One of the biggest challenges for filming this season in particular was that the shooting schedule was interrupted by constant COVID lockdowns. They had such a long pause in the middle of filming that Szohr left before having her baby, and by the time they got back to shooting, she’d welcomed her little one. “[We] totally changed personally — and then everything with the world and the pandemic … To go back and jump into being on ‘The Orville’ and being Talla and all of the storylines evolving, [plus] all new sets, new cast members … for me personally, and for Talla, there were so many changes,” she shared.
Even after coming back from lockdown, the shooting schedule was completely out of order. “A lot of times on TV, you do Episode 1 and then you do Episode 2. You might have a scene or two that you change. But this [time], we were shooting some stuff from Episode 8 to Episode 2,” Szohr said. Her co-star Anne Winters added that shooting out of order presented its own challenges. “We would have different episodes and different scenes [every day]. So it was challenging to remember, ‘Okay, that was that story. This is this story, this happened before, or this happened after,'” Winters said.
