Flack Star Genevieve Angelson on Navigating Hollywood's New Normal
How TV is saying goodbye to glamour and hello to Clorox Wipes.
WRITTEN FOR TOWN & COUNTRY MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2021
It’s 5 o'clock in the morning and I’m waiting for the results of my rapid test, listening to someone wipe down the handle I just used to open my trailer with Clorox.
I am shooting The Afterparty, a new comedy series for Apple TV+. As far as I know, our production is among the safest underway. Since mid-October, we have not had a full-blown shutdown due to COVID-19, unlike so many others. Once or twice we had what were later determined to be false positive rapid tests, but those crew members (along with their entire departments) were sent home for several weeks nonetheless, and replaced by others who passed three consecutive PCR tests. I’ve just had three tests myself —a PCR yesterday on my day off to see if I contracted anything over the weekend, and this morning (after passing a temperature check), a PCR and a rapid. Once I’ve passed, I can begin with the hair and make-up department.
My hair and make-up team wear gowns, masks, and face shields. I wear a mask except when make-up is being applied to my lower face. The chairs are wiped down after every actor sits in one, the mirrors sanitized, and each actor has a sealed container of her own brushes, products, and individually wrapped breath mints. Five or six actors used to sit in a trailer at once; now we go in two at a time with multiple barber chairs dividing us. We used to chat and gossip and bitch over the din of blow dryers as we sipped our coffee, but it’s harder to hear now through our masks and because—even in the middle of winter—the doors to the trailer have to stay open at all times.
I’m thinking a lot of “we used to” thoughts lately, in part because Amazon Prime just released the first season of Flack, a TV series I began shooting three years ago, when the safety protocols required by a deathly virus would have seemed like grotesque absurdities. The last 10 months have afforded me many opportunities to balk at what I once took for granted that will never be the same, but memories of Flack have thrown my present production reality into grotesque and absurd relief.
On The Afterparty's set, there’s a whole new department: the COVID Safety Officers. We begin every day with a safety update, reminders that everyone is required to wear at least one KN-95 mask and not cloth, beneath a face shield and goggles when the actors remove their masks, and that there is absolutely food or drink allowed indoors. To take a sip of water over the course of the 14-hour shoot day we have to step outside, where there is also a table of our beverages, Sharpies to demarcate them, and hand sanitizer next to the Sharpie. We still have craft services, but it’s no longer an open bar of hand-to-mouth trail mix and cookies where crew members are sanctioned to publicly binge all day with impunity; it’s sealed portions of potato chips and canned beverages, shielded behind finely knit netting and administered by caterers. Beneath a screaming HVAC air purifier that runs every time we hear “cut!” our cast chairs are pre-positioned six feet apart, and safety officers wander around gently adjusting people growing weary of their protocols after a long day of shooting.
We shot Flack in London, a country I’m currently banned from visiting. Anna Paquin, my sister on the show, used to squeeze me in a bear hug in our make up trailer every single morning. One day I remember being on location, sitting in a trailer to stay warm with her on our lunch break and we napped next to each other in its Murphy bed. In England, the equivalent to craft services was a tea cart with McVities and pears, where you could hear roughly as many different regional accents as there were people in the conversation as we grumbled and, dare I say, even smoked.
"I know that I am taking my life in my hands every day that I go to work."
