Caroline

You know what really struck me re-watching all these episodes?

Estelle is young.

Estelle is young.

Her actress is young.

I don't know how old she is, but they put her in a mental wig with a crazy manicure and a big cigarette.

But if you actually look at Estelle's face, that lady is our age.

Precisely, yeah.

So this is a layer of friends I've only come to understand since I started making a TV show, which is that like you write these scripts and you then have to, when you eventually go through many, many drafts of them, you have to make them producible at a certain point where you have to start looking at them, not as an artist, but as somebody who is trying to make the cheapest possible show, not a cheap show, but a show that comes under budget.

And at one point, your lovely producer will say to you, listen,

You have all these characters who only have one line.

You have Amy in episode one who says this.

You have Beth who says this in episode two.

You have Meg who says this in episode three.

I'm just picking the little women so I don't give spoilers away from my own show.

And they say, listen, it costs like 2,000 euros just to get anybody to speak on screen.

That is the minimum that we have to pay a special extra.

Can these people just not be compiled into one person?

And then they can be the person that delivers all the kind of extra bits of like color and little bits of story and little bits of dialogue.

The Gunthers, if you will.

Every show, whether it's like Succession or Friends or whatever, has like its like subcast of Gunthers, like who aren't that important, who don't really have their own storylines, but they're adding sort of color and they're adding information.