Hulu's Phony Creator on Making Connie Britton Look Just a Little Off and Getting High School Just Right

What did they do to Tami Taylor's face?!? That was my first reaction to seeing the "impostor" version of Ellen Cooke (Connie Britton) in Hulu's new mystery series Phony. Britton — whose face is more than just famously recognizable; it's a symbol of maternal nurturing and kindness thanks to her turn as one of TV's all-time great moms in Friday Night Lights — descends into the uncanny valley after Ellen's son, Sonny (Sam Nivola), wakes up from a car accident and isn't convinced this woman claiming to be his mom is actually her. Wearing light prosthetics — on her... nose? Eyes? Cheeks? It's so disconcerting that it's hard to say where the deviations are — Britton's slight transformation is the creepiest thing all year, leaving her recognizable enough that you'll know it's Britton underneath but also different enough that it will give you the heebie-jeebies just looking at her. 

When I told Phony creator Nick Paley that I nearly had a full mental breakdown seeing this version of Ellen, it gave him a rush. "Hell yeah! Hell yeah!" he said. "Yeah, I mean that was the feeling. We really just wanted to be very subtle so that you felt like you identified with [Sonny's] like, 'Ahhhh!!' Like there's something that happens in your brain when something is just slightly off." 

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That uneasy feeling arises whenever Britton is on screen after the car accident. It's an ick that we share with Sam, who seems to be the only person who doesn't recognize his mom, who also happens to be the principal at the high school he attends. But it was difficult to find that right mix. Color contacts were an obvious no because of Britton's trademark baby blues, and even the thought of touching her hair, which is one of TV's best coifs, was off the table. 

"We went through a really long process of dialing this in," Paley explained. "We did prosthetics tests, we did makeup tests, we did VFX tests, and what we landed on is like a very subtle blend."

"It was so hard," Paley said, laughing. "Because like of course, when you start with prosthetics, we put a crazy big nose [on her] and did all the stuff that you usually do, and it was like, it just looks like Connie with a fake nose."

In researching facial recognition, Paley discovered that not everyone interprets faces the same way, and reactions can vary with just visual stimuli. So it was up to Britton to sell the whole package — someone who could be Sam's mom, but also maybe wasn't — through her acting.

"It's a testament to Connie's abilities and talent as an actor that she wanted to be able to play both roles for the mystery, you know, like an impostor role and a caring mom," Paley told TV Guide. "And what we found out was that the overlap [between the two] emotionally is trauma. So, like, if you almost lose your son in a car accident, the symptoms of trauma, sort of like a blankness, emotionality, a reactivity, a sort of intense stop-start relationship to people, it looks a lot like an impostor hiding something. So she was just able to play the emotional truth of both by honing in on that and did such a wonderful job."

While making Ellen look just off was one task for Phony, getting the high school vibes to be just right was a different challenge. One of Phony's charms is its portrayal of the social life at Sonny's high school. Decades of high school-set TV shows have conditioned us to look for the jocks, the nerds, the cheerleaders, and other stereotypes, but at Delby High School, cliques give way to more of a mix of all students, something that was intentional based on feedback from real high schoolers.

"I hate typified high school stuff, and I was so scared of making a high school show that would feel just sort of bleached out and typified," Paley said. "And so when I first sold the show, I went and talked to a bunch of kids at high schools around the area where I grew up, and talked to the art teachers and got into classrooms and just talked to them about what felt so false to them about high school shows, and a lot of them just said that it was the types. It was like the archetypes being played out, like '80s high school archetypes, and how there was such a blending overlap in most kids now in high school that it's actually not really cool to identify as in one clique."

In Phony, the typical athletes mingle with the standard geeks, the pothead deadbeats invite the novice magicians to parties in the woods, and many, like Sonny, take pride in welcoming new students to school. It's startlingly harmonious and an optimistic look at youth, making the school feel fully dimensional and lived-in rather than a campus full of kids where only a few social groups actually matter, as other shows would have you believe. 

To flesh it out even further, Paley and co-showrunner Anthony King (Search Party) sprinkle in little vignettes of random students just being kids, trying out for choir, waxing philosophically about what matters to them ("certainty is the most absurd thing in the world," one kid opines during a party in a later episode), juggling, and, my favorite, having a nosebleed in the hallway. It's these details that help Phony juggle genres, adding comedy to what would otherwise be a drama about a teenager losing his mind, something that executive producer Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods) helped bring to the mix.

"Drew is a master of bringing stories that have mixtures of tones," Paley said. "I feel like he's so excellent in that way, and so he was a great mentor in basically sticking up for the small details. Like, how do you have a grounded coming-of-age high school story with a crazy high premise, with character comedy, with a beaver that cuts down a tree, just a lot of tones? And he just talked about it in a way that was like, just follow your instincts."

Naturally, as soon as the trailer was released and divulged the plot of Sonny not believing his mom was who she said she was, internet sleuths began shooting their shot, with the leading theory being that Sonny had Capgras syndrome, a neurological condition in which a person believes a loved one has been replaced by an impostor. 

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"What I'll say is that every theory that I've seen is valid and touched on in some way in the show," Paley said. "It's really exciting to me that as many people know about Capgras and are being like, 'Aha!' My experience of that is like, yes, good. That will help the show. [But] I've not seen anybody actually say the answer, though, of what's going on [in Phony]."  

The good news is that we won't have long to wait for an answer. Shows centered on a mystery can be notorious for dragging their feet to give answers, but Paley wants things to move along.

"I don't like endless mystery boxes, and the season kicks off with like a whole 'nother huge story at the end after giving some answers to what's going on," Paley said.

The first two episodes of Phony are now available on Hulu. New episodes air Tuesdays.