“Arrested
Development” will return with the follow-up to its third season (which
originally aired on 2006 on FOX) on Netflix this spring, and for Jason
Bateman, who plays Michael Bluth, filming his first scene back was a
pressure-filled moment.
“I just
remember trying to be as good as I could as quickly as I could because
there is so much to say and do,” Jason told AccessHollywood.com, after
the Netflix panel at the Television Critics Association Winter Session
2013 in Pasadena, Calif., about shooting his “AD” return, with castmate
Jeffrey Tambor (Bluth family patriarch George Sr.). “We were shooting 15
pages a day, at times. On a movie, you shoot two.”
Jason
said there was an added sense of importance and excitement in those
first moments of filming again, not just because the cast and crew had
14 episodes to shoot (four more episodes than they originally
announced), but because of everything the show meant to the fans and to
Jason, himself.
“Yeah, because
this is obviously the most beneficial thing I’ve ever done in my career,
for my career, the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything in my career,
the people I love the most in my career, so all of those things, it was
amazing to be able to be with all of them again,” Jason said.
“But
then I had to remind myself that there was a job to do and… there are a
bunch of people who appreciate the show as much as I do — the fans —
and so I wanted to make sure that it didn’t suck, and that I [wasn’t]
just out there being selfish and being this close to Jeffrey and having
fun that day,” he added. “I wanted to do a good job playing the
character too.”
Portia de Rossi,
who plays Lindsay Bluth Funke, recalled that her first scene back was
actually with a newcomer to the “Arrested Development” fold.
“My first scene was with Chris Diamantopoulos, who has quite a big role in my episode,” Portia told Access after the panel.
The actress said it was “overwhelming” when she finally did reunite with her fellow Bluths — in a family scene.
“I
think it was all of us together actually, in that scene where we’re all
in the penthouse together, and it was overwhelming,” she told Access.
“It was so fantastic because everyone looked exactly the same, including
the kids. I don’t know how that happened.
“But
it wasn’t just the way that everyone looked,” Portia said of the cast’s
enduring closeness. “We made the same jokes, we had the same
relationship to each other and it felt like one of those moments in
time, where you kind of question whether time exists because it just
felt like we were coming back to work a few months after we ended. It
was very strange.”
And the camaraderie made filming the series “easy.”
“It
was so easy and I mean, to hear everybody in character again and the
first rehearsal again of the scene, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s it,
that’s what we do,” she added.
The
cast avoided discussing plot details of the next installment in the
series during the TCA session (Jason said during the panel it’s not
really a Season 4). And, Executive Producer Mitch Hurwitz revealed
during the show’s panel that some of the fan fiction created by fans of
the show after the show went off the air, actually unknowingly scooped
some of the ideas the writers had to bring the show back.
It
was revealed, however, that the episodes are shot from different
perspectives, so fans will get to see, for example, Portia’s Lindsay
character talking with her mother and thinking her mother, Lucille
(Jessica Walter) is being sarcastic, only to find in a later episode,
looked at from Lucille’s perspective, that the mom meant something
entirely different.
As for the
“Arrested Development” movie that has been discussed, there were no new
details, but the cast was hopeful it will get made.
“Arrested Development” drops on Netflix this spring.
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