'Death by Lightning': Netflix's Hit Garfield Assassination Show, With Mike Makowsky | Prestige TV

Speaker 1 Oh, hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV Podcast Feed. I'm Joyna Robinson.
We have a very special sort of mini episode for you today.

Speaker 1 We've got the showrunner, creator of Netflix's Death by Lightning, Mike Makowski, is here to talk about this incredible Netflix show that has been,

Speaker 1 a lot of people have been talking talking about it, burning up the charts on Netflix.

Speaker 1 This is, if you haven't seen it, this is a show about, it's a four-episode miniseries about the assassination of President James Garfield. Michael Shannon plays Garfield.

Speaker 1 Matthew McFadgen plays Charles Gatteau, who assassinated him. And it is.

Speaker 1 really compelling watchable television. Since this came out a little while ago, a couple weeks ago,

Speaker 1 we just sort of talked about the whole series. So there are, if you consider history spoilers, there are

Speaker 1 spoilers for history. We talked about a lot of the choices, including some that are specifically happened in the finale.
So, if you haven't seen it yet, I really urge you to go watch it.

Speaker 1 It's an incredible

Speaker 1 show. You should really watch it.
And then come back. But if you've already seen it, let's go now to our conversation with Mike McCasky.

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Speaker 1 Let me start by asking you. I'm always fascinated by the length of projects, especially on something like Netflix, where the seasons can sort of expand and contract.
This is for, you know, episodes.

Speaker 1 Was there ever a version of this project that was a feature film length since you've done, you've worked in that arena before?

Speaker 4 You know, i always felt like the story was potentially a little too expansive to be a feature film uh i did initially write it as a six episode limited series all cards on the table and uh for both creative reasons and

Speaker 4 also

Speaker 4 frankly to get the show across the finish line at all to get green lit,

Speaker 4 it just needed to be sort of condensed to its its

Speaker 4 current form, which was four episodes.

Speaker 1 I meant to ask this question. I was going to ask this question later, but I'll ask, this is convenient.
I'll ask it now. Was there ever an impulse to do Gateau's trial since it was such a

Speaker 1 outlandish piece of theater itself?

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, for those who don't know, Gateau was one of the first insanity defenses in our country.
And essentially, his

Speaker 4 pitch was,

Speaker 4 I may have shot Garfield, but I didn't kill him. The doctors killed him, which is correct.

Speaker 1 Kind of what your show says, too. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the trial was such a farce in many ways. The only lawyer in America that would ever agree to represent him was his poor patent law,

Speaker 4 patent lawyer brother-in-law, George, who hated him

Speaker 4 and had no criminal defense experience. And Gato spent most of the trial berating him.

Speaker 4 And yeah, I mean, it was a real

Speaker 4 tantalizing prospect and set piece. And I wrote a whole trial episode.

Speaker 4 And ultimately, what I realized, because the trial took place after Garfield's death, that, you know, just doing like a weird Charles Gateau power hour after losing, you know, Garfield as this, as this counterweight,

Speaker 4 it felt imbalanced.

Speaker 4 You know, obviously there's, I think, part of me that wishes that I could have shown the trial, but I, you know, as with so many of the things that we unfortunately couldn't fit into four hours,

Speaker 4 I hope that this provokes people who are curious to go on Wikipedia or read Candace Mullard's book Destiny of the Republic that I adapted or any of the other really fascinating literature written about Garfield and Cateau.

Speaker 4 The Wikipedia rabbit holes are endless for this particular story.

Speaker 1 I love my impulse always when I'm watching sort of

Speaker 1 an adaptation of a moment in history that I don't know anything about. And the impulse to go on Wikipedia while you're watching, but again, not want to spoil yourself by history.

Speaker 1 I mean, we know where this is ending and how, but sort of what are the steps along the way? But you're like, oh, I just want to, I'll just wait.

Speaker 1 I'll wait until the end and then I will go down all the rabbit holes, you know?

Speaker 4 It very much reflected my experience reading Candace's book for the first time, just to sort of get it out of the way.

Speaker 4 I knew nothing about James Garfield, aside from I think I was mildly aware of the fact that he'd been assassinated

Speaker 4 vis-a-vis Stephen Sondheim, let's say.

Speaker 1 But I was going to bring that up for sure.

Speaker 4 I was at the buy two, get one free table at my local Barnes and Noble, and I needed a third book. And this is absolutely true.
It is not apocryphal. I'm sure I can procure the receipt.

Speaker 4 This was in like 2018. And I needed a third book.
And I picked up this book about the Garfield assassination and I read the back cover. And I

Speaker 4 was just like, I know nothing about this, but I would love to be on Jeopardy one day and I should educate myself, right? And

Speaker 4 I finally, you know, picked up the book and

Speaker 4 read it. And I ended up reading it in one sitting.
And I was just completely and utterly blown away by

Speaker 4 pretty much all of the details surrounding this poor man and his assassination. And

Speaker 4 I feel like I had to continue every five pages or so jumping over to Wikipedia, like hopefully, you know, like, and

Speaker 4 because I couldn't believe that this shit was true. I just, I could not believe that that convention actually happened.
Right, exactly.

Speaker 4 Or that Chester Arthur, like, I knew nothing about Chester Arthur.

Speaker 4 Roscoe Conklin. All these.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Nick, I will say Offerman was the only one of the main actors in the show to successfully grow out his full facial hair. Those mutton chops are all him.

Speaker 4 He was walking around Budapest for five months with those mutton chops.

Speaker 1 I feel like only he could pull that off in like your day-to-day walking around the street.

Speaker 1 Thank you for saying Steven Sondheim before I did, so I didn't have to be the first one to say it. I will come back to Assassins, but

Speaker 1 I was curious, in terms of like reading through this book, book,

Speaker 1 what were the moments that leapt off the page to you as sort of like, this is cinematic in and of itself? Like this is just going to be electric.

Speaker 1 And then what were the more, how on earth do I make this easily digestible, like this political nuance or these sort of maybe in some other adaptations, drier conversations, like, how do I keep them alive?

Speaker 1 Like, what was the thing that you were like, this is going to be a cakewalk and then this is going to be really tough to adapt?

Speaker 4 Well, yeah, to speak to the first point, it really starts with that convention, right? You know,

Speaker 4 1880 Chicago Republican National Convention.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 what happens for those

Speaker 4 who have not watched the show yet

Speaker 4 is Garfield, James Garfield, who was this, who I think Kendis does a really, really amazing job at. presenting this this him as one of the great what-ifs in in

Speaker 4 American history.

Speaker 4 This progressive hero, this man born into abject poverty, who literally falls upward to the highest office in the land, ostensibly against his will.

Speaker 4 A war hero,

Speaker 4 an outspoken advocate for civil rights and racial equality, and universal public education and civil service reform.

Speaker 4 Just truly the best man for the job and who allegedly doesn't even really want it. His name is not in the ballot in 1880 when stepping into that convention.

Speaker 4 He's there to nominate a spoiler candidate.

Speaker 4 And his speech is so powerful and presents such a strong vision for the future of our country while also grappling with the thorniness of the past.

Speaker 4 that some guy stands up in the rafters and shouts, we want Garfield,

Speaker 4 which was a sort of weird moment.

Speaker 4 But after a 36 round deadlock among the delegates, people start looking to other candidates because no one's reached a quorum.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it's very clear to everyone there that Garfield exhibits a lot of the

Speaker 4 raw qualities of leadership that the nation had really been starving for at this particular juncture in history. And he's nominated against his will.

Speaker 4 He tries to shut it down and

Speaker 4 ends up receiving overwhelming support.

Speaker 4 So for me, you know,

Speaker 4 it's the situational absurdity of that massive set piece was just incredibly exciting to me.

Speaker 4 Like, like, like, there's just so much bound up in that and having these figures like Roscoe Conkling and James Blaine and Chester Arthur

Speaker 4 circling around Garfield, what it means for Garfield to step up and give that speech to begin with.

Speaker 4 This man who claims he doesn't want it, but you don't give an Obama in 2004 speech. Right.
If you don't kind of want it.

Speaker 1 I love this.

Speaker 1 I'll come back to that second part of the question, but I do want to divert and say,

Speaker 1 you know, after I watched your show, I did the Wikipedia rabbit holes, but but I also guzzled up everyone's sort of like fact versus fiction, like what this show got right versus like sort of what it, what it embellished for dramatic effect and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 And most of them are like, wow, this is way more factual than this stuff usually is, like way, way closer to the, what actually happened.

Speaker 1 Obviously, there's rhetorical updates, which we will get to, but

Speaker 1 I thought it was so interesting that

Speaker 1 some. people were saying, hey, Garfield was way more of a political operator than it seems like.

Speaker 1 He's not just like a farmer, like he was, you know, a career politician for a long time before he did this.

Speaker 1 But what I thought, what I loved about your adaptation is at the end, you've got this moment when Garfield says to his wife, like, I knew what I was doing when I walked to that podium.

Speaker 1 I wanted them to know me. So you have this sort of like,

Speaker 1 forgive me, this is a Weiss and Benioff production. So this sort of like Jon Snow, I don't want it like character at the beginning, but at the end, he has this sort of like, but did I kind of want it?

Speaker 1 And I was just wondering sort of where you land on Garfield's psychology in giving that speech.

Speaker 4 Well, there's a little bit of Ned Stark in him as well, I think. Yeah, yeah.
And

Speaker 4 like Ned Stark, unfortunately, he doesn't make it. But,

Speaker 4 you know, it's interesting.

Speaker 4 I think in

Speaker 4 sort of positioning it as a parallel journey between.

Speaker 4 Garfields and his assassin, who on the face of it, these two men couldn't be more different from one another. And one succeeds, falls upward, while the other just fails miserably over and over again.

Speaker 4 But what was incredibly fascinating to me was that, like the middle of that Venn diagram, like, what do these two guys actually have in common? Yeah.

Speaker 4 And what do a lot of men in this political era have in common?

Speaker 4 is is is the is the ambition, the the desire to matter.

Speaker 4 Again, Garfield doesn't step up on that stage unless he wants people to know him.

Speaker 4 That is also Gateau's governing ethos, right? Like he wants to matter, he wants to be recognized, he wants to be remembered.

Speaker 4 And I think it is

Speaker 4 that ambition that actually makes them a lot more similar than

Speaker 4 we might assume at the start of the journey. But in Gateau's case, it is very blatant.

Speaker 4 In Garfield's, there's a bit more of a latent quality that I kind of wanted to tease out over the course of the series that

Speaker 4 he is not a pure lawful good. Right.

Speaker 1 It's fascinating. And Michael Shannon's performance is so good.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and there's nothing, I mean, lawful good runs the risk of

Speaker 4 feeling

Speaker 4 simple or easy. There is nothing simple about.
Michael Shannon.

Speaker 4 I think that that was part of the draw of casting him is you can always tell that there's something simmering under the surface with this guy, even when he is projecting the most noble

Speaker 4 version of James Garfield.

Speaker 1 Convention leaps off the page. This is sort of a cinematic step piece.

Speaker 1 What were the elements that you were like, this is going to be tougher for me to figure out how to make it digestible, especially in a sort of a four-episode context?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, really on like a macro level, I knew that the buy-in was going to be incredibly tricky to get people to even want to engage with a story about James Garfields. You know, like,

Speaker 4 I really, I like to align with the 2% of history nerds that would readily

Speaker 4 consume James Garfield's and Chester Arthur content.

Speaker 4 I like to believe that I'm one of those people, but I will say that almost no one else in my life. is a part of that 2%.
They're in the other 98%.

Speaker 4 And I spent, I mean, this was about a seven-year process all in.

Speaker 4 I spent most of those seven years just like grabbing people by the lapels like a crazy person, being like, James Garth, like this is my Roman Empire.

Speaker 4 So, you know, part of the adaptation process is

Speaker 4 giving it a little bit more of a contemporary engine, a little bit more of a sense of

Speaker 4 modern immediacy to it. And that, you know, filters into the conversation about anachronistic language.

Speaker 4 I wanted it to feel modern.

Speaker 4 And it felt like rather than just presenting it as like a sheer docu drama that, again, I think would only have really appealed to that 2%, like wanted to do everything in my power to kind of grab people by the lapels in the same way and be like, no, no, this is really cool and fun and weird and fucked up.

Speaker 4 I don't know if I'm allowed to curse, but you are. Go for it.
Great.

Speaker 4 And a lot of that just has to do with the humor too. And I remember reading Candace's book and laughing a lot.

Speaker 4 Not that the book is written with a lot of like explicit levity or mirth, but there is that deeply ingrained sense of situational absurdity to these larger-than-life figures or, you know, Gateau getting kicked out of a sex commune.

Speaker 4 Like, it's just

Speaker 4 to present like the most straightforward version of all of those scenes and characters, I think, would actually be to do a disservice to

Speaker 4 who they are and why they mattered.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love that. And I, I, I, for the record, I loved the contemporary language.
I was curious about uh Garfield's speech.

Speaker 1 When, like, so there are moments of sort of making the language contemporary, and then were there certain things that felt sacred? Like, we don't want to,

Speaker 1 like, how accurate was the

Speaker 1 speech that he gave at the convention?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I would say probably 70, 30 to the actual language, but it, you know, at times, again, to just make it feel a little bit more modern, I kind of just updated some of the verbiage

Speaker 4 because, you know, like any speech given in 1880,

Speaker 4 there's a little bit of a limited accessibility to,

Speaker 4 but,

Speaker 4 but, but, but, but certainly, you know, Garfield

Speaker 4 was an incredible speechwriter and orator. And I tried to compromise as little as possible on his language and

Speaker 4 the overall just intentionality behind it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm curious. So

Speaker 1 you mentioned this idea of getting this green lit, getting this past the finish line. I'm curious about this sort of moment and period

Speaker 1 adaptations that we're in, you know, when you have something like the Gilded Age on HBO, when you've got, you know, what Stephen Knight is doing with Peaky Blenders into sort of like House of Guinness.

Speaker 1 Like, what do you think is so appealing right now to this kind of,

Speaker 1 you know, we're not doing, we are, we're still always doing Jane Austen. Don't worry.
There will always be Jane Austen, new period pieces. I just got an email about the new sensibility today.

Speaker 1 Like, it's always going to be Jane Austen. But, like, this sort of like down and gritty, muddy, cursing sex, like

Speaker 1 adaptation kind of era that we're in, you know? Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 4 I mean, I've, I've, I've watched both of those shows and liked them quite a bit, but I really can only speak to my own journey.

Speaker 4 And all I can say is there was not like a ready-made market for the James Garfield show. Like when I first told my agent I wanted to adapt

Speaker 4 this book about James Garfield as a TV show,

Speaker 4 he looked at me like I had three heads, like I was just totally fucking insane.

Speaker 4 And we got a lot of no's before we ever got to yes, including from Netflix, the fine folks at Netflix who eventually agreed to make the show. I mean,

Speaker 4 it was a really, really difficult journey. And

Speaker 4 the question that we got back most often from

Speaker 4 anyone that we presented the script to or the book to was, sure, but

Speaker 4 who the fuck cares about James Garfield?

Speaker 4 Which then just kind of gave us that mandate to push all the harder to

Speaker 4 do that lapel grabbing.

Speaker 1 So, you know,

Speaker 1 I will admit and say,

Speaker 1 if someone says, hey, there's an adaptation of the life and death of James Garfield and Gateau, my Stephen Sondheim Assassin's Love Aside, which again, I will come back to, that is not necessarily grabbing my lapels.

Speaker 1 And then I started reading the cast list and I was like, Michael Shannon's in this, Matthew McFadden's in this, Betty Gilpin's in this, Shaya Wiggum's in this. Like, all my favorites are here.

Speaker 1 This is incredible. I'm so excited.
I was like astounded and excited about this.

Speaker 1 Was there, I mean, everyone's incredible. Nick Offerman's great.
Bradley Whitford's great. Everyone's fantastic.

Speaker 1 Was there a performance, though, among these great performances that particularly sort of changed your understanding of these characters that you've already spent years and years and years with?

Speaker 1 And you saw one of these actors already, these actors pick it up and say, oh, there's something even more here that

Speaker 1 I realized.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, all of them brought.

Speaker 4 you know, just an incredible amount of passion and intellectual curiosity to their parts and did way more research on their individual subjects than I probably did, like reading multiple books, just which is amazing.

Speaker 4 You know, it's what you want and what you hope for.

Speaker 4 Definitely Betty Gilpin, though, read more than anyone else, including a full compendium of all of the letters written between James Garfield and Lucretia Crete, his wife.

Speaker 4 Lucretia is such a fascinating character. She was only the second first lady ever to have attended college.

Speaker 4 And in fact, she attended this local university in Ohio where she met her husband and she was like the editor of the school paper and he was the night custodian mopping floors in order to pay his tuition.

Speaker 4 And, you know, every bit his

Speaker 4 intellectual equal.

Speaker 4 But, you know, given the time that she's in,

Speaker 4 she can't even vote for her husband. You know, she and

Speaker 4 I think,

Speaker 4 especially when you have an actor that's as strong as Betty

Speaker 4 and is emotionally attuned as well, like I feel like Lucretia really came to life in a way that I didn't necessarily expect. And we spent a lot of time talking about that last scene between her and

Speaker 4 Gateau and what that should really represent. And what I love about Cree

Speaker 4 is,

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it's kind of a bummer, but

Speaker 4 all of the men in the show are governed by ego to some extent. Like they believe that the uh

Speaker 4 the benchmark of whether or not their lives were successful is that future generations will talk about them. Like

Speaker 4 the last question that Garfield ever asks on his deathbed, both in real life and in the show, is do you figure my name might have some place in human history? Even on his deathbed,

Speaker 4 this is the central concern for him. And Crete says,

Speaker 4 yes, a grand one, but uh, the grander one still in human hearts, and

Speaker 4 you know, you can see it in Betty's eyes, it's like she's sort of disappointed by her husband's question, like it's it, it's but she also doesn't know how to do anything other than to give him what he wants in that moment, which is acknowledgement that, like, yeah, of course, history is going to remember you.

Speaker 4 Uh, which

Speaker 4 we all know watching the show of history did not remember James Garfield, right?

Speaker 4 And or if they did, they remember him as a very obscure footnote in like assassination lore.

Speaker 4 But she gets to have that conversation with Gateau at the very end, where,

Speaker 4 you know, she really kind of like

Speaker 4 calls out the men in this era for like, like, like, why do they care so deeply about this?

Speaker 4 The women in this era know. know better than to think that their names are going to be etched in the annals of American history.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it's just they've nothing in their lived experience has shown them that history gives a fuck about them in this era.

Speaker 4 But what she can do, the power that she does have, is to deny that to Gateau.

Speaker 1 It's a great scene. It's a great moment.
I really loved it.

Speaker 1 I also was completely electrified by sort of this closed door scene between Gateau and Garfield when Garfield is sort of taking all comers into office hours, essentially, and Gateau comes in and sort of talks to him.

Speaker 1 That scene,

Speaker 1 I'm always fascinated by historical adaptations that try to recreate or not try to successfully sort of imagine behind closed doors conversations.

Speaker 1 So sort of like, what was that as a sort of a creative challenge for you? This sort of these two men alone in a room behind a closed door.

Speaker 4 So it's really like their heat moment in so many ways. Like they have very, very few scenes together.
And that is their real one dialogue scene together.

Speaker 4 Mike Shannon and Matthew McFadden didn't get to know each other super well on this production because usually when there was a Garfield block, Matthew would go home to London and vice versa.

Speaker 4 So, and this episode had the benefit of being,

Speaker 4 I believe, Matthew's second to last day of shooting. So, the very end of the journey,

Speaker 4 Gatteau gets to finally meet the wizard. Right.
Right.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know, historical record is pretty light.

Speaker 4 We know that Gatteau was able to meet for about five minutes with Garfield at the White House because he just kept shutting up every single day, day in and day out.

Speaker 4 Garfield, like all presidents in his era, took open office hours. So eventually any constituent could, you know, meet the chief civil servant in our country, which is obviously absurd.

Speaker 1 Wild.

Speaker 4 By today's

Speaker 4 understanding. When Matthew sat down, I think none of us were expecting the level of emotion.
Like even when I wrote the scene,

Speaker 4 I didn't necessarily think of it as like an emotional climax to a journey. The dialogue is pretty much unchanged, but this is just, you know, the difference between

Speaker 4 an actor reading the lines and an actor just embodying the role.

Speaker 4 Matthew just burst into tears as soon as he saw Garfield.

Speaker 4 And I don't know if that was planned or if it was just like the, he had spent the preceding four months begging every single day to meet Garfield, both as an actor and as a character. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I think that that's sort of like a cute visceral emotion, like that was all Matthew. And that's the reason that people talk about that scene.
It's not the writing.

Speaker 4 It's, it's, it's, it's Matthew's face and and Michael, you know, in real time, Garfield

Speaker 4 doesn't know how to deal with him. Like, you can see it in Michael's eye because we cross-cut it.
It's all genuine. Like,

Speaker 4 Michael's like, oh,

Speaker 4 oh, no. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I have to imagine, you know,

Speaker 4 I do think in real life, I'm sure that it was not as emotional of a moment for either Gateau or Garfield.

Speaker 4 But, no, it really is the centerpiece of the show, which was not necessarily what I even thought was going to be the scene that people would be talking about when I first wrote it.

Speaker 4 And that's all just, it's just a testament to those two guys.

Speaker 1 Matthew's performance is, you know, again, everyone is amazing, but one of my favorite things

Speaker 1 about all of these episodes is sort of the moment when someone is talking to Gateau and they realize that they're dealing with someone sort of. unhinged or unwell, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And they're just sort of like, oh, let me back away from the, or how do, like, what kind of kid gloves do I need to put on to like get out of this conversation as quickly or as elegantly as possible?

Speaker 1 Um, and and again, in those sort of like fact or fiction articles that I was devouring, and they were all like, yes, you could get this close to a president, to a secretary of state.

Speaker 1 You could bang on their door, you could walk up to them in the street. That's just what it was like, you know, if you were in DC at that time, which is completely wild.

Speaker 4 There was no Secret Service during this period. I believe the Secret Service was only ever established 20 years after that, when McKinley was assassinated.

Speaker 4 It was, it was, Garfield never ever thought that anyone would ever want to kill him. It was just not, it didn't even occur to him.

Speaker 4 There had been one presidential assassination prior to this point, 15 years before Lincoln had been assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer days after the Civil War, but that was very bound up in

Speaker 4 sort of just like the heat of wartime. And,

Speaker 4 you know, because there was no social media or like

Speaker 4 the idea of like, even like who the president was or what they looked like, like fame just meant something very, very different back then.

Speaker 4 And when Garfield was asked if he would want to pay out of pocket for his own private security, he famously said assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning.

Speaker 4 And it's best not to worry too much about either one. Which, of course, as soon as I read that line in Candace's book, I was like, why did you call your book that?

Speaker 1 You were like, highlight underscore tab.

Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 this is the part of the conversation where I can only be myself and talk to you about Stephen Sondheim and Assassins.

Speaker 1 I think Matthew's performance is so good as Gateau that it got me excited to go watch

Speaker 1 fuzzy YouTube videos of Dennis O'Hare's Gateau, which is incredible in one of the revivals of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, where where in that play, famously, Gateau like cakewalks his way up the, up to the gallows, singing, I am going to the lordy, which of course was something that Gouteau actually said when he went to the gallows.

Speaker 1 Still, I did the sort of Leo pointing meme when Matthew started singing, not reciting, but singing, I am going to the Lordy at the end.

Speaker 1 So like, how much are you, you know, as you're spending years and years and years developing this, how much are you engaging with probably the only other sort of core cultural examination of Gateau that we've had in the last?

Speaker 4 I also watch those fuzzy YouTube videos, but I can't claim to be

Speaker 4 a devout

Speaker 4 adherent to musical theater. I have never seen Assassins still, but I have seen specifically Dennis O'Hare's rendition of I'm going to the Lordy for sure.

Speaker 4 You know, it's such a weird moment to

Speaker 4 try and dramatize dramatize because

Speaker 4 you really feel reading the

Speaker 4 historical record,

Speaker 4 what the fuck was this guy thinking in his final moments singing this dumb song that can't have gone over well.

Speaker 4 Like, like, like, and for me, it all just sort of came back to the ethos with Gateau, which is just that massive delta. between his expectations and the reality.

Speaker 4 That even in his final moments, he thinks if he puts on this like

Speaker 4 fun show, that it will have some effect on his audience. And I can't imagine that any of the spectators receiving the execution felt anything other than abject horror and mild confusion.
Right.

Speaker 4 Which I think is reflected in the show.

Speaker 4 as well. You know, for me, it really is all about and as great as Matthew's rendition of him going to the Lordy, is he's very committed.

Speaker 4 And that was a very, I don't know if it was a fun day on set, but he was trying all kinds of voices.

Speaker 4 And, you know, to, you know, because I, we took a lot of just, you know, fun swings to see what the most effective version of it would be.

Speaker 4 I remember standing just under the gallows in Video Village. Um,

Speaker 4 but

Speaker 4 it's that last, it's that final moment

Speaker 4 before

Speaker 4 the lever drops

Speaker 4 where he, I wanted to give him that moment. And I don't think in real life he necessarily had this moment.
I have no idea how he received the crowd staring in horror back at him.

Speaker 4 But when you have an actor as good as Matthew, it's like,

Speaker 4 like to play

Speaker 4 in his final moments of life, that realization. that Lucretia Garfield the night before was right.

Speaker 4 That

Speaker 4 I don't think that the way that I'm coming across is the way that I actually am being received.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 That like it's that, oh,

Speaker 4 it's just like, oh,

Speaker 4 and you just see, like in that, in that final moment, Gateau realizes that it wasn't worth it.

Speaker 1 That's really good. It was amazing.

Speaker 1 Last question for you is, you've got this interesting sort of

Speaker 1 bookend idea of we open in 1969 with the with the brain in the jar. Sort of what was, what was, were you

Speaker 1 wanting to accomplish with that sort of

Speaker 4 meaning this brain yeah yeah oh nice

Speaker 4 yeah that's a good question what is it what is it made out of what is it made out of um that's a great question

Speaker 4 uh uh we had an incredible props department that spent way too much time i actually got to go physically see the brain the brain is it's actually been split into a couple of parts but uh i went to this military base in Maryland.

Speaker 4 I had to get special government permission to go and like view the brain.

Speaker 4 And you can see pictures of it online. It doesn't like, I think our brain has a little bit more lobage to it to

Speaker 4 register as a brain a bit more.

Speaker 4 I think a real human brain emulsified in a mason jar kind of just looks like Gefilta fish.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 yeah, strange, strange. I feel like I've gone down all kinds of crazy research rabbit holes, but I had to go see the brain.
I mean, you know, I.

Speaker 4 As soon as I read Candace's book, I always imagined that it would start in 1969, both as a way of disarming people who might click on a period show or read a period script and just kind of assume it's

Speaker 4 going to be kind of like dusty and anachronistic and

Speaker 4 not necessarily modern. Like I loved the idea of starting with a 1960s song in the case of what's in the show, Slime the Family Stone.

Speaker 4 And basically the most, I tried to find like the most unexpected way possible to start the show.

Speaker 1 In my notes that I took, the very first note is, we're starting with Sly of the Family Stone. And like, question my question, my, I was like excited and intrigued.

Speaker 1 And I think it was a really good, again, grabbing the lapels, like a really good sort of what, what's happening? Why are we in the 60s sort of moment? So. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And the sort of like thesis statement for the show being like,

Speaker 4 who the fuck is Charles Gateau? Like, and who the fuck is James Garfield? Like, who are these people?

Speaker 4 Most people on the street today would not be able to tell you a single thing about either of these two men. But again,

Speaker 4 what drives their entire parallel journey is that, is, is, is, is the hope that people in our current era or in 1969 or in any future generation might remember either one of them.

Speaker 4 So, all that's left of Gateau perversely is his brain in the mason jar.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 as I later found going to that facility, all of his remains in a filing cabinet, like a sort of Indiana Jones file, just like laid out perversely. You can see pictures of it online.

Speaker 4 The strangest detail is that if you pull the filing cabinet just underneath him, it's the remains of him, the space chimp. So a strangely befitting end for Gateau.

Speaker 4 Alphabetical order.

Speaker 4 I guess so. I hadn't even thought of that, but I guess G-U-H-A-that makes sense.

Speaker 4 That Gutso would essentially be interred beside a chimp.

Speaker 4 Whereas, you know, Garfield, for those folks who are ever, who live in Ohio or, you know, whatever, be interested in doing a sort of Garfield assassination vacation tour,

Speaker 4 Garfield is the only president who is not interred or buried or cremated. His coffin is on a pedestal next to his wife's coffin in his family crypt

Speaker 4 at Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio. And I got to go and pay homage and

Speaker 4 it was an incredibly moving experience. And

Speaker 4 just like that parallel or sort of that

Speaker 4 contrast between

Speaker 4 where Gatteau lives and where Garfield lives feels pretty stark to me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much for the chat. Thank you for this great show.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure, you know, like

Speaker 1 this has been such a success on Netflix that definitely

Speaker 1 way more people know who Garfield was or a bit more about who Garfield was, not to mention Conkling and the rest of these characters, Chester A. Arthur, and

Speaker 1 for better or worse, knew who Gateau is. So

Speaker 1 great, great work, sort of, you know,

Speaker 1 contradicting the thesis of your own show to a certain degree. So, yeah, amazing stuff.

Speaker 4 Well, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you taking the time.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 All right. Thank you so much to Mike for joining us.

Speaker 1 I just really loved this show and I loved talking to him about it. We will be back later this week.
We've got

Speaker 1 The Beast in Me, another Netflix show that we're going to, that Rob Mahoney and I are going to be talking about a little bit later this week.

Speaker 1 And then we'll be back on Friday with another episode about Pleuripus, our ongoing coverage of that.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much to Ashley Smith for stepping in and producing this episode. Thank you to Justin Sales for making everything happen.

Speaker 1 And thank you again, one last time to Mike Mikowski for joining us on the show. We'll see you soon.

Speaker 4 Bye.