15 “Ponies” Facts, Including How Emilia Clarke And Haley Lu Richardson Became The Show’s Superpower

Bea and Twila are so different on the surface when we meet them, but as the season goes on, they really have a core that is so similar. How was it creating these two different types of women that really complement each other?

Susanna Fogel: I think part of it is the casting, just in the sense that there’s a certain type of casting that happens where someone’s playing the role that they always play, and you almost start to have, like, character blindness to what nuances might be in the writing, because you’re like, Oh, they’re just doing the thing they do. They showed up to do their thing. 

For us, just the fact that it was a little bit out of the box for Emilia to play this neurotic American ’70s heroine, and for Haley to play, like, a grown-up, like a wife with real grown-up issues, in spite of her youthful confidence. It’s like audiences are so cynical and so used to watching every version of everything. I think you always have to keep them awake. Just keep them awake and alive as they watch and engage with it. Otherwise, they’ll just fill in the blanks and dull the nuances. Which is just to say that for this, I think that casting a little bit out of the box for type was the start of it. Just to sort of get people to notice those layers. 

It’s not a story about how it takes eight hours for them to be able to tolerate each other because they hate each other. It’s like you just want to get to the fun of them being partners in crime much earlier on, while maintaining their differences. It’s sort of like, within a group of friends that you would actually know in the world, there’s a crazy friend, there’s a type A friend, and more. And everyone’s friends. Everyone’s going on vacation together, but they’re pretty different, and also everyone’s compatible. 

They are both like women that we know. It was also trying to take different sides of our personalities, whether it’s like we’re obviously both more like Bea than like Twila, but we know Twilas, and we have our Twila moments, so we can understand it. So I think it was just trying to find parts of us that connected to both, so that it could plausibly be an extension of our own psyches.