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Spies have codes; collaborators have shorthand. Director Susanna Fogel, costume designer Anastasia Magoutas, and production designer Sara K. White have all worked together on a number of film and TV projects, from “The Wilds” and “Winner” to “The Flight Attendant” and “A Small Light.” By the time they all started work on “Ponies,” they had developed a way of working with each other even more robust than the spying efforts that the show’s late-‘70s CIA puts into cultivating double-agents in Moscow.
It’s about finding key psychological details about the characters to build a world from. Magoutas told IndieWire that all that Fogel, who co-created the show with David Iserson and directed half of the eight episodes in Season 1, needed to say about Bea (Emilia Clarke) was: “She wears L.L. Bean duck boots.” Indeed, while Bea does have some ‘70s-tastic outfits — including a concert-ready white coat and wide-legged pants that, of course, get into some very bloody mayhem at the end of the show — Magoutas and her team mostly keep Bea timelessly preppy, and it illustrates that the character put all her insecurities and self-esteem into being a certain type of capital-G Good.
“They approach the look in their departments really similarly, which is to say really psychologically, which I find really interesting,” Fogel told IndieWire on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “With Anastasia, talking to her about a character is like talking about who that person is, who they think they are in the world, what they think they’re projecting with their style, and what they’re actually projecting that they’re not aware of. It’s a really deep dive into who each character is.”
‘Ponies‘ Katalin Vermes/PEACOCKIt’s fitting for the more impulsive Twila (Haley Lou Richardson) that some of her ‘70s punk-rock look came together serendipitously. Magoutas bought a pair of red cowboy boots on Etsy while having an initial conversation with Richardson, before she even had a budget for the show.
“The very first time I ever spoke to Haley on the phone, we were just chatting about Twila and talking about shows, and she was like, ‘I think Twila wears boots. I feel like she’s a boot girl.’ And while we were on the phone, I was just looking at ‘70s boots, and I found this pair of maroon cowboy boots with a big embroidered butterfly on them. I sent her the link, and she was like, ‘Oh my God, these are Twila’s boots,'” Magoutas said.
The boots are in the show, and Twila carries a lot of bold colors and butterflies in her clothes and accessories, fitting for a character who wants to fly, travel, and do. But Magoutas’ choices also help create a sense of specificity for the two protagonists and their growing friendship. She thought about them as a pair from the very start, and the mountain of two-shots of Clarke and Richardson that would happen every episode. It was important to consider how both would evolve and complement each other in silhouettes, color, and texture as they worked together to uncover what really happened to their husbands.
“They’re doing this parallel kind of journey. I feel like you could take a screengrab of a two-shot of them in the beginning, and one in the middle, and one at the end, and you can tell the story that way. It mattered a lot to me how they looked next to one another because Bea gains a little bit of Twila’s boldness [and] Twila learns to not be so prickly,” Magoutas said. “ The costumes, I think, in the beginning, are doing a lot of work, protecting [the main characters] from things. And I think when we get to the end of the season, they shed some of that because they don’t need it. Because they’re feeling more confident and relaxed in themselves.”
‘Ponies’ Katalin Vermes/PEACOCKMeanwhile, White is doing the same kind of psychological character work with the production design of Bea’s and Twila’s apartments in the American Embassy, too.
“[Bea] is really concerned about the way that she’s perceived, and there seems to be a prescribed way of doing the right thing, and she’s interested in doing that and projecting her femininity, while still being kind of buttoned-up and controlled and careful,” White told IndieWire. “That was something we wanted to do with her space, so there’s a lot of tight tufting. There’s more intricate floral patterns, whereas when you go into Twila’s [Haley Lou Richardson’s] space, it’s a bit of an explosion, where there is color; and where there isn’t, there’s nothing. She’s got both of those inside of her.”
The production design of all the spaces is playing the same game of agendas and appearances — what did the characters want from a space, and what kind of feeling does it actually project?
“Sara has an architecture background, and she’s really meticulous and obsessive, but also does the same thing. Where did this person get this chair? Where would this person buy? Did this person go to the mid-century modern section at Target and think they were elevating their style, but really it’s not,” Fogel said. “They’re such smart, funny girls, and they have funny ways of describing things, like Sara described someone’s personal style as constant Christmas, which I love. Like, ‘Oh her house is constant Christmas.’ I know exactly who that person is.”
One place that is not constantly Christmas is the U.S. Embassy in Moscow itself. “We wanted to make it clear that the American Embassy is existing in a Russian building and there’s a certain fortitude to that building that is imposing itself on this office. Some of that’s done with materiality, so the columns that you can’t get away from, the way that the fireplace is edging itself almost in the room,” White said. “We have the American space that’s trying to be open and modern and trying to really put on a good face. So we’re trying to work those two things against each other in order to create a little bit of tension.”
The U.S. Embassy office bullpen in ‘Ponies’PeacockIt’s this latent tension in contrasting shapes and materials that’s often the first layer of suspense the audience picks up from a shot, and gives the show’s camera a variety of interesting angles with which to put even more pressure on the characters. “When you first walk into the office from the main doors, the first thing you’re confronted with is this bulwark of a Russian column that’s splitting you. You can’t go straight. You have to go left or right, and it was a really fun thing to start to play with, and I think it worked out pretty well,” White said.
Even in “The Bubble,” the secure room where Twila and Bea can be debriefed by their handlers, Dane (Adrian Lester) and Ray (Nicholas Podany), without fear of Soviet eavesdropping, White used contrasts to create a distinctive look that still implicitly places them all behind enemy lines. “It was amazing to walk around and use the materials of some of the buildings that we were scouting for other uses, and just see the materiality, and see some of the techniques that were used in construction, and be able to employ that in the bubble. Because while the design is American, the construction was Soviet, so there’s a lot of cross-pollination in there,” White said.
“Something that I think we all shared — myself, Sara, David, Susanna — we all shared this opinion that we’ve seen the grey Cold War thing. We’ve seen it. It’s very boring. And it’s also just not true,” Magoutas said. “ It was not only our desire to create a beautiful show, but also to depict the reality of just how intense the competition was between the two countries on every front and how much each country felt they had to prove to one another.”
The U.S. Embassy entrance into the Bubble on ‘Ponies’PeacockWhite and Magoutas (and the entire “Ponies” crew) really came together to make the show much more vibrant than past spy series, especially those set in Soviet Russia. “We really wanted to make sure we kept the excitement, the lightness alive,” White said. “We were talking a lot as we were creating the look of the show about allowing these characters, even in a time of intense pressure, to have the full breadth of human experience — like we’re doing now in a political situation that is not ideal. We’re still having birthdays and going on first dates and stuff. We wanted to make sure that that came through.”
“I also love the way that Dave and Sussana are some of the few people out there making stories that are truly about women and specifically female friendships, you know, where the romantic relationships are sort of just background. They just so happen to have romantic relationships; the core is the female friendship, and I love that. I love making work like that. It was a dream job, really,” Magoutas added.
“Ponies” is now streaming on Peacock.
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