‘The Residence’ Creator on Casting Al Franken (but Not Hugh Jackman!), a Possible Season 2 and Losing Andre Braugher: ‘We All Loved Him and He Loved the Show’

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers from “The Residence,” now streaming on Netflix.

Before writing a single word of Netflix’s latest murder mystery “The Residence,” creator Paul William Davies knew exactly who the killer and the victim would be.

Over the course of eight episodes, the new screwball whodunit series — inspired by Kate Andersen Brower’s non-fiction book “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House” — unraveled the mystery surrounding the demise of White House Chief Usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito, who took over the role from the late Andre Braugher) on the night of an Australian state dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

After conducting a whirlwind investigation on the night of the murder, during which she interviewed 157 suspects and potential witnesses to the crime and its attempted cover-up, Detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba) returns to the White House, where she gives all of her remaining persons of interest a tour of the house while explaining the many clues she found along the way. The last stop on that tour is the Yellow Oval Room, where A.B. was killed.

As it turns out, Lilly Schumacher (Molly Griggs), the rich, entitled social secretary who had designs of completely reinventing the White House, killed A.B., a stickler for tradition, on the night of the state dinner. Shortly before his death, A.B. confronted Lilly in his office and threatened to expose her for misappropriating funds, illegally securing contracts, trading favors with different vendors and sneaking individuals into the White House. In the heat of the moment, Lilly ripped a page out of A.B.’s meticulously kept journal, which he had used to document all of her criminal activity.

Once she realized that the page she had could be mistaken for a suicide note, Lilly concocted a plan. She stole paraquat, a toxic herbicide, from the gardening shed and used one of gardener Emily Mackil’s (Rebecca Field) dishes to carry the poison into the White House. She called A.B. from the shed and asked him to meet her in the Yellow Oval Room. She also impersonated First Gentleman Elliot Morgan (Barrett Foa) in order to get the Secret Service removed from the second floor. While she secretly mixed a lethal cocktail, Lilly saw A.B. have a disagreement with housekeeper Elsyie Chayle (Julieth Restrepo). (Lilly later even tried to frame Elsyie and engineer Bruce Geller (Mel Rodriguez) as the “real” killers.)

After Elysie was dismissed, Lilly approached A.B. with the poisoned drink as a peace offering. Once he realized that the drink had been spiked, A.B. threw it on some nearby flowers. Lily then threw a vase at his head, which resulted in perimortem cuts on his face, and bludgeoned him to death with a clock, which she then hid in a storage door in the passageway between the Yellow Oval Room and the Treaty Room. With A.B. gone and the new Chief Usher Jasmine Haney (Susan Kelechi Watson) none the wiser about what had happened that evening, Lilly took the final step of sealing that passageway shut, but she did not expect Detective Cupp to return and literally put a knife through the wall to reveal her cover-up.

A longtime Shondaland writer-producer who cut his teeth on Shonda Rhimes’ “Scandal” before creating the two-season ABC legal drama “For the People,” Davies moved to Netflix with the company and began working on “The Residence” more than five years ago. Below, Davies opens up about that killer reveal, how the show overcame the “tragic, devastating” loss of Braugher with the help of Esposito, why he chose to cast Kylie Minogue and Al Franken — and why he thinks there are many more stories to tell with the “World’s Greatest Detective.”

When you set out to create “The Residence,” you didn’t expect the detective to play a very prominent role. Once you made the decision to center this show around Cordelia Cupp, how did you think about building her as a character? Why did you choose to make her an avid birder?

It’s true that when I first thought of this whole murder mystery idea and started to lay it out, I did think that it was going to be told more through the point of view of the staff and that the detective would be a little bit more on the periphery — like a real character, but not necessarily the heart and soul of it. And even before Uzo came along, just in terms of writing it, I felt Cordelia just pushing her way in there. One of the things that I love about this genre and great detective fiction is that you have a great detective — so I just embraced that, like, “This is really Cordelia Cupp’s story.”

I mean, it’s the story of the staff and the people and all of that. It’s not to diminish any of that at all. But at the end of the day, this is a Cordelia Cupp mystery, and that’s what I love about Sherlock Holmes or Poirot or Benoit Blanc. So I wanted her to be iconic that way, and she kind of wrote herself into it. Uzo is so unbelievable, so magnetic. She has such incredible range, and she’s such a life force that she made it all the more distinctively Cordelia.

The birding thing was kind of organic. My stepdad’s a birder, and I spent a lot of time early working on the show in my backyard where there’s a lot of birds and bird feeders. Even though I didn’t really know anything about birds, I was watching them and I was like, “This could be a fun feature of her character,” but I didn’t set out to make it a thing as prominent as it was for her or for the show. But it just felt more and more like, “Oh, this is a great opportunity to really understand her, how she sees the world and the way she thinks.” It just naturally evolved that way to the point where it really became an essential part of who she is and the way she lives her life. She analogizes to birds all the time. It’s really core to her identity in a way that just felt right as I drew her up.

You created so many colorful characters around Cordelia that it was almost impossible for me to figure out the killer in real time, until Cordelia began to spell things out in the finale. Why did you choose to have so many suspects by design?

I think it’s twofold. One is that the whole project was born out of reading this book and just learning about the staff. And even though it went in an entirely different direction and there’s no murder mystery in the book, I was attracted to it and wanted to keep figuring it out, because I thought there were so many great stories and relationships among the staff and between the staff and the president. I cut characters out at various points. As many as there were, I had more! It became even harder when I started casting, and then I wanted to write more for all of these incredible actors. I ended up having to do less with some of the staff members who weren’t necessarily suspects, but that I wanted you to know more, and it just was impossible at a certain point. But I wanted it to feel as rich a world and as distinct a world as possible, and that’s born out of the characters. That was really important to me.

And in terms of the suspects of it all, I love those all-star cast murder mysteries from the ’70s — “The Last of Sheila,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Death on the Nile,” and then more recently, “Clue,” but then especially “Knives Out.” I think that’s always been the fun part of the genre, just even the “Knives Out” poster with everybody there — it’s great! God bless Rian Johnson for doing that, and resuscitating that whole genre. And going back to Agatha Christie and having as many people as you can in that room when you have a summation — that, to me, is delightful.

There’s obviously all kinds of different ways to tell a murder mystery and have detective fiction. “Sleuth” was a really important movie, I think, for Rian Johnson and really impactful on me, as well as “Death Trap” with Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine in the early ’80s. Those are two-, three-person movies. But I wanted this to feel as big as possible with as many distinctive characters as possible.

How did you find the tone of the show, and how did you work on it with your leads and the rest of your very large ensemble?

The tone of it is kind of just me, so in that sense, I didn’t have to figure it out other than get everybody on board. Shondaland and I have a great relationship. I’ve been here for over a decade, and they know who I am, how I like to write and the tone of things that I like. Not that this is the same as other things exactly, but I think it’s multi-tonal in the sense that it’s very comedic, but also there’s a romance in it, there’s some real emotion to it. So it’s not just a hard comedy, but it’s also clearly not a drama with a couple of jokes. That’s just the way that I write things, and I don’t really ever just do one thing in a specific way. I like being able to have a lot of different tones that add up to, I guess, who I am.

I’d written four or five or six scripts before we really started casting. The tone is very much in the scripts themselves too. If you read one of these scripts that I wrote, there’s a lot of stage direction, a lot of jokes. You can get a sense of who I am and what the show is going to be from reading those scripts more than maybe some other scripts. I think the people who read it, responded to it and wanted to do it knew what it was, and then I fed off that energy too. We understood each other. So it wasn’t like we ever really had to sit down and have the discussions of, “Oh, you know what? It’s really like this.” They all have great comedic talent, but they also can play it straight and do things in the way that the show was designed. So there were no hard conversations. Everybody was on board with it from the get-go.

At what point during the writing process did you know that Lilly Schumacher was the killer? Why did you settle on her?

When I set it all up, it really was making sure that I had identified the right person — both the killer and the victim. I really needed to identify somebody who could be the victim, who could engender a lot of hostility, motive, and have that be believable and sustainable over lots of different folks. I knew I wanted to do a big spectacle like a state dinner, but I didn’t want it just to be that the only people that were potential suspects were people in the staff or people attending the dinner. I wanted it to be as wide a range of folks as possible, so I needed to figure out who that person was — and then, at the same time, the right killer.

I wanted the central conflict to represent something that was real to the House. I didn’t want it to be like there was some outside-the-house dispute about money, or an affair, or something that could have just been anywhere but just happened to be at the White House. I wanted the conflict to be rooted in the House. There is this tension sometimes between the more permanent staff and then the people that come in and are like, “Hey, we’re going to redo this, or think about it this way.” They often and do work together all the time. I mean, we haven’t had anybody get killed in these positions. But I liked the idea that this tension that does exist is something that could motivate this relationship on both sides.

But were there any specific clues that you included in the show to later reveal that Lilly was the killer? Were there any clear tells that you and Molly Griggs had discussed ahead of time?

You can see all the way along that she has these disputes with A.B., and unlike other characters where they’re more focused on a particular episode, her disputes kind of exist almost in every episode, which, to me, was fun. When you go back, you’re like, “Oh, Episode 2 is largely about Marvella. 3 is Didier. 4 is Sheila. 5 is Tripp.” But in every one of those episodes, weaving your way through, you learn, “Oh, she was in a fight with him about the musical guest. Oh, she was in a fight with him about the seating charge.” So it is kind of all throughout, and if you watch that, you’re like, “Oh yeah, she’s constantly having issues with him about this night and before this night.” So that was structurally really important to me.

Molly’s brilliant, and I think she gave us so much. I had to calibrate everything at the end to make sure I wasn’t revealing too much or too little. She’s such an incredible actress that she gave us options to be able to play with the performance. Within this range, she delivered this incredible, indelible — to me — iconic villain performance when you realize who she is at the end. But also, as great actors do, with enough range in how she does it so that I could “true” it all up at the end and make sure that it wasn’t too big in this direction or too buried or whatever. So that was on me to do that at the very end — not just with her, but with everybody. It’s almost like an eight-hour movie in a sense, so you have to make sure that 90 minutes into it or three hours into it, you’re not pushing too far in this direction or that direction.

I did make a point of this whole notion that A.B. always had his fights with people behind closed doors, and I reference that repeatedly. You see him do that all the time so that when Lilly does say in Episode 7, “Oh, I saw him fighting with somebody in the Yellow Oval Room.” It’s very nuanced, but that is not believable because we actually, literally saw the door closed in that scene. But also, it is not consistent with the way he did things for the most part. So there were things like that all the way along that I wanted to make that logic apparent to the viewer, because that was something Cupp was picking up on as she was working through the case.

You lost Andre Braugher halfway through production, and you chose to recast his role with Giancarlo Esposito, who had worked with Braugher on “Homicide: Life on the Street” and was a longtime friend of his from the New York theater scene. How were their portrayals of A.B. different? Did the role have to get any smaller or change at all to accommodate the recasting?

The role itself didn’t change. I did not rewrite anything. I didn’t write it for Andre in the beginning, and I didn’t rewrite it for Giancarlo. The role was the role. I think it’s a testimony to the brilliance of those two actors that it’s almost like a play, in the sense that different people come in and play the same character, and they play it in their own brilliant, distinctive way — and that’s what they did. So I didn’t need to write to either one of them. They’re just incredible actors. I mean, obviously, [it was] a very unfortunate circumstance — tragic, devastating for all of us. So it’s not like a play in that sense at all where you just have a different actor coming in. This was born out of a total devastation to all of us on a very personal level, and their performances are very distinctively their own.

Technically, it was challenging, because we had shot stuff with Andre, so we obviously had to reshoot certain things. We had to figure out other things that were challenging, but that was the least of the challenge. The challenge was emotional for all of us, because he was such a core part of this family, and we all loved him and he loved the show. We were lucky enough to have the grace and brilliance of Giancarlo to come in and handle in a way that I think made it easier for all of us.

The directors of “The Residence” ended up using “plates” — background shots which are then superimposed with other elements during post-production — so you were essentially able to superimpose images of Esposito over Braugher in some episodes. How much were you able to reshoot with Esposito, given that A.B. is mostly in scenes with bigger groups of people?

We reshot any kind of substantive performance. There were larger scenes at the state dinner and stuff where it would’ve been incredibly challenging to replicate all those things that A.B. was in, and we could technically do it with “plates.” So we were able to make those things work, but we reshot any scenes with him that he was talking or performing in any substantive way. I mean, everybody’s in a scene for a reason, but in some cases, it was easier to be able to [use “plates”] — instead of replicating that full scene — than to try to reshoot something massive where the core of the scene was about something else [other than A.B.]. So those things we made work wherever we could.

Have you or Shondaland ever considered releasing clips of what Braugher did shoot in those four episodes before he passed?

We never talked about that.

You decided to set this show during the hustle and bustle of an Australian state dinner at the White House. You got Kylie Minogue to play a version of herself in a couple episodes, and then there are numerous references to Hugh Jackman, even though we never see his face. How did Minogue’s cameo come about? How close did you actually get to getting Jackman, and why did you choose to use a body double of him when he couldn’t do it?

I wrote Hugh in when I wrote the first episode and kept it going, with the hopes that maybe there was a chance with the schedule, that it would work out. I don’t know him, I’ve never worked with him, but I’ve only heard great things about him. There were people on the show that had worked with him on various things — people at Netflix — and my sense was very clear that if the schedule would’ve worked out, he would’ve been totally game for it, but it didn’t. And I thought, “Well, it’ll be fun [anyway].” I think it’s just part of the humor of the show, so we left it in, and I thought that was a fun way to do it.

Kylie’s incredibly busy, and it just worked out that she was able to do it, and she was absolutely delightful. And not only did she do it, but she did even more than originally anticipated because, again, scheduling things worked out and she was so game. I wanted to use her however I could because she’s so fun, so we got to do a little bit more than I had originally even planned for that.

What about Al Franken? The former real-life senator, who resigned in 2018 under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, plays a fictional senator in this show.

Al was the same kind of thing. That was always going to be kind of a more traditional role in the show, in the sense that it wasn’t just like a day or two or whatever. It was going to be a bigger part all the way through. But I didn’t know that I would be able to use him as much as I did. He was really happy to do it, so definitely once I had Al Franken, I used as much Al Franken as I could. He is a legend and he did a great job, and I think people really enjoyed working with him on those scenes.

The fact that this show is titled “The Residence” means that you could theoretically set the next chapter of this story in another famous home, in just about any country. Have you thought about what a second season could look like?

I haven’t had a lot of time to be able to think about it, but I have thought about it along the way, for sure. Even in its inception, once I really thought about Cordelia and Cordelia and [Randall Park’s] Edwin, it’s always lurking there. I’ve definitely thought that there are other places that we can go, and mysteries that could feel totally distinctive yet maybe familiar in the sense of how they work. I think part of the fun of a lot of great detective fiction is that each one is different, but there is a familiarity to the way they work. There’s 221B Baker Street; there’s Poirot — both in his style and the way he approaches things. How the cases come to him is very distinctive, but also familiar every time. That’s part of the comfort of a great mystery and great detective fiction. So I think I would want to continue to build on the way that we did this, but with its own twist and its own adventure, wherever that might be. I have ideas!

This interview has been edited and condensed.