In the end, we know about as much as when we started. Expats, whose first episode started with some open-ended reunions — first a more charged one between Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), and later a calmer, sadder meet-up between Hilary (Sarayu Blue) and Margaret — has left off with those same characters coming together, and the same indefinite feeling permeating their meetings.
[Ed. note: This post will now start discussing spoilers for the end of Expats.]
What we still don’t know is what happened to Gus, or what Mercy is going to do next with her own baby, or even, technically, how these women all feel about each other at the end of the day. But that’s exactly how showrunner Lulu Wang wanted the adaptation of Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 novel The Expatriates to feel. As she tells Polygon, she sees the ending as its own sort of beginning, and the mystery that drives so much of the pain in Expats was never the point she wanted to leave us with.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Polygon: So, starting off, how did you think about and approach the tone of the ending for each of the characters?
Lulu Wang: I think I wanted it to feel both, like, macro and micro. Both large in scope of the world, and global, but also so deeply personal. It’s a mother looking for her child. But it’s also all of us looking for a way to move on, to grieve, to find closure, to be happy, to find forgiveness, to be gentler on ourselves.
So I think visually, it was always really important to me that I have that really long take of Margaret walking through the city with her backpack on. And in many ways, she becomes part of the city; she’s now no longer able to separate herself from the streets and from the people and from the elements, because her son is out there somewhere. And for Mercy it was about getting to realize that she just wants to be loved. We hate her so much, she does all of these things, and she makes all of these choices. But that moment of her where we really realize she’s just a kid, and her mother brings her soup — I think that’s one of the most heartbreaking [bits] of, like, Oh, wow, she’s really young. She’s just a kid and she’s dealing with these really adult situations. And for Hilary, just breaking free, you know, we always envision her ending having a lot of color, and I wanted her to almost, like, yeah, she’s lost everything, but in a way she’s coming back to life. And she’s this butterfly and she, you know, goes from very monochromatic to embracing a lot of color.
Photo: Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
I’m curious how you thought about establishing the tone of the series directorally. What was it you felt like early on you gravitated toward in terms of getting the mood just right for what you were looking for with this adaptation?
I didn’t want it to be a plot-driven series where we were watching to solve the crime. I wanted it to really be an exploration of grief — I wanted it to feel like the book, because that’s what the book felt like. It was this tapestry of characters, of all of these different backgrounds, and against this very complex setting. And there are all of these different ways that people are trying to cope in different ways.
And so I think that really looking to the book, and I would pull out sentences, and then I would talk to my DP, and we would watch films together — we watched this great French series called Les Revenants, “the return,” which is a zombie series about the return of the dead. But it’s not what you would think. It’s really about grief and about time passing. We would watch foreign films, like this Icelandic film called AWhite, White Day. We watched Nashville, which is one of my favorites. We also looked at a lot of photographs.
So just putting together those images, I think we wanted to have there be a sense of a haunting, and have an emptiness.
That haunting really comes through, and I’d love to know what formed in your mind’s eye as you were thinking about how to show an absence or illustrate, if not a total emptiness, that lack?
I think we talked a lot in the writers room about ambiguous loss, and about not having closure, and all of the different ways in which we carry trauma that is not visible. It’s not always as simple as, OK, this person died. And now I’m grieving. Sometimes you never get closure, you never get to say goodbye. Sometimes you’re grieving the loss of time. Sometimes you’re grieving the loss of memory […] where the person is still there, but they’re not there in the way that you know them. So how do you relate to them? And how do you grieve?
I think that’s why — and I did this with The Farewell also — [I focused on] really looking at space, and having the ability to do wide shots, where people are really isolated in the frame.
Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Prime Video
Photo: Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
Photo: Glen Wilson/Prime Video
Margaret, for example, she seeks out in her grief a place where she can be alone. And the emptiness of that room gives her comfort somehow, because she’s able to be someone else. She’s not constantly reminded of the tragedy. And so that was a really pivotal image for us was having Nicole in a practical location in Hong Kong. She had to go up the seven flights of stairs. It was her first day of shooting. I was like, Oh my god, she’s gonna hate me. This is Nicole Kidman. I’m having her trek up the stairs, there’s no elevator. We’re in this tiny room, and there’s windows everywhere so that we can really see Hong Kong and all the windows and all the lives inside of all of those windows, you know? And she’s here in this tiny box of a room, and there’s this weird purple bathtub. Like something kind of almost Murakami-esque, right, about the strange places we find ourselves in and the strange feelings we get from them.
Definitely. And to your point about almost dodging the mystery of it, I’m curious how you build the final sort of confrontation between all these women. There’s this sense in the finale of it as a staccato conversation, these bits and pieces chopped up.
In a way, it’s like a visual voice-over, I suppose. I wanted it to feel like they were addressing the audience; I wanted to play with this [idea that] everything they were saying, the other woman could also be saying almost those same things. It’s a specific conversation, but it’s also a universal conversation; it’s endings and beginnings. It’s apologies, and not being able to find the words to apologize. They all have been the other woman in different situations. And the series deals a lot with perpetrators and victims. And we always empathize with victims, it’s easy to identify with them. But it’s much more difficult to actually have compassion for the people who commit the acts and make the mistakes. And it was really important to us that all of these women were perpetrators and victims at the same time — but in different stories. In someone else’s story they are the perpetrator; in their own story, they are the victim. And to be able to hold all of those truths at once — it just felt like having that symmetry of their faces linked them.
In 2021, One Shot blasted into action fans’ hearts, making full use of Scott Adkins’ varied skill set. It’s a high-octane tactical action movie with a fun gimmick: The whole movie is designed to look like one continuous take.
The newly released sequel, One More Shot, now available everywhere you rent or purchase movies digitally,is a more confident, polished effort than the original, adding a compelling and familiar action-movie setting (an airport), more action legends (Tom Berenger and Michael Jai White), and a string of exciting fight sequences that make the most of the location, the conceit, and the talent.
One More Shot also reunites director James Nunn with Adkins and fight choreographer Tim Man, who’ve each worked with Nunn four times. But this movie is Nunn and Adkins’ most accomplished collaboration yet. Polygon spoke with Nunn about the difficulties of shooting an action movie in one take, following in the wake of Sam Mendes’ Oscar winner 1917, hiding the cuts, what he learned from the first movie, and his hopes for the future of the series.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
Polygon: As someone who’s filmed more conventional action movies, like Eliminators, what do you think is different for the audience when a movie is portrayed as one continuous take?
James Nunn: Well, it’s funny, because it started as an exercise in How can I push something? How can I be different? How can I be unique? How can I use Scott’s raw, amazing ability to the best? And how can I use my technical knowhow? So it actually started as more of an experiment in just proving to people, I’m really good technically, he’s really good physically and on camera — merge them skills, make a movie. That was where the initial pitch came from. But as time went on, and as we started filming it, honestly, I’ve kind of fallen in love with doing it this way. You realize that you’re pushing this immersion on your audience.
All movies have a ticking clock. That’s the premise of a lot of stories: You’re going from A to B, or A to Z, but it’s not about the letters, it’s about the journey between. There’s always a ticking-clock narrative, especially in action movies. Whether it’s a bomb going off or saving your loved one because she’s about to fall into acid, there’s always a timer. And I think what happens when you don’t manipulate time with cuts is, you’re actually forcing people to, almost on a subconscious level, just feel that timer a bit more, feel the urgency, and be a bit more present in it.
Now look, a lot of problems come with the style, because you can’t film Scott as the best martial artist in the world, necessarily, because you can’t do the angles that really show off what he can do. Equally, he can’t be like, spinning around doing amazing butterfly pirouette kicks, because it would just be of a different world. So the format comes with restrictions. And we know what we’re doing. We try to hold back on the flashiness and go for, like, this grounded CQC [close-quarters combat] military vibe, which fits really well. I think the elongated take of it, whether you like it or not, you’re just being sucked in.
Certain actors will really rise to the occasion and be the best you’ve ever seen, because they’re like, I don’t want to be the one in this 10-minute take who messes it up. So they switch on to this level of authenticity and focus, and you can feel that as well. But then equally, if you’ve got a slightly weaker performance, it’s harder to hide away from that.
I’ve fallen in love with it. I won’t do it forever. I will return to normal, conventional moviemaking soon, I’m sure. But I’m having a lot of fun. And I am so pleased with the reception that we’ve had.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
What did you learn from One Shot that you applied to One More Shot? The movie feels more confident — did it feel that way to you while shooting?
For sure, we did. And I say “we” because I’ve got a very solid core team who I love working with, and they’re all on the same train with me. I think the first movie, although I was confident… Look, I tried to keep it a bit of a secret in the first one, but we all know there’s hidden cuts in the movie. Don’t get me wrong, I will run a take as long as I can. There’s three reasons to break: safety, geography, or actor availability, if you have to shoot out of sequence. Those are really the reasons I cut. If not, I’ll go for as long as I can within that time frame. So you’re really looking at, like, eight- to 10-minute takes.
On the first movie, I knew we could do it, but we hadn’t done it, in that we hadn’t actually hidden cuts before. So I put a lot of the focus in the first movie on making sure that we could hide the cuts. The difference with the second movie was that weight had been lifted. We’d done it. I knew we could do it. I knew how to do it. I knew how to get myself out of a bind, even if something wasn’t working on the day and I needed to get out of it. Because we’d tried and tested it before.
So that weight had been lifted off my shoulders. So it’s like, OK, well, now I’ve actually got the time to think a bit more about being more elaborate with the camera. And also, we had a tiny bit more money on this one. So we could do stuff like hand the camera out of the car and throw the camera down a stairwell on a rig and know it would be OK. We were able to be a little bit more tricksy.
How did you manage filming at London Stansted Airport?
That was the most difficult part of this whole process, filming in the working environment of an international airport. We knew we wanted to go bigger. The fan response to the first one was overwhelmingly positive, and much more than we’d anticipated. Obviously when you set out on these ventures you believe in the movie — you have to, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. But I really wanted it to land. And it didn’t necessarily get the big push I hoped for, because of COVID at the time, but it did enough to really find an audience.
We listened to the feedback of the fans. Not necessarily the big paper reviews, but the fans. And we tried to respond to that in this movie and give them more fights, give them more hand-to-hand, give them more plot, but also make it not feel as low-budget of a location, which was something we bumped into a lot in the comments.
So once we found out we were given the lucky opportunity to go down the road for number two, we embarked on what we’re going to do, and we were like, We’re never gonna get an airport. We’re just imagining we’re gonna get, like, some private little runway. It’s gonna be rubber, it’s gonna feel low-budget anyway. So the producer, Ben Jacques, was tasked with Can you get an airport? And as if by some sort of miracle, the fourth-largest airport in England, Stansted Airport, showed an interest. They were like, Oh, we love the sound of this. Yeah, come on down. And so we did.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
So we went down and we looked, and we thought it’d be perfect. And then we wrote the script around it. But this is where it became tricky. The first movie, we had a derelict location, which we could film for 11 hours a day, no questions asked, easy-peasy. But going to Stansted came with a huge amount of restrictions, the same restrictions you face as a traveler flying internationally. You’re going through the metal detector, you’re going through the screening thing. Getting a hundred crew in with guns, with knives, with fake explosives takes an hour off your day easily.
Equally, you’ve got tourists running around waiting to catch their flights and stuff. In the U.K., you can’t fly between midnight and 4 a.m. They basically close it down so that people can sleep. And that was when we shot the movie. So we’d get in the airport at like 7 or 8 at night, do some rehearsals, have a bit of food. And then we really started kicking off between midnight and 4. It was a hard stop at 4, because the planes were coming in, or people getting on planes.
One particular night, we were in the baggage claim area, and we had a long take and an hour to go. And we’ve had months and months of meetings about this. But you know, there’s always one guy who’s never at the meetings who shows up and is like, Oh, you’ve got to wrap in 20 minutes. We managed to get two takes that were nine minutes each. The second one’s in the movie.
Everyone knows the layout of an airport, so it becomes a lot easier for the audience to ground themselves in where things are, what access-restricted locations look like, that kind of stuff. But it lets you interact more with the environment in terms of the action. What else did the airport location add to the film?
It’s kind of like how I feel about 1917. One thing we faced coming out after 1917, even though [One Shot] had originally been written before 1917, was that people struggled a little bit with the backstory. There wasn’t a huge amount of backstory being told. And the problem with doing things in real time as a one-shot thing is, you can’t stop in the middle of a fight and start calling your mom or your wife, because the audience knows what you’re doing. You’re crowbarring in a backstory, but it just starts to feel hokey and not real.
And the advantage that 1917 had over us is that the nation and the world’s collective understanding of a soldier in World War I — everybody’s studied it in school. You immediately have some idea or backstory knowledge of that soldier. So it’s not necessarily that 1917 even has more backstory than we do. But what makes a difference is that there’s this unwritten understanding of World War I that you just understand. It’s in your subconscious, generally speaking, as a Western audience.
And that’s the same, probably, with the airport. Not everybody’s seen a Guantanamo-style base [the setting of One Shot] outside of a movie. Whereas everybody knows an airport. And I think that’s where [One More Shot] heightens as well, is that we’ve gone to somewhere that you all kind of understand: Oh, there’s gonna be an escalator, there’s gonna be this, there’s gonna be that. So I think to harp on your point, I agree with you totally. And then you just start enjoying the fruits of what you can find, you’re walking around and you design the [fall] going over the rails, or fighting on the metro.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
By the way, that’s my favorite fight in the movie.
Me too. We don’t cut during the fights. That’s part of the reason that Scott loves doing it as well, is that we really make him do it for two, three minutes. And what I love about the metro fight is because of all of the foreground, poles, beams, and glass, it’s actually impossible to have even put a cut in there. So that is just two physically amazing on-screen fighters [Adkins and Aaron Toney] really going for it. And I’m privileged that they did that for us on a moving train at about 30 miles per hour.
What strikes me as one of the hardest storytelling challenges of the format are the transition sequences. How did you approach getting from scene to scene within this structure?
[That’s where] the advantage of going to the location [came in]. Having a 10-page outline, finding the location, then writing the script around the location, and then doing set visits backward and forward. And also it being a [real] location, not being something we were building that people had to try and understand.
Because there’s a lot of One Shot that is actually a set. Like, we use the exterior terrain, but actually all the interiors are generally fudged together in a gym on the location. And that was much easier for [screenwriter] Jamie [Russell] to write those passages of time. And then I had a couple of actor friends come down about three months before we shot the movie, and on a GoPro, we walked every scene just for script timings.
You want to do another one of these? One Last Shot, perhaps?
Yeah, I do want to do another one. I’ve got no spoilers for you. There’s no green light yet. I’m gonna try my best and knock on every door to hopefully get us there. But there’s no news, other than the title. And it seems like the internet has found the title itself.
I mean, you set us up for it.
[Laughs] Me and the producers have talked about it in the past, but it’s sort of organically been like this little bit of a roller coaster online, which is fun and exciting. So I desperately would love to do that movie, but we’re not there yet. Let’s see.
One More Shot is available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.
The new Jason Statham January action movie The Beekeeperis what it suggests on the tin: a tongue-in-cheek, bee-themed action comedy where Staths doles out punishment to any bad guy who has the misfortune of buzzing his way.
It’s classic Statham stuff, but it’s a different kind of project for director David Ayer, best known for gritty crime dramas like Street Kings and End of Watch, and for 2016’s Suicide Squad. Ayer spoke with Polygon about working with Statham, his excitement around taking on a different kind of genre project, and his favorite bee joke from a movie that has a veritable hive of them.
Polygon: What first drew you to the project?
David Ayer: I got the script, Jason was attached. And the script had amazing character, this really interesting plot structure that just kept crescendoing. I read a lot of scripts, and I already know what’s going to happen before I turn the page. And this one got ahead of me. So I knew there was something there. And it was an opportunity to work with Jason, who I’ve always esteemed as an actor. Great performer, great physical action guy, I think he’s the best. So the opportunity to build a fun, soulful movie around him was a no-brainer.
What was your collaboration with him like?
What I really had to understand is, he almost has this unspoken contract with the audience about how he plays and what he’s going to do, and what he doesn’t do, and how he’s going to deliver for them. I had to learn his language as an actor, and then do my best as a director to showcase that and elevate it. He’s really normal and humble off-duty. He’s just a regular guy, and he’s kind of quiet. But then on set, he’s A-plus-game all the way, and demands everybody else brings their A-game.
I actually ended up learning a lot about action. I’ve shot a lot of action, but I’ve learned more about action from working with Jason Statham than all my other films combined.
Like what?
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of cinematic action. So you can do a piece of fight choreo, and he can tell you where he’s seen that in another movie 20 years ago. He knows body kinetics, in how it plays on camera, better than anybody I’ve ever met. And so he already knows if a punch is going to sell — he knows it instinctively.
So we’ll be on set. He’ll do his thing, and he’ll know it’s not to his standard. And he’ll [say], “We’re going again, we’re going again,” and [I’m like], Yes, sir. And then you go and look at the monitor, and he knows when it’s right without looking at the monitor, which is a really rare gift.
Photo: Daniel Smith/Amazon MGM Studios
Second unit director Jeremy Marinas is one of the absolute best. What was working with him like? What did he bring to the table?
Jeremy is a great guy. Bay Area kid, just a total martial arts, karate geek. From the 87eleven school of hard knocks of stunt performance, he has this visual understanding of how to get the look and the choreography needed on camera.
It’s a tough game now, because the bar on action is so high these days. You go watch a movie 20 years ago, and it’s like, Wow, I remember that differently. The audience is so sophisticated, and has such a sophisticated eye. You’re always trying to exceed that. And with Jeremy, you can see it. There’s a lot of action. There’s a lot of fights, there’s a lot of stunts, and it’s progressive, it just keeps getting bigger and better as we go.
Which was the hardest action sequence to execute?
I’d have to say the gas station scene. We did it early in the schedule. And in any film, you’re kind of finding your sea legs, and you get better every day as you work together. I didn’t have much time to shoot it at all. So it was, OK, how do I creatively compress this much work into that much time? And I didn’t know if I had pulled it off. I was actually really worried about it until I finally saw the scene cut together and it played beyond my expectations.
It’s scary sometimes. Sometimes, you just suck it up and plow forward and hope for the best. That’s what I think people don’t understand about movies, is they become their own thing. They unfold the way they’re going to unfold, and you can’t always control that.
One of my favorite things about the action in the movie is how prop-based it gets. You have an old-school, almost Jackie Chan vibe, especially when Statham is using the beekeeping equipment as weapons, or in the call center sequence, with the monitors and keyboards. What did the prop-based action bring to those sequences?
That’s everything right there. Jason Statham is playing the Beekeeper. He’s not [playing] a tactical action guy, with the pistol shooting. He’s more about using the environment and always knowing where to put his hands and what to grab next, and how to use the tools that are available to him immediately.
And it’s also pretty fun. It’s like, Oh, well, we can use a stapler, or we can use the phone, we can use the chair. And Jeremy was great at building that out. It was also represented in Kurt [Wimmer]’s script, the idea that a gun is a temporary weapon for the Beekeeper, and he’s gonna find something to hurt you.
Photo: Daniel Smith/Amazon MGM Studios
You have this tragic revenge story, but it’s called The Beekeeper, and there are a lot of silly bee references and jokes throughout the movie. How would you describe the movie’s tone, and how did you balance those two disparate elements?
That was the hardest thing for me. I knew that was going to be my big challenge going into it, because I come from a lot of straight, intense, gritty drama. I wanted to make a broad-playing movie. I wanted to make a movie grandma would watch, I wanted to make a movie young people would watch, and everyone in between. I really studied a lot of ’80s movies: [Richard] Donner, Walter Hill, [John] McTiernan. You see it in Die Hard, you see it in Lethal Weapon, there’s a place for the gravitas. There’s a place for a human truth that’s grounded. And there’s a place for absolutely just going nuts.
I think that’s another element where having Statham really helps, because he’s such a funny performer. A lot of people learned that with Spy, but for those of us who have been watching his action movies forever, he’s a really funny guy. And he’s able to deliver a lot of those bee-centric one-liners in a way that few other leads really could.
That’s the thing. He can say anything and you’re gonna buy it, you know? And he has that voice. That voice is so distinctive, and that on-camera presence. He has that movie star magic. And I feel like so much of that is just missing from cinema right now. You know, that sense of fun and adventure and Hey, let’s eat popcorn and escape from the problems of the world for two hours.
And it’s not just being quip-based, right? Because there are a lot of quippy action movies, but this movie better integrates it into the action, which makes it a lot more fun.
That’s the thing, it’s getting everything to work together. And, you know, I had a lot of fun making a genre movie. I’m not gonna say I wasn’t scared going into it.
Do you have a favorite bee joke or reference in the movie?
Oh, man. I kind of like Anisette’s [Megan Le] line “You’ve been a busy bee” in the gas station fight, because you immediately know who she is, what she’s about, and that there’s a relationship there.
The movie has a heavily yellow-and-black color palette. Was that something you thought of when you saw the script? Oh, we want to make it feel like a bee thing?
Yeah, I mean, you gotta have the warm honey tones, and the golden light is part of it. And with this one — a lot of times, my color palette’s a little more naturalistic. I had a new camera system, the Arri [Alexa] 35, which is just gorgeous, the most beautiful digital camera I’ve worked with. And I wanted to take advantage of it. Because that polychromatic, colorful feel of the movie is definitely a function of the camera. And again, just, as a filmmaker, exploring a new look, exploring a new style.
Photo: Daniel Smith/Amazon MGM Studios
I’m glad you brought up McTiernan, because I think there’s certainly some of Hart Bochner’s Ellis from Die Hard in the call center villain aesthetics, and a lot of Wolf of Wall Street, too. What did you want to evoke with that group of people?
[Big sigh] Crypto bros. People with too much money, too much going on, too much of a sense of self. It feels good to be a winner, but it’s not good to win at other people’s expense.
Action movies with short, almost silly titles have been landing well recently, like Gerard Butler’s Plane in 2023. What do you think a title like this brings to a movie?
I think it’s important. It gives you a container to put the world in. It’s so competitive these days, and there’s so many movies. The more you can have a little fun with the audience, be clever with it, but have it make sense for the project itself, have it be part of the reality of the film, it’s crucial. And I’m honestly thrilled how much people have connected with that concept and run with it. And now it’s like, Catch the buzz!
To what you were saying earlier, I think people want to have fun at the movies again, right? And something like this promises you that right from the jump.
That’s it, man. It’s like, Just have fun. I want to go to a movie. I don’t want to be lectured right now. The world’s tough. I want to forget my problems and just eat popcorn and watch people get their butts kicked who deserve it.
Mauga’s early access weekend was more than just a fun surprise for Overwatch fans; it was also a test for Blizzard. The tank hero was buffed, debugged, and tweaked in response to that hero preview, resulting in a more powerful (and hopefully balanced) addition to the game’s hero lineup.
Lead hero designer Alec Dawson said in an interview with Polygon ahead of Mauga’s release that the Overwatch development team hopes to do similar player tests with future heroes. Dawson also talked about some of the lessons learned during Mauga’s preview weekend, and how the Overwatch team is evolving its approach to adding new heroes to the game.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Polygon: For Mauga, you did a kind of unprecedented test of a new hero nearly a month in advance of their launch. Can you tell me about what led to the decision to do that?
Alec Dawson: If you look at the team overall, and how we’ve been trying to treat development over the course of the last [couple] years, it’s really been to open up a lot more of it, engage more with the community, and try to make sure that relationship is as transparent as possible. With Mauga in particular, we had an opportunity: BlizzCon was coming back. We wanted to do something big, especially for all the folks at home, and we thought it’d be a great time to show them Mauga early, and also collect feedback on Mauga before he actually gets launched as well.
We think it’s something that worked out really well, and we’re looking forward to do it in the future again with future heroes.
How did it go?
I think overall we were really happy with the weekend, and there were some things we wanted to tune up, especially around Mauga’s survivability. We saw when he gets in there, gets in close and is in the right situation, he can be incredibly lethal. We saw players utilizing his ult very well early on, too. But there were some things on the survivability front, in terms of his frontline presence — being a tank. So we upped that [survivability] before launch. There were even small bugs that we were able to catch, especially with how quickly he was setting enemies on fire. So we’re able to fix that and get that sorted. We also got to see that first-time user experience across millions of players [and] how they’re playing with Mauga, what were some of the shortcomings there.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
One of the biggest things was Overrun, and players not feeling as capable with this ability where he runs at you and then he jumps up and does the big, big stomp.
When we look at it all, Mauga’s performance over the weekend, obviously it was in a very different structure than we’re used to. But we want to make sure that those [new hero] releases launch on the side of strong and making sure those launches can be as exciting as possible. Make sure they’re making up for some of the time that you may have on heroes that you’ve been playing for hundreds or thousands of hours, that your first-time experience isn’t gonna be something that’s detrimental to the rest of your team, something that you can pick up pretty quick.
Thinking about the addition of Lifeweaver in season 4 and how a lot of changes were rolled out, in terms of his healing and and damage output over the following weeks, it seems you’ve also really buffed Mauga quickly. When you put in a new hero like this, what’s your comfort level with where they are? You really don’t know millions of people are thrown at it, right?
I think in the past we’ve been conservative about certain things. And there are still things we’ll be conservative about, specifically gameplay mechanics. With the preview we were a little conservative on how much sustain we were giving Mauga, because too much sustain can just feel like, Hey, this character is never going to die. I think we’ll also be conservative in the future, if you know we’re making a second Widowmaker, for example — some sort of sniper, or one-shot mechanic. Things like that we’ll be a little softer on.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
With Lifeweaver in particular, we knew there was a lot of healing in the kit, and we knew there were also things you’re taking away some player agency from your teammates [with Life Grip and Petal Platform]. Those are some of the things we’re a bit more conservative on at launch because we knew those are going to be some of the pain points. But overall we saw we could have gone a little bit more aggressive for Lifeweaver’s launch. Since then, we’ve learned a number of things about how we want to launch heroes and how we want to release them. Doing these previews is just another step in that learning.
Previously, the hero balance cadence was seasonal and midseason adjustments, and obviously you would patch things if there was something outstandingly broken. How how have you and the team adjusted your reaction window to balancing heroes?
I think with a hero launch, or even a hero rework, we want to be very active into that first week to two weeks. With Roadhog, it was by the end of the week we had buffs ready for Roadhog to go [out]. So we wanna be very responsive, and if there’s anything else that’s, like, outstanding, we’re gonna come in and make any adjustments that need to be made.
Speaking of BlizzCon, I know it’s early to talk about the next Overwatch hero, Venture, but I wanted to see what kind of feedback you got to that hero’s reveal and how you’ve been ingesting that in terms of continuing work.
A lot of work has happened since that video clip was recorded, so it’s really interesting to look back; that was a while ago when we did that playtest. But it’s just been exciting for the team. We saw fan art go up everywhere, and a lot of excitement around Venture, and just people talking about them as the next damage hero for 2024. That was really invigorating for the whole team.
Venture, a new damage hero coming in Overwatch 2 season 10Image: Blizzard Entertainment
What we showed of gameplay was so short, so there’s not necessarily a ton to take away from what people saw. At the same time we saw excitement, and that for us was really great to see, and makes us feel a lot better about how early we can show some of these things. Because I think it’s gonna be something that we continue to do as well.
Mauga obviously came with BlizzCon, but say you do a hero test for Venture. Do you have a sense of when you would roll that out?
We’re still figuring out the exact timeline for it. I think you can expect somewhere in that month beforehand, where it gives us enough time to make adjustments before the launch and is close enough where [it aligns with] other teams working on a hero. Those are still some conversations we’re having on the team [in] exactly how we want to execute on that. But we know we want to do it.
By now most people know the secret behind Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: Scott Pilgrim — well, he takes off. He’s gone, for most of the narrative, leaving the players as we know them to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened to him. What happens to them in his absence is usually a total flip of what we’ve come to expect: Think Gideon introducing Lucas to the slowburn anime he’s been watching for a while (or maybe just a few days).
Bryan Lee O’Malley, who wrote the original comic and co-created the Netflix anime reboot with BenDavid Grabinski, knows that sort of remake is something audiences have come to expect. “I mean, it’s in the air, right? We’re all seeing remakes and reboots of everything,” O’Malley says.
When Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was in development he says he and the team looked at everything new in this vein they could, from The Matrix ResurrectionstoSpider-Man: No Way Home. But just as frequently he turned elsewhere for inspiration — Dragonball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!, or even Elden Ring. But none of these were quite the main catalyst, even something like Evangelion, which he calls “a good comparison, but not necessarily an influence.”
The real reason O’Malley wanted to make this story was simply: It was the only way he could see revisiting the world of Scott Pilgrim.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Polygon: Starting off: I’m curious to hear a little bit about how you did justice by Matthew Patel, the lowest ranking evil ex.
Image: Netflix
Bryan Lee O’Malley: Our first spark of idea was to kind of take Scott Pilgrim out of the picture after the first episode. And that naturally led to the process of: Then what happens to Matthew? What does Matthew get? And then what do the other exes think about it? So yeah, it really appealed to me right away, and to be like, Oh, then Matthew should win, and Matthew should become the boss. Because we’re going through all these different reversals of fortune; so someone goes from the top to the bottom, and someone has to go from the bottom to the top. And yeah, giving Matthew kind of his flowers was so much fun.
Were there any characters in particular — like Matthew, or just generally — that you felt most excited by like, OK, if we open up this world without Scott in it, what can you do?
I was excited to take on kind of all the exes; that was one of the biggest appeals to me of revisiting Scott Pilgrim, was just — I felt like I gave them short shrift in the books a little bit. I was making it up as I went along, and I was locked into Scott’s perspective. And I was younger and didn’t really know that much about other people like that! I certainly didn’t know about movie stars, or rock stars, I didn’t really know the details of how they lived; I just saw them in magazines, or whatever or in movies.
So now I’ve lived a little more, I’ve been in LA for a long time, and met lots of different types of people. And I think that just feeds back into kind of giving these characters a little more pathos, a little more depth and nuance — and pathos also in the sense of, like: pathetic; they’re also losers. And that was always really fun for me.
One of the things BenDavid told me was you were approached to adapt this, and you were wrestling with, Well, I’ve changed since I did this story, what does that mean? And I’m curious what sort of things you were really thinking about as you’re getting approached for this series that so many people love and so many people cherish and it hits different for you now.
Well, I mean that’s the initial fear. Netflix, and our producers, Jared [LeBoff] and Edgar Wright had approached me, we had talked about it a little bit — doing a series — and they were kind of keen on on doing it much more like the books initially. And for me that just made me kind of recoil. Like I don’t want to revisit myself at 25, necessarily. And it’s all there! It’s all on the page. So why would I want to relive that? Why would I want to perfect something that was so messy; it just seems like an impossible task.
Because the messiness is such a part of it. It’s part of the joy of it, is it’s messy, it’s complicated. It’s irreducible. So when faced with writing X number of TV episodes, I just thought, how the fuck am I gonna do that? I just had no idea, so it was really not until that dinner with BenDavid that that we just kind of started spitballing — not professionally; just kind of joking around [wondering], What can we do with these characters? And then a lot of those jokes we were like, Oh, actually, that would work. So you know, the joke of “Scott dies at the end,” or “Matthew becomes the boss” — those all just became something that we can really work with.
Image: Netflix
At what point did it become clear to you that if we’re revisiting this, and we’re taking Scott out of it, and we’re giving everybody space to be a little bit more themselves, a little bit more nuanced — at what point did it kind of become: Oh, Scott might be the bad guy?
Well, I mean, that’s definitely part of the initial discussion. That’s a perception. I don’t really see Scott as the bad guy. But these days — this is a terrible thing to say in an interview — the perception definitely on Twitter and stuff kind of turned over the last maybe five years where now it’s like, “He’s a bad character!” “It’s a toxic relationship!” and all this kind of chatter.
And I think all that stuff is true. But I don’t think that people in the 2000s didn’t think it was true. Like, I think the younger generation is, like, We discovered that Scott is bad. But, you know, it says on the very first page he’s dating a high schooler; no one’s supposed to think that’s a good thing. I think in the 2000s, I took it for granted that people would be like, Oh, he’s terrible, but it’s funny. So now you kind of have to be a bit more explicit — it’s just the way our culture works, the way online works. Like, if you don’t outright condemn something, then the absence of condemnation is seen as a tacit approval.
So yeah, it was never a tacit approval. It was a tacit condemnation. But definitely in the show in the modern era, yeah, we have a scene where [we show] Scott, it’s not a good thing to date a high schooler. So — throw them a bone?
I’m curious how you interpolated but also synthesized a lot of those conversations that are happening around this property into this, since it feels like this show is so in conversation with those.
I’ve absorbed all those things over the years; I didn’t disappear after Scott Pilgrim finished. So in a lot of ways, I kind of want it to feel like Scott Pilgrim is back from the dead. You thought it was gone, but it’s back. But not only is it back, like it never left, it’s also been paying attention to you. It’s grown up alongside you.
Image: Netflix
And we had to kind of cater to so many different audiences: someone like you, who read it a long time ago, and kind of has a memory of it, of what it felt like. But also someone who just read it last week for the first time, or someone who just discovered the movie, or somebody who hasn’t seen any of it. So it was just this really complex, but invigorating challenge of: how do we make this feel fresh, and also layered — and also hopefully staggering to some people who have thought about the book, but maybe not to this degree?
Did you find yourself being surprised by your reaction to revisiting this and reframing it in any way? Were there any characters who you felt ring a little differently or sit a little differently with you?
I don’t think I have a strong memory of how it hit back then. But it was really just a fun process, writing them and, and discovering these things and challenging ourselves to find new ways into everything.
I got to write the great scene where Knives and Kim sit down and play music together. And it’s not something I could’ve done in the comic, a) because it’s music. And then just the logistical challenge of making that happen, and making it feel organic and real, was very satisfying. And then that final scene, like just made plays magically for me. It was cool to discover those things by virtue of the collaboration with all these different artists and stuff. And that was that was the big new thing. It’s just letting other people in and letting their they all have their own different kinds of love for the series. And that shows, I think.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is now streaming on Netflix.
After nearly three years in development, Outerloop Games and Annapurna Interactive’s Thirsty Suitors was released on Nov. 2. From the beginning, the Outerloop Games team knew a few things: They wanted to make a game about relationships, and they wanted it to reflect the lived experience of its developers in telling an immigrant story. So much of the game was built out from there to create the wholly unique, genre-bending Thirsty Suitors — a game that blends its story up with cooking games, turn-based battles, and skateboarding.
What you get is a video game that goes beyond its individual labels. In the lead-up to Thirsty Suitors’ Nov. 2 release date, Polygon spoke to Outerloop Games co-founder/Thirsty Suitors director Chandana Ekanayake and narrative designer Meghna Jayanth about the complex, “more is more” game that explores both trauma and joy while player-character Jala kickflips her way through her hometown.
Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive
[Ed. note: This story has been edited for length and clarity.]
Polygon: Thirsty Suitors is so many different things — turn-based fighting, cooking, romance. It’s an immigrant story, a skateboarding game. How did you pull all these elements together?
Chandana Ekanayake: Where do I start? It starts with the theme and the stories we wanted to tell, and everything else stemmed from there. We wanted to do an immigrant story, because a lot of the folks on the team are — it’s a fully remote team made a lot of immigrants.
That’s where we started. And then we knew we wanted to do a game about relationships. The battle system came out of that, like, how do we balance this argument personified into this battle, plus the writing, the dialogue back-and-forth. So from that, the story came through, throughout just a lot of iteration. Then we added the cooking — it was always gonna be a big part of it, because culturally it’s significant to be able to talk through things while cooking. And then skating was just something that made sense after — I don’t know, it just came about.
Meghna Jayanth: I think skating began as a loading screen. There’s so much creativity on the team; it was really just a loading screen that people loved. And then we built it. Working as the narrative designer, week after week, I would come back and be like, Oh, it’s been two weeks. I haven’t checked in on this. Oh, we’re making a minigame. There’s a little bit of exuberance and creativity on the team.
I think we pulled all of that in. Eka loves to call this a “baby Yakuza,” which I really love as a description. There’s really a sense of joyful abundance, like we’re presenting you with all of these delightful things to do, but hopefully it has some focus as well.
With regard to skateboarding, it comes into the story as well. It’s the same with cooking. Did those parts grow throughout production? Or was it intended to be like that from the start?
Ekanayake: It grew through production, but we also knew the narrative was the focus of the game. We wanted all these — and this is where the “baby Yakuza” comparison is — disparate game mechanics to weave in and out through the narrative. That came through iteration.
The skate park became how Jala and Tyler bond, by doing her a bunch of these favors and trying to figure out what’s going on in the skate park. Cooking was also a way to bond with your parents and figure things out, because Jala hadn’t talked to them in years. You probably noticed that the stuff you cook at home, while there are great emotional beats, it also means you can use in battle too, as items.
Jayanth: A lot of it comes down to the fact that we were able to work on this for about three years. We had an opportunity to figure out what the heart of the story was, what those themes were, and then play around with the narrative and mechanics and really iterate and have the time for that to develop. Big story ideas could change until eight, nine months before we shipped. We edited and significantly changed almost all the content in the game just before we went into voice recording. It’s an amazing opportunity to be able to develop ideas in that way, which you don’t often get given the production cycles of the games industry.
Ekanayake: That was intentional because we knew the game was going to be so different. We needed time to figure it out. There’s 19 actors for 21 speaking characters in the game. Once we cast, Meghna was like, Oh, I’m going to write to this actor now because of how they deliver the lines. That was unexpected, different from what we actually envisioned on paper. It was a really fun process.
Jayanth: We actually did a lot of rewriting on the fly in the sessions, too. It’s nice to be in those, because there’s a lot of very specific cultural context. Even the actors, we were really deliberate about making sure the actors matched the backgrounds of our characters. Even within that, there’s so much you could pick from someone. I’m from Bengaluru down south, and you could go down the street and meet somebody with a completely different sort of context.
We did seven weeks of VO straight. We had a brief break in the middle so we could go outside.
Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive
Ekanayake: It’s fully remote, right? The team is spread across seven cities, four continents. We have folks in LA in the studio, folks in Vancouver and New York and Toronto. It was a really fun process. The biggest dramatic thing was our lead, who played Jala, Farah Merani, was very pregnant. It was a running clock to finish. She has, like, a third of the lines in the whole game. So her bag was packed in LA at the studio, ready to go. We finished and a week later she gave birth. It was that close
Jayanth: We wrapped on a Thursday or Friday, and the following Tuesday, she was giving birth, which is amazing. We did have a little bit of a backup plan, which I’m so glad we didn’t have to institute, where maybe Aruni [a fantasy version of Jala’s sister, who is Jala’s inner voice] takes over Jala if we don’t get through those lines.
Since we’re talking about production, let’s talk about what it was like for you to work on this game. You’ve both talked about how having a good, healthy production is important — to have people who are taken care of and treated well. Why is that important to you?
Ekanayake: Mostly because we’ve had the opposite experience. This is my 25th year in games. I’ve worked on a lot of projects — bigger teams, smaller teams.
Part of starting the studio fully remote six, almost seven, years ago was part of that, to be able to work-life balance a little better. We’re made up of a third brand-new folks who’ve never worked on games, a third somewhere in between, and then the rest are olds, like myself. We wanted to have a variety of experience and also get folks that have never worked on games some experience as well, because I think that’s important.
That’s the great thing we can do remotely; people don’t have to move their whole lives for a job. We finished the game in almost three and a half years. The last two and half years have been fully four days a week. We started this during the pandemic, so people are going through all sorts of things, and we didn’t want the work to be another thing that was weighing on folks, while going through some hard times and trying to make the schedule work. The great thing is we control how big the game is. There’s no need to make it a certain size, which allowed us to have a flexible schedule. So people aren’t burnt out at the end of it.
Jayanth: I’m not a manager, but it’s just been really wonderful to work with a team where all these production processes really work. We hit all of our internal deadlines, which is wild to me. I’m not sure that has ever happened.
Ekanayake: We did extend the game a little bit just to try to figure out a launch window, which is so hard this year.
Jayanth: We kind of built this game a little bit as a sense of refuge for us, particularly for marginalized folks and queer folks. It felt really important that we were doing that during the pandemic as well. Getting to work on this colorful, joyful world was a really nice escape for I think a lot of us on the team from what was going on outside. I think it’s really important to be able to do that while not burning yourself out. I do think that it’s a really important model in the industry, that there are alternative ways that we can do these things. We don’t want to be making these supposedly joyful games but burning people out and destroying them in the back end. At the end of the day, it is just a video game. I know we’re out here to sell this game and we want people to play it, and we’re really proud of it, but it is just a video game at the end of the day. And I think keeping that perspective is super important.
Meghna, I know you’ve spoken a lot about capitalism and colonialism in games. Does Thirsty Suitors subvert that tendency of the games industry? It sounds like that influence goes beyond the game, but in studio practices as well. But in-game, all of the different layers of community building really stood out to me.
Jayanth: What we really wanted to do with it was just kind of create a bit of a balance. I think you want a certain amount of familiarity and familiar mechanics, especially when you’re innovating on content and themes. I talked about this at my talk at NYU just last week, as well. In some ways, I feel like maybe the most radical thing that we are doing here is allowing the protagonist to inhabit this queer brown woman joyfully. It’s a sad thing that that’s still deeply unusual in the industry, but I do think that really pushes back against the narrative of who’s playing games, and also whose humanity is interesting to play, and what kind of fantasies — to open up the space for the different kinds of power fantasies that we can explore in games.
I keep joking with my friends, whenever I’m explaining this to non-gamers, I’m like, “All right, the power fantasy of Thirsty Suitors is you get to speak up to your parents, tell them how you feel, and they listen and learn and grow. And the final boss is your maternal grandmother!” It’s about the fantasy of breaking cycles of generational trauma, which is very real, very human. And, yes, they’re very specific, but I think these are all really universal ideas.
One of the things that actually we probably haven’t talked about that much that we did want to include is that this game was sort of set in the ’90s and Jala is in her mid-20s. She has a bit of a millennial vibe, because, I guess, we are — but we really wanted to have that idea of, she’s speaking up to her parents and the older generation, but also kind of being challenged on some of her bullshit by the kids at the skate park, who are way more radical in a way. Personally, I think Jala is a lot less radical than I am, which is fine, too. With the skate park, we get to challenge some of those narratives as well. Hopefully it feels more like being in conversation rather than preaching to anyone. It’s that feeling of being challenged and having accountability, and that being OK, and learning and growing and healing. All of which I think are wonderful things for us to model right now in the world.
Ekanayake: Yeah, and also, it’s not just about Black and brown trauma, right? There’s the joys of the experience and the fantasies of it too. That’s pretty radical too, I think, for most game stories that come out these days. That was definitely intentional.
I’m really into saying goodnight to Jala’s dad every night. It’s so sweet. I have been looking forward to Jala going home, and I wonder what they’re going to watch.
Jayanth: I’m going to reveal a little secret. Some of the things you watch are actually Eka’s kids’ basketball games that he taped. It adds an extra layer of cuteness.
Ekanayake: I think we have the history of Washington wines as read by one of the folks that helped us on VO. And then we have the history of trains.
Jayanth: I think there’s a Cold War documentary, because all dads are obsessed with the Cold War.
Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive
I got that one last night, and I was like, Yep, yep.
Jayanth: Getting to put this gentle brown dad in the game was just so lovely for us. And I think it was actually quite late in the process that we really found that cycle of, like, cooking in the morning, going to the skate park, to wandering downtown and then coming back home. That kind of cycle that started feeling really good for us, where players have some idea of what to expect — and another way I think that we are respectful of players is the game is about six to nine hours in total, which I love as a length. And also, the chapters are 40-minute-to-an-hour chunks, which is, I think, a respectful amount of time in someone’s day. There’s a really deliberate effort to put a whole narrative arc in that so that it feels satisfying without demanding too much of your time.
Ekanayake: Yeah, we just want a little bit of your time. Not all of it.
The game is also very funny, but has an earnest emotional core with Jala’s family and culture. How do you pull that off?
Ekanayake: Being honest with ourselves, and taking that stuff seriously — just trying to find the truth in it and play with it, but also, we’re sincere about it.
Jayanth: All of us care. In some ways, Nicole, it’s a little bit terrifying. It does feel really exposing. We’re so much less interested in ironic distance and with appearing cool. We all just really wanted to make something really human. There’s elements of writing and story there. But I also think it’s completely the animation, the light, everything, to the way that camera angles are framed. And of course the voice acting as well, which just adds just a huge layer of humanity back in there. But I hope it feels a little bit like real life. And hopefully there’s enough humor in there that we can pull off a few of the the sincere moments. I won’t deny that I would be extremely delighted if we made people cry. [laughs]
Ekanayake: We found that through the beginning of the project. The first thing we built was the Sergio battle. And tonally, it was a lot meaner. Jala was a lot meaner to Sergio.
Jayanth: Sergio was actually fully toxically masculine in what I consider to be an unacceptable way. But people liked him. [laughs]
Ekanayake: People really liked him and felt bad for him. So Meghna reworked the dialogue, and that’s where we really found the tone for the game.
Jayanth: That’s something that was really great that we got a chance to respond to. In doing that playtesting early, we found that, Oh, actually, people want much more to make friends with this person. Each of these suitors, we’re actually spending a significant amount of time in the game with them. People want to love them. And so instead of kind of trying to push against that, we just incorporated that into our storytelling.
Initially, we had a design where you could choose to make up with the characters, or you could choose to basically be enemies as well, or it could be based on narrative choices. But I think as we went on, the game just turned into one about reconciliation and healing. And so none of the characters you meet are on unremittingly evil in any way. They’re certainly flawed, and I like some of them more than others, but they’re all just human beings attempting to make sense of life, basically.
Ekanayake: Meghna and I are both are older game developers, and I think the later we get into our career and projects, especially on this one, we let the game tell us what it wants to be through the course of development. There’s this risky and scary but really exciting part of it where it’s just like, We think we know what we’re gonna build, but leave enough room for some magic to happen and for the game to figure itself out. That really happened on this project. It doesn’t always happen, but I think being open to it really worked out for us on this project.
Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive
I want to talk a little about music too. It feels like 1990s hip-hop with South Asian influence. What was your approach to creating music that matched the vibe of Thirsty Suitors?
Ekanayake: For the exes battles, we were kind of thinking about ’90s music videos, when music videos were a big deal. We’re looking at the theatrical, over-the-top aspect of the spaces and those videos and trying to find a piece of music to match each of the characters and themes. So like everything else, just lots of time and iteration.
Jayanth: I love the vocals in it, which are just so beautiful. It was wonderful for us to have some Tamil in the vocals. I would say that’s really unusual in games, but this year we’ve come out alongside Venba.
You can really see there’s a lot of ’90s hip-hop meets anime meets South Asia. It’s a “more is more” aesthetic.
Ekanayake: Because of the fantastical spaces and the surreal nature of some of the battles, we were able to really push the music to fit those colors and themes, too.
Jayanth: I’ve been secretly sneaking our playlist onto my party playlist and everybody’s like, Oh, that’s really good. Hopefully you see some of that joy. And that’s what it’s been like working on this. Every single person has just put so much love into it. Every single day, when [Thirsty Suitors composer Ramsey Kharroubi] drops a track or [animator Aung Zaw Oo] does a new piece of animation, or a new piece of writing goes in, it just reignites the inspiration for each one of us.
Ekanayake: It’s a 15-person team, so everyone has something significant that they can contribute at this scale. Everyone can point to something in the game and go, “I did that.” That’s what I like about this scale we’re at, too.
Surrounded by a sizable, colorful cascade of plushies — largely Nintendo-themed — and an impressive retro game collection, Ash goes live on Twitch five days a week. She’s played everything from Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion to Sierra Entertainment’s Quest for Glory,focusing on games that evoke a sense of nostalgia. The one thing that stays the same each stream is the way Ash ends them, with a message to her viewers: “Don’t forget to tell your friends Ash said hi!”
When Ash, who goes by AshSaidHi online, first envisioned her Twitch channel, she started with the name. “I knew I had to have a tagline or a call to action,” she told Polygon. “That’s where the name AshSaidHi comes from, because I wanted it to be like, Oh, that friend, they told me to tell you hi. It sticks in your brain a little bit.”
Over the years since Ash started her Twitch channel in 2019, she’s worked to build a community and a business that matches her values — a place where she could have a work-life balance that her previous career didn’t allow for, and a community of support Twitch can provide.
“People go to Twitch to connect about the things they love and find other people that are into the things they love,” Ash said. “That’s how I built an engaging community.”
Ahead of TwitchCon 2023 in Las Vegas, Polygon spoke to Ash about how she’s carved out her own space on Twitch.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
Polygon:First, I just want to let you know I love the collection in the background.
AshSaidHi: Thank you! That’s years and years of work. My parents got me into video gaming when I was really young. Even my mom, she still plays video games. I texted her the other day and was like, “Did you download Lies of P?” and she was like, “Yeah, but I really like Lords of the Fallen.” And I was like, “What?”
She’s a big Soulsborne, like Elden Ring, player. She just bought a PS5 and was like, “When are you getting a PS5?” I was like, “Mom, I play retro games on Twitch. OK?”
I know you started your Twitch channel in 2019. What prompted you to start streaming?
I was working in an industry where I didn’t have a work-life balance. And after I left it, I was like, Oh, I want to get into content creation. And I got into a different industry. It allowed me time to create content. So I was like, I think I’m gonna start on Twitch. I have a degree in advertising. The first thing I wanted to do was create a concept for my channel. And I knew I had to have like a tagline or a call to action. So that’s where the name AshSaidHi comes from, because I wanted it to be like, Oh, that friend, they told me to tell you hi. It sticks in your brain a little bit. And so it’s like, “Oh, don’t forget to tell your friends Ash said hi.” That’s how I always wanted to end my videos.
I started on Tetris 99 and Breath of the Wild. Those were the first games I broadcast on Twitch. But I have this big backlog of video games. Why don’t I start getting into retro games? And that’s how it it really snowballed. I got into a retro games, and the community was wonderful. They taught me the ropes, I met a lot of friends — friends that I still have to this day. It changed my life for the better in so many different ways.
I really, really love being a creator on Twitch. The magic is in the sense of community that you get when you meet people and they share the love of the same things. I met like people who were into Amiga 500 gaming, and Commodore and NES and Super Nintendo and all that kind of stuff. I knew I found my people.
Do you stream full time?
It’s what I mainly spend my time doing. It’s always a funny question because when people say “stream full time on Twitch,” they imagine it means eight hours a day, five days a week. But I think it means that I put all my focus on it. I do a lot of sponsorship work and a lot of offline work for my channel. So technically, yes.
How long did it take to get to the point where you could spend that time on Twitch and the business behind it?
I started in 2019 and then I got Twitch Partner in November 2020. And I was like, OK, wait a minute, people really like what I’m doing here. I have an engaging community, I try to never miss a message in chat — I literally have chat up on like three or four screens.
Once I hit Partner, I found out about the Twitch Ambassador program, because I saw somebody with a check and I clicked it. I applied and talked about all the skills that I had learned. And I talked about why I was passionate for what I do. They called me back a few months later and were like, “We want to invite you into the program.”
I was announced March 2021, and at the time, they also had a billboard in Times Square. I’m originally from New York, but I no longer live there. They put my picture up on that billboard. And at that point, it kind of gave me a kind of sense that there’s credibility to what I’m doing, which is really important for me. I flew up from where I live back up to New York, and I told my mom and she was freaking out. It was such a surreal moment. For me, in my hometown — the crossroads of the world — here is a picture of me. Then it snowballed from there. I knew I wanted to take it seriously.
If you would have told me 2 years ago on this day when I had my VERY FIRST broadcast that just 24 months later I would be on a @Twitch billboard in Times Square, one of the most iconic places in the world & my home, I would have told you “NO WAY” yet here we are. Forever grateful pic.twitter.com/BSq5fiaa0X
One of the things that I do that helps me sustain my business is sponsored broadcast. Because of my professional background, and the way that I communicate — I work on trying to build good bonds with developers or marketing people. I make sure that I do my due diligence, to be on time and to be mindful in the moment and be professional. Whenever I’m called upon for a job, I put a lot of pride into what I’m doing. I knew things were getting serious when people started paying me to play video games.
I love that it allows me freedom to be able to travel to things like TwitchCon. And it allows me to go spend time with my mom, or to just take time to relax, like I can have that work-life balance and not have to request this time off or things like that. And my mom is really proud of me. When I talk about it to my family members, they’re always so happy for the things that I’m doing.
It’s cool to hear you talk about that work-life balance, because I think sometimes when you hear about people doing Twitch, it can be grinding out streams for 12 hours straight. It’s nice that you’re able to have a balance.
That’s key, right? I can’t do my best work if I’m not taking care of myself. I understand why that’s the mindset of constantly streaming, like you’re not discoverable if you’re not live sometimes. That’s the conundrum. But I do feel like if you put your time and effort into things like, I’m going to start writing a little bit, or I’m going to start making short video that I can post on social media so people can get a sense of who I am. Even when I’m not broadcasting, people can find AshSaidHi. When I’m not live, those things helped me bridge the gaps.
What have you learned since you started streaming about carving out that engaging community you mentioned earlier?
I learned to be authentically myself — be present in the moment. I always tell people this when they meet me in person, that you’re meeting the Ash that you see on camera. I’m always talking about my mom and my dad and how they got me into video games. I feel like I’m sharing the best parts of myself — what I grew up with.
I talk about food all the time on my channel. If you meet me, I know all the places in New York where you could get some good food, you know what I’m saying? Like, that is like a big part of who I am. I love Star Trek, I love Nintendo, I love drawing, I love all of those things. And I love sharing those things with people. Being excited about the things that we love… I think that’s key — being able to share the things about you would that you could connect with people.
I think that that’s also the magic of Twitch — connecting with people. It’s a people platform first to me. We go on there, we play video games — whether it’s playing video games or cooking, exercising, ASMR, chatting or whatever it is on Twitch. People go there to connect with people. People go to Twitch to connect about the things they love and find other people that are into the things they love. That’s how I built an engaging community.
What should people know about your career as a streamer, or about Twitch itself?
I would love to share the power of community on Twitch. There is the Twitch Women’s Guild, which is incredible, because not only does it connect women and empower women to be who they are on Twitch, but it’s a place where we cheer each other on. It is a safe space for us to kind of talk about the things that impact us in our daily lives as broadcasters.
I did a Creator Camp with some of the women that are in that group and it was incredible. And I also did a show called Streamer Strategies. I try to do a show once a month where we talk about different strategies that you might be thinking about for streaming. The first one I did was creative monetization. But the next one I did was collaboration. I feel like a lot of really wonderful opportunities come from being able to connect with other people like that. And it’s such a great program. It’s one of the best things that Twitch created because it gives us a space to learn. And it gives us a space to speak about our experiences. They also give a lot of tools to us to help us extend our skills.
Especially for women, Black people, people of color, things like that solidify the fact that we belong in this space. And I think that it is so important to inspire people who feel like they don’t know if they belong, right? Because we see so much of that. I’m really grateful for all of those opportunities that I’ve been given. I just want to make sure that people know how awesome those kinds of tools and resources are, because without things like that, you question whether or not you can do it.
How many times have you worked on something and people are like, “Oh, can you really do it?” They’re questioning your intelligence, or they’re saying, “You just got by on, like, certain qualities.” But no — there’s so many hardworking individuals that get a space because of things like that. I just love that space for us.
Season 2 of HBO’s pirate comedy/romance Our Flag Means Death takes some big turns by episode 7 — maybe not as big as the season 1 turn, when inept pirate captain Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and Ed “Blackbeard” Teach (Taika Waititi) realized they had romantic feelings for each other, but still… a whole lot of things happen that we figured viewers would want to talk about, once they’d seen it for themselves. So when Polygon sat down with creator and showrunner David Jenkins to talk about season 2, we split the conversation into two parts: an overview of the season’s biggest ideas, and this spoiler-focused conversation about all the surprises in episode 7, including its explosive ending.
[Ed. note: Read on at your own risk; spoilers abound ahead.]
Photo: Nicola Dove/Max
To recap: In episode 7 of Our Flag Means Death season 2, Stede and Blackbeard have just had sex for the first time, and they seem all set for their happily-ever-after together — until Blackbeard abruptly leaves Stede to pursue a job as a fisherman. The crew visits the Republic of Pirates, where Oluwande (Samson Kayo) expresses feelings for Zhang Yi Sao (Ruibo Qian), even though he was previously uncomfortable with her expressing feelings for him when she took over his ship, and even though he and his friend Jim (Vico Ortiz) had a romantic liaison in season 1. They also learn that The Swede (Nat Faxon) has happily settled in as one of 20 husbands to Spanish Jackie (Leslie Jones), even though he was forced into that relationship to save the rest of the crew.
Yes, that summary does sound like something out of a soap opera, now that you mention it. But this doesn’t: At the end of the episode, a trap set by Prince Ricky (Erroll Shand) obliterates Zhang’s fleet, and the pirates’ haven is destroyed when the English fleet sweeps in to kill or capture the whole cast. Jenkins talks us through it all below.
This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: One thing that really surprised me in season 2 is that you have two different coercive relationships where a man is being uncomfortably forced into an intimate relationship with a woman, and then he later decides he likes it. What kind of conversations went into those relationships and the gender tropes you’re reversing there?
David Jenkins: With The Swede and Spanish Jackie — she owns [her husbands]. They live in her basement, and she owns them, basically. So already, you’re [ick noise]. But then I love that The Swede really likes her. She’s a gangster, she’s a mob boss. There is a gender aspect to having her in that role. But then he says, “I’ve found parts of myself that I never knew existed, and other parts I thought were long gone.”
I just liked the idea of Leslie [Jones]’s character and Nat Faxon’s character being together and happy, balancing each other. She’s already got a wild thing going — she’s got 20 husbands. To me, to see that relationship start as kind of a joke, Oh, Leslie’s character’s scary and his character’s timid, and it turns into No, actually, they balance each other pretty well — that’s kind of sweet. It’s less about the fact that she essentially owns him, it’s about the fact that they do care about each other. It’s kind of nice.
Photo: Nicola Dove/Max
But you have very much the same dynamic with Zhang and Olu. When they start out, she’s got all the power in the relationship, and she’s kind of predatory about claiming Olu. He’s intimidated and forced into it, and he comes around on deciding he likes her. It just feels like an odd beat to repeat.
Well, she has all the power in the relationship until she doesn’t. And then she realizes that she’s in love with this guy — he is soft and kind and sweet. And that’s powerful. I think they’re mirrored in Blackbeard and Stede’s relationship — they’re each each other’s manic pixie dream girl.
I think there is something in the show about how piracy is a brutal way of life. It’s essentially Mad Max, this world. There’s no law, there’s just strong and weak. And in stories like Game of Thrones, we see how that plays out. It’s a lot of women getting raped in stories and you’re like, [resigned ick noise]. In Our Flag, a lot of these relationships aren’t consenting relationships — they’re power-dynamic relationships, because it’s Mad Max. So a thing I like to see in this show is, Well, why is the more powerful person interested in this weaker person? What are they trying to balance?
In a world where might makes right, and some people just need to align themselves with someone strong, it’s interesting to be like, Well, what does Blackbeard need? What does Spanish Jackie need? What does Zhang Yi Sao need, the most powerful pirate in the world? What happens when she gets into a relationship? What is she looking for? She’s a modern person, what does she need? So you’re always gonna get those weird power dynamics to start with, I think, and then you just try to get to: What’s underneath that? Why are they doing what they’re doing? What are they looking for?
Photo: Nicola Dove/Max
Speaking of what Blackbeard needs, I think some fans will think that him leaving Stede in episode 7 is a form of revenge. It so closely parallels what Stede did to him. You can read it as them being very much alike, running from commitment, or as him trying to hurt Stede. What do you want to say to people freaking out after episode 7?
Well, there’s a thing I talk about a lot — I really, really liked the Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga version of A Star Is Born. I like how the dynamic changes between them. Everything we do is collapsed on this show — we talk about these lofty things, but we don’t have the time to execute everything we might like to do. Like, episode 4 is a mini Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, just a very small version of it.
In this case, we liked the idea that Blackbeard found this guy and made him a legitimate pirate, but now that he’s a star, Blackbeard’s questioning what he wants to do now that he’s lost his appetite for piracy. And Stede’s turned into Lady Gaga’s character. He’s famous now, because he killed the scariest pirate, so that power is inverted. It’s interesting to look at how a relationship changes now that Blackbird isn’t the star anymore and Stede isn’t a hanger-on. Stede got what he wanted; he’s a real boy. Is Blackbeard jealous? Is he uncomfortable with it? When power dynamics shift in a relationship, that leads to trouble. And then it really is just like, What are they going to do? Are they going to make it through it? Can they rebalance? Because that is a sign of a healthy relationship.
That episode is also a big turning point for Zhang and Olu, and for Olu and Jim. What went into the decisions around them moving in different directions after their connection in season 1?
I think that relationship was always seen in the room as a friend relationship that got romantic. That tension was interesting to us — it’s like, Well, what if we don’t play them as jealous? What if we play it as, when you love a friend and it becomes romantic, and then you see someone who makes them happy and you know you’re not it, you feel jealous? But also, they’re your friend. You want to see them happy. I think a lot of times, particularly in straight relationships, it’s traumatizing, and could be more about the jealousy. But here, I think it’s nice to see it this way: They truly care about each other enough to just want to see their friend with someone good, someone who takes care of them. In my life, those are the best relationships [with exes]. I do see those among my friends, but I don’t see it dramatized a lot, I just see the negative component dramatized. I like it this way — they’re friends, and they just want to see each other do well.
Photo: Nicola Dove/Max
This has never really been a show about villains, but the end of episode 7 feels like a shift in that regard.
I think a lot of the internal forces in Our Flag are the villains. It’s like, Can you let yourself be loved? Do you know what you want in love? If you know what you want, are you healthy enough to get it? When you start going into the tropes of [Blackbeard impression] Oh, should I be gay or not? or Oh, my friends did me dirty — we’ve seen that a lot. It’s good dramatic fuel, but I don’t think those are the things that drive the show.
I think the things that drive this show are a bunch of people who care about each other and are trying to figure out how to have relationships. And relationships are hard. Usually, you’re your own bad guy or gal or person in a relationship. It’s rarely [someone] doing something terrible to you — it’s you just trying to figure out your own shit. Hopefully, your friends help.
The big ending of episode 7 does suggest, though, that there might be more outside pressure coming to the cast, even if it’s just a short-term blip.
I think this is a story about the age of piracy coming to an end. This way of life is coming to an end. And every Western that’s good is that story: This way of life we made is coming to an end, and it can’t last. […] I think every story about outlaws is about trying to preserve a way of life against normative forces that are kind of fascistic.
All of which is a big historical moment, as far as the history of piracy, and it’s part of Stede and Blackbeard’s real-life story. Was that element coming in from history, the way you took little parts of Stede and Blackbeard’s relationship from history?
Using historical beats are good, because they give the story some shape — until they’re not useful, and then you just ignore them. When you feel like you’d rather eat a sandwich, just ignore the history. And then when you feel like, OK, we’re in emotional soup here, we need some downward pressure, then you bring history back in. The balance of the show is 90% ignoring history, and then 10%, bring it in, whenever we’re like, Ah, gotta move the story forward! Remember, the English are out there, and they’re really bad!
The season 2 finale of Our Flag Means Death airs on Max on Oct. 26.
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