First of all, I’m really interested in how you got involved in “Candy.” A lot of your best-known work has been in comedy, so what drew you to the role of Pat Montgomery?
A friend of mine and I always joke, “What drew me to the role is that they offered me the opportunity to play it.” That’s the first thing that draws me to it. In all seriousness, Robin [Veith]’s writing is incredible. The balance of tones that she has is amazing and my own personal taste. I’m best known for a show that was very much straight-up comedy, but I came out of and came up in an independent theater world, which is always a mix of everything together all at once.
[That mix is] Robin’s writing and the way that she was able to blend all these tones together of things that are weird and things that are funny and things that are scary and things that are very dramatic and sad. She did such an amazing job putting all those things together. That’s what really drew me to the project in general.
Also, “Candy” is based on real events, so did you research this story before you started shooting?
Before we started shooting, absolutely. I did not know the story when I first got the scripts and intentionally didn’t find out anything about it until I had read the scripts that they had written, until I had read all five of the scripts, because I wanted the story to be revealed to me as if I was a person watching the show with no prior knowledge. Going into it, I didn’t know anything about the case, and then as we led up shooting, we did do a lot of, or at least I did a lot of, research regarding the time period and regarding Pat himself and the story and the case, I did a lot of reading about that.
We had consultants on the show who were involved in the reporting, we had consultants who knew the real people, but ultimately, because we weren’t trying to be a photorealistic recreation of events, there was a lot of creative license that we were able to take. There was a lot of research done, but it wasn’t about presenting the real life. It was about presenting this interpretation of the story.
