The Season 4 finale of “Hacks” took Ava and Deborah far away from the sunny Los Angeles skies into the world of Singapore. While the episode follows Deborah after walking away from her Late Night series, the backdrop and elegance of Singapore follows both characters as Deborah attempts to do standup in a Singapore casino using a translator.
With a new location, production designer Rob Tokarz began brainstorming ideas to bring the world of “Hacks” and American standup into Ava and Deborah’s Singaporean trip, and collaborating with his Singaporean team to create their vacation.
I imagine that when Jen [Statsky], Lucia [Aniello] and Paul [W. Downs] pitched a finale where Ava and Deborah go to Singapore, the four of you had a long conversation about how you were going to construct and build new standup sets as this is the first time we see Ava and Deborah leave the United States.
It was very much a first. What happened initially is that they wrote the episode and had a number of ideas in mind when they were breaking the season between three and four, and so they were going between a few different places that the characters might travel to. And then, before I had started prep that season, Morgan Sackett and Nate Young, our producers, went to Singapore and did a scouting tour of what are the cool things there, and then brought back those ideas to share with Jen, Paul and Lucia. They had an idea of what they wanted to have happen to Deb overall. When I jumped in, we went [to Singapore] in December and ended up scouting these really cool spaces, like Gardens by the Bay and Victoria Theatre, and just being able to be on the ground with Adam Bricker, our DP, who helped us make sense of it all and how everything would be structured while we were there.
How many locations did you and your team scout in Singapore?
In general, we got to shoot at all of the ideal spaces for us. We probably looked at maybe five or seven other locations that didn’t make it on the screen. We had some alternatives for The Fullerton, for Deborah’s suite. We looked at a couple of different hotels for that, and there’s other places that just wouldn’t fit in time-wise, that was another thing. The hotels had to fit into our schedule.
Deborah’s suite is so very her with all of the extravagant clothing. What were the details and trinkets that you wanted to bring into her Singapore suite, which is her home away from home in this episode?
What we were looking for with the suite was finding a place that was elegant. But when you get to Singapore, especially coming from Los Angeles, you realize how tropical and lush and human it is. So what we did with her suite is that we wanted to bring in more greens. I wanted to bring in more tropicals and wanted to feel the lushness of Singapore, but also have that elegance that Deb does have, but also the volume at which she has it. We converted the second bedroom into basically a built-in changing area. My team in Singapore built the wardrobe that she pulls everything out of on the day or night before and we redressed the room to try to bring some of the elements that Deb is comfortable with, but we also wanted it to feel like we’re in Singapore.
I wanted to talk about Deborah’s Singapore stage. Was it an actual stage that you guys built for the episode, or were there pieces of the stage already there in Singapore?
That was at the Victoria Theatre, which is a theater that goes back to the colonial era of Singapore. For classical music performances, behind the stage is this beautiful, 30 foot wide pipe organ, which was very cool, but the feature was really distracting. We had to build all of our scenery in front of it. But I found this piece of reference that was a Chinese model, and it was all of this beautiful saturated red on red. I knew that when I covered everything up, I wanted to go really, really red and make it very saturated, and then the fan concept was just another way to honor the place we were.
In “Hacks,” we’ve done so many stages with Deborah and Ava over the seasons that it needed to feel very different. As soon as I landed in Singapore for the actual shoot week, my team ran up to me with swatches and said, “We have to pick the red,” so we picked the red on the spot while we’re scouting, and then we built the stage to be reflective of that richness and the luck that the color red brings. The chair was another thing, because we looked at around 18 different chairs at one point in time. And slowly, as the stage came up, we had landed on the one that she fell asleep in so magnificently. The chair was a big discussion. It’s really a big thing because it becomes the full focal point.
Deborah’s posters always stand out on “Hacks,” and her Singapore posters for the finale are very different from her advertising back in Los Angeles.
Because it’s a very last minute trip since she diverted the flight to Hawaii to Singapore, there’s not a lot of time to do a big PR thing or photoshoots. So creatively, what we did is we operated under the idea that Deb called Damien and said “Damien, I need you to send over photos to this to the Sentosa. They need to make a poster for me. I’m going to perform!” And then what I did is used my team in Singapore to do the graphics for it, as opposed to the graphic designers that we have in LA, because I wanted there to be a little bit more of a Singaporean aesthetic. We did a bunch of different versions of it, and landed on that one just for that gag of extending her run. We used some old existing photos, and then just let the Singapore team do what they do.
“Hacks” is a show that has heavy roots in Los Angeles, as we see throughout the entire run of the series. How did you and your team collaborate on designing the Singapore sets versus the LA sets this season?
I had an entirely different team in Singapore. They were working on getting all the bits and pieces prop-wise and dressing-wise while I was running my department in LA. We work until six or seven o’clock in LA, which is right around the time that Singapore wakes up and starts working. So, I would be doing my full day of La work, and then I’d be turning it over and spending a few hours with the Singapore team with Zoom and emailing them back and forth. And then, they would go about their work day. I’d wake up, do the LA work, review what happened overnight in Singapore, which is their entire day, give them notes, and then the cycle would repeat itself over the last few weeks before we got there. So it was really having two departments, and luckily, the strength of my LA department let me make that balance work.
Now that “Hacks” has gone international, what would be your dream set to design for Ava and Deborah?
That’s a hard question. I’d love to add a wing to Deborah’s mansion. I’d love to add a wing that we’ve never seen before, and something that she’s been hiding for five seasons, and for the joke of her to say “What you didn’t know this was here?”
For Ava, it’s hard. One of the things with Ava that happens every season is she never lands, like she’s always on a journey or temporarily in a space that she moves in or moves out of, and she has nowhere that she’s rooted down. I’d love to design the place where she lands. I’d love to design. I wanted to buy Ava to buy a house or a condo, and I want to design a place where she’s going to be long term, because she’s finally found herself. I want Ava to be okay because I remember being her age and the journey of being 27 and 28 years old. I just want to design a spot that is there for her when she’s finally okay.
