David Cross Confirms That Shooting ‘Arrested Development’ Season 5 Was Chaotic: ‘It Wasn’t An Easy Shoot’

Netflix

If it wasn’t clear by this point, making season five of Arrested Development was not as fun as seemed in the past. Outside of the Jeffrey Tambor accusations and the incident with Jessica Walter, Mitch Hurwitz detailed how he was not on set in the same way that he had been in past seasons. This led to an intervention by the cast and crew, led by Jason Bateman, and seemed to indicate that the process was fairly stressful.

It’s something David Cross confirmed during a recent interview with SiriusXM’s Jim Norton and Sam Roberts, seeming to blame the chaotic shoot on some of the behavior that made headlines before the show’s premiere on Netflix according to Indiewire:

“It wasn’t an easy shoot,” he said. “We’re getting new pages. It was not cool, for an actor, it was a difficult time, because for myriad reasons I won’t go into, we’d get a script, they weren’t done. You’d get something at night, it’d be fucking pages and pages of stuff and then it would change later on that night. And then you’d get in in the morning, and you’d have two and a half new pages of long stuff.”

He added, “That’s hard for anybody. … It was one of the things that added to the tension, and people weren’t able to do the scenes correctly. That was a big part of it.”

This could be taken as Cross attempting to explain Tambor’s reported behavior, mainly since it follows some discussion about the controversial New York Times interview that preceded the show’s return:

“I definitely have a different feeling about it now, having read it and remembering it, than I did in the moment,” Cross said. “In the moment, it didn’t seem so egregious. I definitely get the criticism, I truly do.” He continued, “One of the lessons I’ve learned is, nobody gives a shit about your context. Nobody. If there’s a crying woman in the room — or whoever, if there’s somebody crying — nobody cares about your ‘well, buts.’”

Cross added later, “I don’t think what we did was right. And hopefully, I won’t do that again.”

Cross explains that he’s being “very careful” with what he says now, but he does share his view on how the media covered the interview and Jessica Walter’s tearful reaction. He added that he wrote an email to Walter after the fact, along with many of the other cast members, and says he wasn’t solid that Netflix wouldn’t cancel Arrested Development before its premiere — they did cancel some press events, though. You can read the full rundown over at Indiewire or listen to the appearance below.

(Via Indiewire)

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