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It sounds odd to call a show about the aftermath of a nuclear disaster a surprise hit.
The series received critical acclaim, became unexpectedly buzzy, and didvery wellin terms of ratings.
Its also in the running for 19Emmy Awards.
Given the shows sobering subject matter, Im guessing you were surprised by how many people watchedChernobyl.
I mean, I thought some people would watch it.
The estimate of the audience would be some amount of people.
The week-by-week release ofChernobylhelped create a kind of snowball effect.
They see all sorts of allegories in it.
It draws you in because it is a terrifying succession of events.
Then the more you look, the more you see them.
Now, also, oddly, were seeing non-allegorical parallels becausenuclear reactors are blowing up in Russia again.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.
I mean, its remarkable.
Theres a moment in our show where Gorbachev is looking through a collection of Western newspapers and the headlines.
I mean, forget about the fact that you shouldnt.
And yet they try.
Prior toChernobyl, you wrote primarily comedies.
Did it feel like a big shift when you were writing it?
You know, I love comedy.
I love working in comedy, I love features.
But Ive been doing it for, you know, 25 years.
At the point I started working onChernobyl, it had been about 20 years.
20 years is a long time to do anything, and Id done a lot of movies.
It was a lot, and it would never stop, either.
There were no breaks.
And comedys the hardest.
I mean, its just the hardest.
Its way harder than writing drama.
Its not even close.
Why do you say that?
Thats different than anything else.
They were crying at the end.
And Im like, Yeah, at the end.
But they didnt cryany other time.They have to be crying, like, three times a minute.
Thats what comedy is.
Comedy is anti-crying, three times a minute.
It requires a sense of logic, and it requires a kind of intellectual capacity.
Some of the smartest people I know are comedy writers.
You have to be transgressive, but you also have to understand character.
When I was writingChernobyl, it seemed very natural to me.
It was nice to just worry about nothing more than, honestly, me.
It was a dream.
Honestly, the easiest thing Ive ever done as a professional writer was writingChernobyl.
Or do you just push that aside and tell the story?
I mean, I wrote without any cares, you know?
I just wrote towards an ideal.
Ive written a lot of sequels.
Sequels are the hardest things to write.
You have demands from everybody and everybody has a thought.
Nobody was telling me what to write.
Nobody was telling me how to write it.
There were no constraints.
It was simply, Write something.
I hadnt had that experience in a long time.
Before you begin, there is just stuff there, and with this, there was nothing like that.
It was just simply purity of intention.
And to HBOs credit, that never changed.
They never interfered in that regard.
Everyone basically came together and said, Okay, lets make this as best as we can.
Chernobylended up being five episodes.
Im the most fastidious planner there is.
A bible is, you know, you lay out your season.
I knew how it began, I knew how it ended.
It had to be planned.
Its like, you know, go faster.
As a critic nothing irritates me more than that.
You feel when theyre just adding.
Now, I found out why.
HBO was like, Okay, great.
And then I found out that I got paid by the episode.
I never thought about that.
Literally, I didnt even know.
It was just that things felt crisper.
There was less sluggishness.
We couldnt do it because it turns out, parades are expensive.
Other than that, honestly, we got to do everything.
I hope people get that sense when they watch the show that they havent been cheated.
We were given a tremendous amount of resources.
Because it was not like what we thought it was here in the U.S. Theyre just people, right?
Because in the end, it was Soviet citizenry that saved us all.
I wanted to ask you about Ulana, Emily Watsons character.
I know shes a composite of numerous scientists who were researching and working on all of this.
But how did you arrive at creating that character?
Legasov [Jared Harriss character] was an interesting guy.
He was very political, and it wasnt accidental that they sent him [to Chernobyl].
It wasnt simply because he was a good scientist.
A willingness to be disagreeable when you have to.
Shes not interested in popularity.
Shes not interested in promotions.
She only cares about the truth.
The scientists who were actually working with Legasov, I assume some of them actually were women?
There were a lot of names that well never know.
Generally, the women who were sent there for technical reasons were medical workers.
But there were scientists, female scientists, involved in Chernobyl.
These scientists, some of them did their jobs and were fine.
Some of them, um, challenged things a bit too much.
But it was a difficult time.
Im wondering, how has working on this show affected your approach to your work?
Has it changed anything about your process?
And that is that what I think, what I want, matters.
I come from a middle-class background.
My parents are public-school teachers.
I didnt grow up out here.
I dont know what the word is, but the antonym of entitlement?
Thats what I had.
If you were to hire me, my obligation was to make you happy.
But this is different.
When youre writing something you want to write, its wonderful.
And it sounds crazy to say that its a rare experience in Hollywood, but its a rare experience.
Im trying to stick to that lesson as best as I can.
