‘Imposters’ Co-Creator Paul Adelstein Threatens: “Somebody Dies in Season 2”

Paul Adelstein is about to freak you out. Imposters fans got a brief introduction to his character, Shelly Cohen, during last week’s season two premiere episode, but tonight, in the second episode of the season: brace yourself.

Adelstein is the co-creator and executive producer of Imposters (along with Adam Brooks), the sole original scripted series currently airing on Bravo. And while viewers are used to seeing him as the (mostly) nice guy from Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, Private Practice, and Scandal, and just a bit less nice as Agent Paul Kellerman on Prison Break, they haven’t seen him like this before. When we sat down with Adelstein last week at the Bravo offices, he had to admit that finally playing the creep is, “So satisfying after getting to play the nice guy all the time. It’s just so much fun, especially the Shelly bad guy. That kind of fast talk, I love those kinds of roles, they’re really juicy.”

Shelly Cohen is sent to track down Maddie (Inbar Lavi) who is suspected to be on the run with a $1.4 million dollar ring, after tricking and slipping through the fingers of both Cohen’s business associate The Doctor (Ray Proscia) and Patrick (Stephen Bishop), an FBI Agent. Only it’s our beloved Bumblers, Ezra (Rob Heaps), Richard (Parker Young) and Jules (Marianne Rendón) who are in possession of the ring, and plotting their next move with it.

As for Shelly Cohen’s next move, well that’s taking care of Maddie. In tonight’s episode, the opening scene finds the two brutally sparring in her peaceful Michigan rental, in a scene where the intensity is sure to stand out. “It’s upsetting,” real life nice guy Adelstein explained of the violent scene with Lavi. “There was a stunt person, but it’s play and you’re faking it. But you know, she tripped a couple of times and I tripped once. Her knees got messed up. Putting your hands around someone’s neck and choking them out is upsetting. It’s fun in a theatrical way, but after it feels a little gross. Also she’s teeny. I tower over her, but I think that’s super effective. It needed to be violent. In comparison to season one, this is out of the gate. We wanted to announce that this was different.”

Also different for Adelstein this season: stepping in front of the camera. While he was originally slated to play Lenny Cohen in season one, once Brooks’ old pal Uma Thurman saw the show’s pilot, she showed interest in appearing in the show’s second season, but Adelstein was quick to offer to Brooks, “Dude, she needs to play Lenny.”

And so with season two, Adelstein stepped into the rose-colored glasses and leather gloves of Shelly Cohen, Lenny’s ex-husband. “I’ve got enough to do on this show, but then I was getting more and more jealous as the [first] season progressed,” he joked. “I was watching the actors get to play and then I directed and I was like, ‘I want to be over there, too.’ And then we thought, ‘Well she should have a counterpart,’ and maybe somewhere down the road they butt heads. But as it worked in season one, it works in season two that there’s a certain surreal energy that those characters insert into the story and we wanted to do that again, so that was kind of how Shelly was born.”

Along with Shelly, so came a line of eccentric accessories to illustrate just how out there this guy can be. For Adelstein, it was the “beard, glasses, gloves” combo that pulled the character together, with him noting, “You start leaning towards dandy because it’s menacing, obviously, and anyone who’s wearing gloves is up to no good. The colored glasses thing is something I find really cool but I could never pull off in life.” And while he name checks the 1979 Bond film Moonraker as an inspiration for the look, Shelly’s car was a pure original. Literally. The mustard yellow Cadillac, his not-quite getaway car came to be because “We just invented it and they just did it. That’s not a color that exists in the Cadillac line.”

However, Adelstein isn’t afraid to say his jump from behind the camera to in front of it, especially as such an unforgettable character, was actually a bit scary. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to screw up my own show.’ That’s really falling on your face. But it felt really good to do. Those days of work were just a ball. And he returns,” he teased of his character.

Oh, and that’s not all he’s promising. “Very much by design, we talked about in season one how somebody needs to die. You want there to be real consequences and stakes. And somebody dies in season two.”

But before we all start hyperventilating about who that might be, there’s still a lot to come. Thurman is set to return this season as well, as Adelstein teased, “We get to see her interact with The Bumblers this time.” And fans of Jules, Ezra and Richard have a lot to look forward to including eye-popping romances and revelations. Specifically, Adelstein confirms, “We find out what’s in Jules’ envelope and a family member of hers becomes a key figure in season two. You learn what’s haunted Jules and whether she’s able to move past it. To a certain degree, it’s way uglier than what the others have gone through. It explains some of her issues and frankly, she’s capable of anything as an actor. It makes the rest of the season for her so incredibly rich.”

There are few shows, even today among the endless options available, where conversations about deaths and dark, dark secrets are also balanced with the humor that Imposters pulls off with each episode. In fact, season two has already felt even funnier, even clickier, and even wittier than the first round, but according to Adelstein, that’s the result of much discussion about establishing the show’s unique tone. “It was incredibly helpful that we talked about for a long time what the show was about before we talked about any plot other than woman marries man, pretends to be somebody else, steals money. [That] led to, what are the movies and TV shows that we love that deal in the same gestalt? What are the great con movies and why do we love them? Why are they so American? The Sting. Out of Sight. Oceans. Lady Eve, which is a ’40s movie. The reinvention is such an American idea. Part of our pitch of why this show belongs on Bravo was that it’s aspirational in its own way. Don’t you drive by an airport and want to get on an airplane? Seeing what you can get away with, reinventing yourself: it’s Gatsby, it’s all that stuff.” Adelstein also mentions the writers’ room habit of huddling around YouTube to watch pieces from different movies they loved and used for inspiration, big and small, when it comes to creating Imposters. “We would watch this French movie for this pickpocket scene, we’re going to watch this scene from Out of Sight for this airport scene in the pilot.”

So they’ve got the con thing down, but how about the comedy? “The real tone that was the challenge was the comedic: not too goofy, but goofy enough,” Adelstein said. “It had to have real stakes. That was something we didn’t know we were going to be able to pull off until we started writing the pilot. You don’t want it to be as light as air, it’s not Austin Powers. It’s not about putting on wigs.”

Adelstein says Imposters is “darker in season two, for sure,” and mostly that’s due to the fact that, “The real theme of season two for us was consequences. Both of the good part of this life and the bad part of it, you know, what happens to you when you give your soul away like that over and over and over again.”

“That is another tonal thing that I think we keep a very close watch on. We don’t want it to be too easy. We don’t want the cons to be too easy and we don’t want the life to be too easy,” Adelstein said, and part of the method to achieving that is the writing process between himself and Brooks. “We pick scenes that we want to write and avoid scenes we don’t want to write. It’s one of the great things about having a partner; it really becomes a dialectic and you just send them back and forth. We’re the opposite of precious about our own work. He sends me something and I rewrite it or change something. I say, ‘That’s not funny enough.’ or ‘That’s too precious.’ And he writes to me that ‘Your thing is too goofy’ and that it’s violent. Whatever our dynamic is, it finds a middle.”

Adelstein is also finding the middle between his work as both an actor and co-creator of the show. Luckily, he’s had a bit of experience when it comes to learning from the best. “I’d written on Girlfriend’s Guide and I sold a pilot with a friend, but it wasn’t until the writers’ room for Imposters where I felt like [after] doing 111 episodes of Private Practice, a certain structure has been baked into my bones in a healthy way. Shonda is a master at the act out reversal and those are shows that are plot driven but not as plot driven as Imposters, so that was crucial. I feel like I took that. And there’s a diligence in Shondaland that I also tried to bring to it.”

He also took from Shondaland the knowledge of when to let your audience — and your characters — in on what’s really going on. “There are times where you want the audience to be ahead of the characters and times where you want the audience to not know what’s happening, and that takes a certain kind of balance.” In fact, Adelstein promises this exact situation is on the horizon during Lenny Cohen’s upcoming interaction with The Bumblers. “There’s an instance where the audience is way ahead of the characters because they don’t know her, but the audience obviously does.”

While Adelstein previously directed on Private Practice and an episode of the first season of Imposters, he says it is something he certainly hopes to do more of in the future, especially on Imposters, and found the freedom especially rewarding. “Directing on Imposters, I was like ‘Oh, there’s nobody I’m answering to.’ There isn’t like ‘What does Shonda want?’ in the back of my head. It’s just what you want. We own the tone and we feel very clear about the tone and so getting to do that hands-on was so fun.” Doing just what he wants to do? Spoken like a true Shelly Cohen. But, you know, nice.

Imposters airs tonight on Bravo at 10pm ET/PT.

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