Hollywood Reporter – The creatives behind “Dopesick,” “The Dropout,” “Inventing Anna,” “Pam & Tommy” and “The White Lotus” take THR behind the scenes of their shows.

Rob Siegel and D.V. DeVincentis, showrunners of Pam & Tommy (Hulu)

DeVincentis: “We did exhaustive research, and Lily [James] would still find things that we didn’t know about that turned out to be crucial to the storytelling. Lily and Sebastian [Stan] were the best custodians of characters I’ve ever seen. Their dedication and their love of the characters is so overwhelming, and it’s all there. And by the way, Sebastian, because his transformation isn’t as extreme, the specificity that he’s using isn’t quite as noticeable, but it’s every bit as potent. Particularly recently, I’ve seen some footage of Tommy Lee talking, and after seeing hours of it after watching Sebastian do it, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, Sebastian was really inhabiting it.’ It was incredible.”

Siegel: “For me, the archival interviews, hearing them talk. You can just learn so much from video footage.”
DeVincentis: “If you watch enough interviews with Pam, particularly the late night interviews, you start to see how brilliantly and with the sort of innate intelligence she handles the situation. You watch what she’s putting up with, and you see her putting up with it. I like to think there’s sort of a larger goal, like she knows people are going to be sexist and gross and shitty to her, but if she gets through it, she gets to talk about things that are really important to her, like animal rights and PETA. And to me, the behavior in watching how she handles really insensitive, crappy people was the most instructive thing about that character to me in terms of research.”