Life on the Outside (Episode 2 Discussion)

"I'm always good, always good."

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or "Kulturheidelberen", 125 grams for 0.1 euros, 9.30 grams. In your Aldi Nord, for Yale. And further, let's go to "Einfach Lauschen" and "Genießen." Aldi. Go to "Friallet."

Do you have an impersonation of Xavier? In the show, you do this, you know. Yeah. Like, "Where the fuck is my wife?" "Where the fuck is my wife?"

Hi, everybody. And welcome to "Hulu's Official Paradise Companion Podcast." I'm your host, Ryan Michelle Vethay, and today I am thrilled. And thrilled, I say, to be talking to my husband, Sterling, who I am happy to now be able to confirm, yes, he was actually in this season of the show, which is now streaming

on "Hulu" and "Hulu on Disney+, and all joking aside, you are pretty dope." Thanks, man. I appreciate that. You're welcome. There are so many things that I want to talk about.

First of all, all I could think about was, how you going to get it in a plane in crash?

I was so much fun. Yeah. There's a big storm. You know what it was? What?

I'm very attached to Xavier, and I did not want to see him crash. And so there was a crash here. Okay, we're good. Okay, so we agree. We agree.

And we don't always. Always. I agree. We need something to go right. When you get on that plane, I don't know why I thought it would be smooth,

smooth sailing. But with the plane crash, we realized just how silent the world is, right? Because you're in this sess none. You're doing all the things that you've been trained to do. Sess in a two, two, eight, and nine, alpha, bravo, Charlie.

You know, it's the first three letters.

Thank you.

“That's what you've been trained to do in a world where there are people.”

Right. And nobody's hitting me back. Nobody's listening. Yeah. Like the silence of that was deafening to me.

Yeah. And your initial instinct is he's flying through this storm. He can't see. He's like, you're going to run into another plane. It's like, well, no, you know?

No. I know more plane. I know more plane. Just know plane. It's just me.

But anyway, this leads me to my next question about the kids. We're about the kids. Because we land and it's so loud, the crash and the fire and everything is happening. And then how silent the kids are. What was that like?

I think they'd learn silence for safety. Right. Of course. You know, I'm saying because they know that like drawing attention to themselves is the last thing that they want to do.

Shout out to the kids. The young boy who plays Daniel, his name is Alexander, and he has a special place in my heart, very sweet, very precocious young man who did a wonderful job. We incredible job. All the kids are great.

And also, like, I'll shout them all out. But this little girl is like the cutest little thing on the face of plan. Got like these big, oh, gorgeous eyes that just pet, she's like, he's hurt. We'll bat. He's hurt.

Bad. Sounds sweet. I love these kids. Yeah. I can't say people don't know.

You're a whisper of children. I am. You can connect with them. Just a giant one myself, basically. Yeah, I know.

You want to say it. So I'll let you say it. Listen, if I'm not a giant kid, I like sitting at the kids table that Thanksgiving. Yes, you have always. I can say that much for sure.

So I had a wonderful time with all of them, and just sort of like exploring this idea that for the first season of the show, you see people with resources, people with planning, be able to endure something that seems like they tried to create a day-to-day situation. Now we're exploring an episode one and now with these kids and the people that they encounter.

“What it's been like for the rest of the world, you know what I'm saying?”

Who have varying degrees of resources at their disposal, and then people who just got to make a way out of no way. These kids are all by themselves. It's a fascinating thing to think about. Like if this global atrocity transpires, like how do you make it through, and these kids

who just basically hunt together, scavenging off of whatever they can find, move in from place to place, and just making it, barely. Talk us through what Xavier was thinking about in terms of fatherhood, because I think that's such a theme of this episode, but also we know how serious Xavier takes being a dad. We know how you startling in your life, take being a dad, and what that means to you.

Yeah, I think the idea of any child being left on their own to fend for themselves in this world is something that he has a very difficult time stomaching. So his instinct is like I'm going to bring you guys home, right? Like is it perfect? No, but you'll be welcome there.

You'll be safe there, like I can look out for you.

So he has like this proxy for his own children.

“And I think there's never a part of him that thinks that he's going to be separated from”

them. Look them leaving him before he would have ever left them. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, I wept when you came back and I said, sorry and I heard it in her voice, right?

Because even though the leader of the pack was the one who was doing the talking for you, I heard it in her voice because she didn't say anything. And when she did speak it was so important, he was like, he's hot bad. But I wanted to talk about what do we think Xavier felt when he saw that, sorry? A couple of different things because they took a lot of his stuff.

Right. They jacked you. They did jacking. I did get jacked.

You know what I'm saying?

With a jacked up leg, I had the hobble back to this plane window, like I could have used the few resources that I had. But then also it's like, I think they in a way were more equipped to survive in this world than he is. It's like they've sort of proven that they know how to adapt.

Right. There's been three years, you know what I'm saying? And they've made it this far by themselves. So I think there's a sadness that they feel like that's the best that life has to offer them.

Right. And that he was hoping that maybe he could be a part of it in some shape form of fashion. But also now, I have to get to my wife at the end of the day, like, okay, now I have to trust that they're going to take care of themselves. Now I got to get back to my woman.

That's the whole reason why I left this place.

“Probably the only thing that would let me leave my children in the first place is to find”

my partner in life. Now we got to talk about that moment, speaking of the kid and being a protector. What was that like to film? The guy dies in what an inch of mud, you know, you push him down. Once I push him deep enough, I guess I'll do it.

Okay. Well, right. What was filming that like, look, he is trained. He's a man of the particular side of skills or whatnot. What the dude told me, he said, yeah, we've been tracking these kids for a minute here.

I can't. Was that the moment you decided, oh, he's got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got to go. He just wants to take.

And I think that's the thing that the season brings out for me is that you see different aspects of humanity, heightened and explored. Like there's the selfish aspect of humanity that just wants to take everything for themselves. And then you see like the spirit of communion and people coming together and being of service to one another.

And both of those things, I think, get heightened when the world goes through like a dramatic event, such as the one that our world has gone through. But once he said, I've been tracking these kids for a minute. I was like, are you about to go? I do think that that brings up something very, very interesting and fascinating about Xavier's

character. Because he is this duality between a man with the particular side of skills, which normally we see in cinema and television in film as very one-dimensional. But then what we live with with Xavier is people are good. Yeah.

There's good in the world, which I find like a really interesting dichotomy and I wanted you to speak to as this person who's playing the character and as this character unfolds. I think it is something that he has to believe as much for himself as he espouses out loud. And I think there's a turn too, because at the beginning of season one, I think you're finding a man who's learning how to live with despair.

He's been without his wife for three years. He's been raising his kids, joyful, happy to have them alive and safe, but still grieving that loss. Of course. As soon as he hears the tape that's a natural place for him and the possibility that

Dr. Terry Rogers Collins could be alive, then there's like this new found spark of like I can have my whole family. And so his whole reason for venturing out of the nest is the belief that love is out there, the belief that the person that I wish to be with more than anything is out there. And so I think that turns into like, I don't leave for no reason at all.

Right. It's just too succeed, and therefore this success has to be a possibility, not just for me, but for everybody, right? There is good out here. I don't believe good ended three years ago.

“We went through tragedy, but that doesn't mean that everything about life is tragic.”

There's still something beautiful that exists in the world. I think even the presence of those children is a reaffirming thought. Like these kids still exist. They didn't all go away. So I think I have to find her.

And in pursuit of her, I have to believe that she's still there. You know what I'm saying? I do. Or else it's all for now. Yeah.

And leaving your kids. Yeah. Would be unjustified.

This is my favorite thing.

What is your favorite? I love it when wives meet. You have so many wives. I have a few. I know.

I know. I know. I know.

“But what I want to do is not to be a part of the whole studio.”

The master of the club is called "The Internet". So I'm really sorry. I'm sorry. You can say that you're a hero. You're a master of the club, right?

But you don't believe it. I'm not. I'm a master of the club. I'm just doing what I do. And if you work, you'll be able to do it.

That's right. Save. What do you do? I'm just doing what I do. It's because those else will be in.

I'm Xavier. It's nice to meet you. Terry. What an absolute pleasure. All right.

Welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited to introduce a Nuka Akuma. Right, God. You look fantastic now. Oh, you're so amazing.

Your character, Terry, is married to none other than the famous agent, Xavier Collins.

“But not when we first meet you, there's something we get the backstory.”

We don't always get to play characters that have backstories.

This is true. Right. This is very true. We play characters. We make up the backstory.

All the time. You get a backstory. You get a fleshed out character. Let's start there. What a treat.

What a treat it was. It's the beginning of the story of it all. So it was just really, I don't know. I just thought it was really special to get to do that. And we had fun.

We had a great time. We had fun. Thank you. Did you know when you guys were filming it? This is for both of you that it's going to be so magical.

You hope. Yeah. Was it magical? I mean, that's what I was like. It wasn't magical.

You're my life. So if you say it's magical, then yeah. Yeah. It was magical. It was a real life.

I appreciate it. Well, I mean, truthfully, we didn't work. That's too much together in season one. No. Right.

Right. It was like hi, nice to meet you. You've been married for 15 years. Go. Right.

That's kind of what it was. So to be able to actually know the story, because you do have to make so much of that up as an actor. But we were actually given the story of how we met. And I just feel like it informed the rest of our relationship as the show went on.

You also know I asked questions, right? Because it's an easy way to get to know each other. And Nuka is a fairly open human being. So when we're just sitting down in our chairs or whatnot, we'll talk, we'll ask questions, we'll have some deep dives.

And then there's a moment when she goes into her script. And you see it just like standing and looking into the space. And you're like, oh, she's working right now.

“Like, if I see her, when does I say what we think about right now?”

And she's like, I'm thinking about what it's like to lose my family. And I was like, continue. As you were, madam, so there's moments where you like get in. And there's moments in which you yield space or whatnot. But I think there's such a warmth and generosity that comes from her naturally.

One of the things that Dan was sort of worried about in our meet to was like, you know, is she sort of rejecting him too much? If you just take the words on the page, like, the rejection was a lot of the rejection. And so we've played with it many different ways. Like, how much is she going to hold her?

And you know, and how bitchy is she going to be hell and trying to, is she going to be? When I want her to have my surgery, get the hell out of here. Yeah, already had my, some of the necessary constructions. Yes, I've heard we've all heard. So I think we settled on, like, immediately there is an attraction.

Immediately she knows this is trouble. But she's got, she's focused. She's got a one share of mine. There's something she's going to be doing. Right.

So what you're saying is that I'm not going to let my life plan get derailed by the hot guy in the hospital better put a blanket on my feet. And this is not part of the plan. So you'd be all cute there. You put your blankets down, but this is where it is.

Yeah, right, right, right, right. I think there's also something that I found really funny about, like, brev was undeterred. You'll have a chance. We'll see.

He was like, yeah, you can say what you want to.

But you're going to be blind in the second.

I'm going to take care of you and it will be fine. Yeah, I don't think she was all the blinding here. I'm not going down the blinding. To pick up your cue cards and it's going to be me. He's going to be me.

Annie, who, yes, the tray to me was just such a symbolic moment. That all of her stuff is on. Her stuff. Yeah. Because it plays so beautifully.

And I love how organic that was for you in terms of living in this derailment. Just calm down. Will we calm down? Yes.

Well, calm.

or even you bother him. Yeah, yeah, bother my stuff.

And then the second time is--

Is this what you do? What do you mean? Make sure I have what I need. Yeah. It comes back twice.

Right. Yeah. That's why I said it was so magic. You know what I remember. I remember a couple of things.

I remember you trying to figure out the calibration of sight. And what to take in, what not to take in, like other shadows. And just sort of trying to get that part, right? Well, because I shared this with Sterling many, many years ago,

I played a character on a show who was blind. And they gave me kind of opaque contacts. So, and there was a little smoky. That's what it felt like. And there was also, like, you're in a heavy fog.

And I really felt blind because I couldn't see anything. And so I was just sort of traveling back to that feeling while we were doing the show. But I didn't have the help of contact. Right, right, right.

And he was right there. The whole time, right, right, right, right. So it was just really fun, especially the moment when the sight comes back. You can see.

“I'm just starting to playing with how much do I see?”

Can I read his expression? Can I actually see him? Can I? You know, how much was I sensing him being there? It was well done.

It was really, really well done. And for an actor to play stuff. Yes, no, I was like, oh my God, this is it. It was beautiful to watch. What was the moment when you decide that he's okay?

I think it was. There's a moment when she says to him. He was, I will come back. Mm-hmm. And this happened to go lucky.

He's just like, yeah. I know, well. Terry is so strong. Terry is so confident and so capable.

And this blindness, it's the first time in her life

that it throws her for a loop. And here's this relentless man who is not taking any negativity, nothing for an answer.

“And so I think because she's lost and in a sea,”

he seems to know she's going to be fine and all will be fine. And so she actually is in a place to trust someone else for the first time. And so I feel like it's when he says, all will be well. That she's like, oh, okay.

I'm very reassuring, but this is what a nuke is trying to tell you. I put people at ease. I would be remiss if I let you go with that. Telling the world that you and I have actually known each other for many, many, many years.

We have been on this journey together, right, for really, really long time. And we had that relationship where we would see each other at the same audition. And it was that camaraderie that we are actually

in it together, that we are colleagues. Yeah. I am so grateful to you for obviously your beautiful work on this, but also for you being the kind of human and actress to embrace and to say, you're my colleague in this.

You are not my competition. Yeah. And that means a lot. Yeah.

“I feel like I felt the exact same from you”

and knowing that there were women out there that we have each other's backs. And it's like, yeah, if I don't get it, and Ryan does, how fabulous. Because there's enough for everybody.

And here we all are together. Yeah. Well, I'm going to get it to you. And I'm going to thank you for few sleep for coming.

You look amazing as always.

OK. OK, everyone, welcome back to the Paradise podcast. We are finally going to talk to some with lots of letters behind their name and actual professor, which is very exciting, a professor of sociology.

Dr. Jonathan Mice from Boston University. Jonathan was a consultant on season one. But now I get to pick your brain about all of season two and beyond. So Jonathan, welcome to the show.

And thanks for coming in from Boston. Lovely to be here. So the first question I have is, I know that sociology is a very big field. So can you narrow it down for us?

You are a professor of sociology. Is that what you got to PhD in? And more specifically, what part of sociology do you study and look at and delve into? So basically, I spend my waking hours researching

and teaching on sort of everything that's wrong with our society. So inequality, very much, is sort of my specialization. And this project was a really fun opportunity for me to kind of flip everything upside down. And think about how I would go about creating

like a perfect, egalitarian equal society, which people could flourish and be happy in a way that's unfortunately a lot of us today aren't.

How did this magic come to be?

“So I think it was TED talk, I gave years ago.”

I was based in London. I was like a big production in a large theater, it was very nervous. Was Dan at that TED talk? Oh, no, he wasn't in the audience.

I think he just found it online. So we're like, OK, OK. So I was asked to first have a bunch of conversations with the writer's room, which is a lot of fun. And people started firing questions at me,

like how would you even select those 20 or 50,000 lucky people that could live in this society? How do you decide who sort of gets to live in the bunker? Once in the bunker, how do you make it so that it's decided to have social cohesion?

How do you bring people together? How do you exercise power in a way that people accept as legitimate? All of those kind of really big questions? So that was my task to kind of apply that to this scenario

that is the very beginning of the series that we now know is paradise and try to try to apply these to the challenge that was confronting the billionaires that were creating bunker society. And I try to do as best as I could.

Of course, in the way that I always do things is

we're just right a very long paper about it. And did you write a paper? Did you write the paradise paper? I wrote the paradise paper. Really?

Oh, wow, so there's a whole paper. So how does one even begin? I mean, how did you come up with 25,000 first of all that number? That's not a lot of people. Yeah, so I didn't ask the questions.

I was just given like these 50 or so super big picture questions. So we have some research about what people find acceptable. So I try to sort of help the writers from kind of think through those series scenarios as best as they could.

Things like that balance between merit, but also family kind of coming together.

“I think that's what you see in the show, right?”

So it's not just a bunch of adults who've done great things. It's also their spouses, their family members,

their kids, because for them to function and flourish,

they need that to kind of support, right? They cannot just be individuals. We can just kind of leave people behind. So that's something you see in the series. It's a big theme, of course, to say if your wife is the main reason

why he's leaving paradise, right, in search for her. That's one theme. Another would be things like meaning. You know, what gives people meaning? So we see that work has an important function

in this society, whether that's being a bartender or being a librarian, but having some purpose, that's something that a lot of research also points to us being, you know, people need to have sense of purpose. But there's a broader sort of narrative around,

these are the survivors of a catastrophe. These are the only survivors. These are the people. This is going to be the future of humanity. And that's such a strong belief that could really

binds people together. And there's also rituals, like around the death of the president, where people come together in the stadium through rituals. We cope with trauma. We cope with tough and good things that happened in our lives.

But you see that once that narrative, that sense of purpose around we are the survivors, once that is sort of punctured by the realization that there actually are others of us. Right, right, right.

Then you see how quickly things start falling apart. Then the episode that I think we've just watched, you see a small group of young children that bonds together over again, that shared trauma, that shared experience, that shared probably violence and also the scarring experience

that brings them together in a way that can be the beginning of something. What about your families? We're all gone now. But it needs to find a place for people to have that sense

of solidarity. And that's something that in paradise, in the bunkers' society, starts falling apart when people know that, in fact, it's not a democracy anymore. And that's in my--

A lot of garbage. It's been lied to. Yeah, yeah. And that's how quickly things can start falling apart.

To know that so much of this has such roots in an actual discipline has actually fascinating to me, that they didn't just spin it out of whole cloth. That it actually was rooted in not only your TED talk, but then the paradise paper.

I love that. The paradise paper.

“That's what I'm going to say when you know,”

when we're facing our catastrophe ourselves, is it, I mean, God forbid? God forbid? At least I wrote the paper on it. Yeah, I wrote the paper on it.

Well, thank you for your paper. And everything you brought to the show, and I appreciate you. And we're just getting started. So stay with us. Can you tell I'm excited?

I'm excited, bro. We're talking episode two of season two. And I probably shouldn't say this, but there is one guest that I'm a little bit more excited to talk to than the others. Don't tell anybody.

We got air as bigger with God. I'm in the house. This is my TV daughter for this is us. But she's on the podcast for paradise. Because he was a PA on set for season two.

So I told Dan, like, hey, what's up? I want some production experience. Because I want to be a film producer.

like anything you could give me.

“And he was like, when you did at a school,”

and I was like, well, I'll get out of school, like, after you guys start filming. And he was like, yeah, you can pull up as a production assistant. And I was like, cool.

And I pulled it. I saw her on set. I was, hers. And she's like, sterling. And I was like, what are you doing?

She's like, I'm a PA! [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I was really excited. And she did everything with this big smile on her face. Like they'd have her like, hold and traffic

like about, you know, to have people to stop. I hate what I do. But she's teeny tiny. And she's like, rolling. Rolling.

OK, you make your head sound like crazy. You're hilarious. I was killing it. OK, you killed the king. You're having you on set this year.

Baker, was it dream? I am so happy. The way that you want to do your podcast, go ahead. I'm happy, I'm done.

First of all, what's harder being an actor or being--

I mean, obviously, we know what you're going to say, but I have to at least ask the question. What's harder, and in what ways? Y'all want that real? Yeah, that's real.

“So, honestly, I don't think one's more difficult than the other.”

But being on set was hard. When I'm an actor, I'm able to prepare myself. OK, I'm no my lines. I know it was going on. I know the story.

I know the environment. But when you want set, there's just-- Yeah, but so what we just do in a lot. And it's like, look, pyramid lake, pyramid lake was so hard. And it's freezing outside, and there's so much going on.

And you've got crafty all the way around the clock.

And you've got to make them run.

And I've got to make them run. I've got to make for that people. Get the coffee. I've got to make sure. But director got their tea.

And this is a long going on. Yes, yes. What is it for you? Yes. OK, I know that we don't have forever with you.

“I have to ask you, where do you see yourself in 10 years?”

And I want you to remember I said this. Yeah. In 10 years, you're still going to be super young. Yeah. OK, great.

30 years old, very, very young. Yeah. So young and lit? I feel like I want to be a producer. I want to run my own production company.

I want to make black films. I want to make films for us by us. I want to set. I admire you. I admire Dan.

I admire people that I just able to create communities and create a crew that just gets along and connects. You don't see that all the time. And that's just so important. And I want to be able to make those environments for people.

And I want to be able to have young black girls, young black people in general. Look in my films, and be like, damn, like, I feel that. Or I understand that. I get that create conversation and just change some things for us. That's what I want.

I love it. I ask you that because I want to be able to play this clip in 10 years. Oh, though, OK. Let me turn my answer. No, no, no, that's perfect.

That was perfect. Because in 10 years, I have-- I know without a shadow of a doubt that all of those things will come true and more. Well, thanks, guys.

Hey, welcome. We love you. I love you. Harris, thank you so much for coming today. I'm being here with us and making Sterling's Paradise

happen. So we really appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure.

It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure. Paradise, the official podcast, is now streaming. And stream the new season of Paradise on February 23, on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for Bundle Subscribers, Terms Apply.