Sophia Lear (the episode’s writer), approached her a month before shooting and asked for her input. “I’m pleased with how they handled it. I was very surprised, I’ll be honest with you. But I’ve been surprised in the past, and then it ends up making perfect sense to me.”
- (Source) Lamorne Morris, who plays the poltergeist Saul in ‘Holes Are Bad‘ told Deadline he’d been chomping at the bit to make an appearance on the CBS comedy. “When the show came about, I would harass [stars Utkarsh Ambudkar and Rose McIver] regularly about being a part of it,” he said. “I was like, Listen, this doesn’t make sense that I’m not a part of the show. So in any given moment, I’m gonna come for you, and I’m gonna ask that I be a part of the show.’ It worked out.” When Utkarsh and Rose were posting season being confirmed, he commented, ‘No, I don’t want to be a part of your show. Thanks for asking.’ Then the showrunners decided to reach out [to Utkarsh] curious if Lamorne Morris truly wished to be a part of the show, to which Utkarsh called him to ask, ‘Hey, man, do you really want to be a part of the show?;” to which Lamorne‘s response was: ‘Absolutely. What the f*ck took you so long to ask me?’ When the character of Saul was presented to him, Larmone thought that it was perfect. Lamorne revealed that in his own time, he researched into what the baseball players did for a living outside of playing baseball, to which he found that a lot of them were tradesmen or plumbers. ”So my character was a plumber in my mind, who happen to be able to play baseball really well. They gave me a lot of information already on the how he died, where he’s from, the team he played for, where I used to hang out, where I partied, the club that we used to go to. All that stuff was given.” Larmone found his scenes with Danielle a delight, claiming; ‘‘Oh, man, she’s the best. She’s the best. She’s so gifted and funny, and more importantly than that, she was encouraging. She just kept whispering, ‘Keep doing that. Keep doing stuff like that.’ Because she knows the show.[…]you could tell she wanted somebody to come in and win. That’s kind of how the whole cast was. They invited me out to dinner, and they were all just super nice. All those long days, they didn’t have to do that. They’re like ‘No, you’re leaving. Let’s go out. Let’s grab a drink. Let’s grab some food.’But we had fun. She’s so dope. So beautiful. So funny. So talented. It was easy.” he also stated how most reactions were improv. ”I know my objectives and what I want to accomplish with the scenes. But it’s our facial expressions [that] make you laugh, they make you change up what you’re gonna say based off of how she’s responding. So it’s not that everything you plan for goes out the window, but you now have become a unit, and it’s not about what you’re going to do. It’s about what the scene is.”
- Rebecca stated in CBS Mornings that ”Finding out how Hetty died really took my breath away. I really enjoy being part of a screwball comedy that is so enjoyable which have so many wonderful lines and so many things to laugh at, but can still manage to be provocative. […] and provokes conversations in families that might not otherwise had happened, about mortality and regret.” She hoped deeply that the episode ‘Holes are Bad‘ would engender a lot more of those conversations.
- Rebecca also commented that she finds grief to be ”the great unifier”, and that talking about grief and loss in the show and in life to be deeply important to talk about.
- When asked about her relationship with the cast, Rebecca responded, ”The cast go all over the place together. We can’t stay away, you can’t make up that kind of chemistry, and I’m so thankful for it because we all shoot in Montreal. We love our crew so much, and most of them are Francophones, so we’ve all decided to start taking French lessons. Some of us are better than others, Rose McIver speaks very well.”
- (Source) Despite being a sitcom, Ghosts encourages people to have conversations on topics surrounding death. Rebecca explained, “One of the reasons it’s such a devastating death is that it’s so delicate that people don’t talk about it, People tell us they’re able to talk about delicate things with their family that they might not have talked about before because they watch the show together. So if this episode can reach one person out there who was in a dark, deep, well, and encourage them to reach out, that’s important.” “The show normalizes talking about feelings, and that’s so incredibly healthy. So I’m very proud of that, and everyone involved took the subject matter very seriously.” “We have the benefit of speaking to someone 150 years after the act. When do you get the opportunity to do that? And as she said, there are 150 years of retrospect and regrets, and only recently has she come to understand what she got wrong. She did not understand that her existence mattered inherently,” Rebecca stressed, once asked what she hoped for the viewers to take from Hetty’s experience. “Hetty thought the only thing that was important about her was the wealth that she could give to her child. In addition to that, she was also deeply, desperately alone, and unhappy in the world. So it’s a wonderful lesson that your existence in and of itself matters. She never was taught that lesson in her life by her family, her father, her husband, her society and she paid the price.” “The choice to abandon love when she was 25 — it began a life of misery and regret that culminated in her death. She believes that all generations of unhappiness in her family come back to her and wants desperately to break the cycle she feels she started.” Rebecca stated, not wanting to overlook the blame that Hetty had placed on herself
- (Source) When asked on the difficulty of historical accuracy being brought to the show, Rebecca exclaimed, “Our costume designer, Carmen Alie, and my dresser, Sophie Godard, are geniuses — and so caring! That dress that I wore when I played 25 — God help me — that beautiful white dress took 260 hours to make. And it was on screen for maybe 45 seconds. So the art departments, the crew in Montreal, are so talented. So much of that detail elevates our show.”
- (Source) When asked by Deadline how Rebecca felt on having such a huge puzzle piece of the puzzle on Hetty’s backstory, Rebecca responded, ”She’s had a really great season. There’s two flashbacks for her, which was the first that she’s had, and we learn a whole lot more. I think the flashback that we showed earlier in the season when she was 25 years old and felt forced and compelled and trapped into making a decision to choose privilege and money and what she thought was safety over love and truth…I mean, I believe that that is the origin story of her misery. It certainly set a lot of other things in motion that you then see in this episode, in 1895. I think she believes that there’s been generations of misery and trauma in her family that I think she believes that she probably created. She gets it wrong a whole lot, but she finally, I think, put some pieces together 150 years later, in this episode, and realizes why killing herself was, she says, a great misjudgement. And I believe it, obviously it was.’
- (Source) Rebecca revealed that she was involved in a lot of conversations with the showrunners around Hetty’s death and how it unfolded. ”I’m so grateful that they did. Everyone involved knew how important it was to be accurate and sensitive and not sensationalize it as a plot point. I think it’s very earned. I mean, there’s so many seeds that were planted over the course of our three seasons that make this both shocking and also make complete sense. She’s had this cord wrapped around her — not only is she corseted in this beautiful but uncomfortable gown, but she’s had this cord wrapped around her neck this entire time. So many of the little behavioral things that I chose to do as an actor in the beginning of season 1, even like always fiddling with my neckpiece a little bit, always kind of nervously grabbing on to my fellow ghosts next to me…Hetty doesn’t like to be alone. She has a terror of isolation. All those things planted seeds that made this make a lot of sense.” ”I love that she’s only able to speak about this and really process it when her friend is in a similar, metaphorical situation. The title of the episode is, ‘Holes are Bad.’ When she realizes that Flower is possibly going to be isolated and abandoned forever, she has to act, and that just makes real sense to me that the writing is gloriously funny, and then it’s smart enough to go to these places because they’re justified and because you’ve come to love all of these characters and realize how dependent they are on one another.” Rebecca stated that she hoped ”very much that this episode will reach someone who is out there and despairing and remind them that they’re not alone and that speaking about their feelings, no matter how dark they may seem, is the way out of isolation. We all took that very, very seriously.”
- (Source) Rebecca also said she enjoyed the comedic relief in the recent episode. ”When Thor says, ‘Why don’t you try updating the iOS operating system?’ We really got a kick out of that. The ghosts are so silly, and they’re their best when they’re behaving completely out of character sometimes.” Even in the scene of Hetty explaining her death to Samantha and Isaac contained the humour of Hetty exclaiming that she didn’t even know the telephone dialled out. ”I love that bit of irony. I think it’s so wonderful that the manner in which she killed herself was actually her only possible chance of saving herself.”
- (Source) Rebecca spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how she first learned about her character’s backstory, the pride she feels for Ghosts‘ treatment of serious subject matter amid broad comedy, and why the sitcom’s premise rewards its writers efforts to play a long game with its cast of characters. Rebecca revealed that she had first discovered of Hetty’s death around a month before the episode. ”[Creators] Joe Port and Joe Wiseman came to me and said, “We think that this is the direction that makes sense to go in with this.” And I was blown away, I was not at all expecting it. But they’re so smart and were so generous to involve me, on a dramaturgical level and sensitivity level, to make sure that things felt like they jived with Hetty’s motivations and what was plausible and accurate. And also, that we tackled this subject matter with the sensitivity that it deserves. We’re on a half-hour sitcom, but it’s become known for tackling difficult challenging topics and opening up conversations. I’m really proud of that.” She explained that she loved intertwining Hetty’s and Flower’s stories together, ”There’s so many beautiful little seeds that have been set up throughout the first three seasons [about] why Hetty is so terrified of being alone — things that I wasn’t even aware that they were picking up on. Like, I always have made the choice to stand very close to other people or have a hand or an arm around someone. She enjoys that; she’s very orderly and standoffish, but she really has a terror of being alone. For them to explore, after 150 years of close friendship with these ghosts, she’s going to reveal the secret to save Flower from being doomed to an eternity of abandonment and aloneness.… It just was very moving to me. I mean, the episode’s title is right on the nose: “Holes Are Bad.” It’s a really beautiful metaphor.[…] People weren’t necessarily going to therapy [at that time] as we know it. Those things weren’t available to her. And then in that same moment, when she says ‘I didn’t even know that that telephone could dial out,’ I just thought it was so heartbreaking. And that’s the kind of humor I’m interested in: a deep truth into someone’s blindness. She killed herself by the very means with which she could have saved herself. ”
- (Source) Rebecca also revealed how despite Hetty’s intentions are always to help other people, ”in true Hetty fashion, she gets it just a little bit wrong in every single way. She was oblivious to the thing that her child actually needed her.” She continued, ‘‘it really is a message that her existence matters, regardless of the amount of money she had, regardless of the value that she thought she had. […]This is a reminder that [the audience] are not alone. It feels very, very important to be on a show that takes such risks and is taking them with responsibility and consideration.”