David Bernad
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
David Bernad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
in and then before mike starts writing he goes and lives you know he lived in sicily for three or four months he lived in thailand for three or four months and he kind of went around and investigated different cities and local culture and he met a lot of really interesting people and i think through those travels kind of he pulled out some of the thematic ideas and he met a couple funny characters when he had a little adventure and i think that led to some of the stories in the show
Mike's going to have to answer that. I would say we were very ignorant. about Thailand. And that's what's so exciting about the show. You know, in Thailand, they call it soft power. And soft power is this idea of them trying to figure out how to export Thai culture. Because really what Americans know about Thailand is probably from The Hangover.
And it's this idea of like, it's a party country of like sex tourism, which that's not what Thailand is, obviously. And for us, we were kind of ignorant And the second you land, the second you get in there and you really immerse yourself, you realize just how beautiful Thailand is. So it kind of just really coalesced in a natural way.
You know, similar to Sicily, we were never going to – I would have bet money we were going to shoot in France. And we were in Sicily – And we were at a hotel and there's all these heads everywhere. And we asked the guy, what are these heads? And he told us a story about this Moor soldier who came and fell in love with a local Sicilian woman.
And the woman found out that he had a lover back home and she chopped his head off. And that's what those heads represent is this kind of story about jealousy and infidelity and and kind of the history and culture of Sicily. And once we heard that story, I think that opened up what Mike wanted to write.
In a similar way to us traveling around Thailand, opened up this idea of doing a season about Buddhism and the beauty of Thailand.
I think right away, I mean, again, if you had told me that John Grice would still be in the show season three when we were shooting season one, I would never have believed you. But John's amazing. He's an amazing actor, amazing human being. And I think... Mike immediately had this idea of how to keep Jennifer Coolidge's story going in a way that would surprise audiences.
For Mike, you know, the Tanya storyline has evolved as kind of a through line. And he had this brilliant idea of how to keep that storyline in the show. And once we knew Natasha was in, Mike had the brilliant idea of bringing Greg back and seeing what happens when those two cross.
Yes.
Who is it? It's Walton Goggins. Of course. Yeah.
I wonder. Well, it's funny because if you spend enough time with Mike, you're going to end up as a character in one of his movies or shows because he's always paying attention and he's really good at picking up on funny moments you don't even realize he's paying attention. So... There's a lot of me, I think, in the show. That or I'm a narcissist and I'm just projecting.
You're distributed amongst. Yeah. There is definitely one line in there that I told him as an anecdote. When we were in Bangkok, I had gone out for drinks with someone and she told me that the women in Bangkok call these bald men LBHs, losers back home. So I went back and told Mike the next day, which I was really excited when that ended up in the script.
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's interesting when we're making the show. HBO picked the show up very quickly. in July of 2020 and said, can you get a show shot this year that can be out in 21? And Mike and I had sold and thought about multiple versions of a travel show that examined upstairs, downstairs life and the resort culture and colonialism.
and you know mike started writing really quickly and then the idea of this of the murder plot was something that came later that was never the idea of the show was always kind of these really specific characters kind of interacting with each other and examining more existential ideas so this idea of like a plotty show was never something that we set out to make and even when we were cutting season one
I remember we got this note about the end of the pilot returning to the dead body to remind people that there's a dead body. I remember talking with Mike about it and he was like, I don't think people are really going to care about that. They're going to forget that the dead body exists. Let's not really focus on the show.
Obviously, for some people, that's a big part of the show and they're hooked into that. Season one is really just like, as you said, a lot of people sitting around a table talking. Part of that was because we had to shoot that in a bubble. We couldn't leave the hotel. And that was partly why the show was so contained. Season two is really a bedroom farce.
And I think Mike, who's brilliant at plotting and brilliant at writing soap, and I mean that as a compliment, he's like, how do I escalate this and make this a really fun bedroom farce? And And I think after the success of season two, it's like, how do I make this even bigger? That's what led us to that and the nebulizer is what led us to season three.
It's also funny, like in even season two, when we started shooting, we were still in the throes of COVID. So we were slightly contained. And this is the first time we've made the show with kind of nothing holding us back. This was a massive production. We were in so many six cities or something and constantly moving and so many hotels.
And I think he kind of wanted to challenge us to kind of go bigger.
I know.
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