This story contains major spoilers for The Umbrella Academy Season 3.
The Umbrella Academy Season 3 sees the titular dysfunctional superpowered family returning to the present after their time in 1963 Dallas, only to discover that they’ve dramatically changed the timeline and caused yet another looming apocalypse. With a temporal anomaly threatening to devour the entire universe, the season’s 10 episodes are packed with family drama, absurd musical numbers, powerful character growth and Easter eggs for fans of The Umbrella Academy comics by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá.
Tudum spoke with showrunner Steve Blackman about the season’s biggest moments, digging into the motivations behind character arcs and how budget restrictions and COVID-19 shaped the show. Blackman also dishes on who the best dancers in the cast are and shares why a Season 3 scene is one of his favorite moments of the series.
One of the best scenes of the season was the Footloose dance number. Who was the best dancer of your performers? Was there anyone who really needed some extra tutelage to get through that scene? I can say proudly that they learned that dance during COVID, locked down in their hotels or their apartments, over Zoom initially. They and our choreographer would stand 10 feet from their laptops, and they learned to dance for weeks that way. Then we moved into a space with masks and shields, and then we moved into the actual set. I thought we’d have to have dance doubles for parts of it, and we were hiring them, but we never needed them. Everyone danced themselves. Everything you see is our actors.
Now, who is the best? I can say this without insulting anyone that I think David Castañeda has some pretty badass moves. So does Emmy Raver-Lampman, who comes from the stage. Jake Epstein, who played Alphonso, is another stage guy. The three of them were our top dancers.
How closely did you work with Elliot Page to handle his character’s transition in Season 3? When Elliot told me that he was transitioning, the Season 3 scripts were done. I was thrilled for Elliot. I was very happy that he made this decision, but then I thought, ‘What do I do now?’ To Elliott’s credit, he didn’t say, “You must do the transition.” He said, “I trust you. Do what you think is right for the character in the show.” My first call was to Nick Adams at GLAAD, who was really incredible and supportive. He helped me enlist Thomas Page McBee, who also knew Elliot. Thomas is a trans writer, novelist and journalist. He was my guide to telling what I wanted to be a very authentic story. We collaborated with Elliot as well.
To be honest with you, I didn’t know a lot about people who were transgender before Elliott called me. I learned a lot over this process. I know I have a lot more to learn. It was really an incredible journey for all of us. We wanted to tell the inclusive story, but at the same time not make it the story. We wanted to just make it feel like there are families that just can accept you unconditionally as transgender, and that doesn’t have to be the whole story of the show. That was the balance I tried to find.
Allison has such a dark arc in Season 3. What inspired it? It’s a dark arc, but it’s not driven by anger. Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is thrown into the Jim Crow South in Season 2, in 1963, where there’s out-and-out racism against people of color. She has no voice for the first year, literally. Physically, her throat is cut. Then when she gains back her voice in year two of her time in Dallas, no one’s listening because she’s a woman of color. So she’s trying to gain back her voice metaphorically now in Season 3, trying to be heard.
The problem is, she’s suffering from PTSD from her time there. She’s in incredible pain from making the decision to leave [her husband], Ray Chestnut [Yusuf Gatewood], and the hope is that she finds her daughter, Claire [Coco Assad]. Claire does not exist in this timeline, so she’s lost everything and she’s coming apart at the seams. I thought Emmy did a beautiful job of showing the layers of that emotion. She’s trying to show a tough outer skin, but the audience sees that she’s emotionally just devastated and becoming more and more desperate to figure out a way to have her daughter back.
What was the symbolism of her cutting her hair this season? That was something Emmy really liked. Emmy felt that was a really powerful scene where she tries to Rumor herself. If only it was that easy to Rumor yourself out of pain. We’d all want that power. But she can’t, and then she felt, ‘I need to do something different, so let me cut my hair. Let me at least feel some kind of change.’ It’s all sort of desperate moves and desperate thoughts and desperate choices.
How did you pick what each character would sing during the bachelor party karaoke? That was just me loving music and having fun with it. “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life” is just such a funny song, and it’s so iconic, and it’s so counter to what’s going on. The world is ending, yet they’re trying to rush in a bachelor party and wedding in the same few hours. It’s very absurdist, which is what our show is. As they’re singing we’re having a time of our lives, we drift up and we see outside that the world is almost over. The universe is about to fold in on itself. It’s so much fun picking music for the show.
Speaking of music, how did you come up with the “Cat’s in the Cradle” training montage with Klaus (Robert Sheehan) and Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore)? I talked to the writer of that episode, Michelle Lovretta, and we were trying to figure out the horror version of a dad throwing a ball with his son. It makes no sense to us, but in the world of a Hargreeves’ brain, it makes total sense. It’s a motivator to start learning how to come back from death really quickly, but it’s so absurd and so over the top. Then you needed this song that was such a beautiful song about dads and sons. We actually picked the more rocking version of “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Ugly Kid Joe. This is one of my favorite scenes of the show. It’s just nuts.
Where was Hotel Obsidian shot, and what was your vision for the space? Obsidian was a set. We were coming into COVID shooting in Toronto where it was very, very shut down, even more shut down than LA was, with much stricter rules. I had to rewrite the show a bit to be more interior. It became almost impossible to shoot locations in Toronto during the months we were shooting. So we built a monster hotel. It’s still standing: the hallways, the rooms, that lobby.
My inspiration is a combination of some Kubrick — if you look very, very closely, there’s some The Shining Easter eggs in there — as well as The Grand Budapest Hotel from Wes Anderson. I worked hand in hand with our wonderful production designer, Carey Meyer, who really, really did a wonderful job of both looks of the hotel, both Obsidian and Oblivion.
What are some other Easter eggs that people might have missed? Well, I don’t want to give some of them away. I just think you should look carefully in the tattoo parlor. There’s some very interesting things on the walls of the hotels, both in the Oblivion Obsidian. There’s things in the graffiti on the Berlin Wall, for example, that are callbacks to the graphic novel.
This has nothing to do with the graphic novel, but it’s fun in terms of sustainability: When you look at the pillars of the Hotel Oblivion, they’re done with these really interesting geometric shapes that are lit up. If you look very closely, you realize there’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of recycled coffee cup holders from Starbucks.
What appeals to you about picking elements from the comics, like the white buffalo and the Mothers of Agony, and using them in novel ways? I just love any time I can go back to the source material and either use it directly or use it as a springboard into some storytelling. Initially, the fans of the show were probably the people who love the graphic novel. Now, we have far more fans who didn’t know about the graphic novel come to discover it.
The comics that Gerard’s doing are very nonlinear, and it’s very hard to translate a completely nonlinear storyline into something that I can do in 10 hours of storytelling. Plus, one of the restraints I put on the show, and the writers always hate me for it, is every episode is about a day. So we’re only talking about 10 days of time. That also makes it harder to tell long-term stories.
Is there anything from the comics that you really wanted to include but couldn’t due to budget constraints? Oh my gosh, so many things. There’s the great Eiffel Tower story we wanted to do from the first few pages of the kids fighting Gustave Eiffel and the tower that comes to life as a robot. We’ve budgeted those things. I sat down with the effects teams and said, “How much would this be?” And then I get sticker shock. There’s some things I wanted to do in Dallas in Season 2 that we simply couldn’t afford to do, but we did get to Dealey Plaza. I was really proud we could actually do that.
Do you think of Reginald Hargreeves as the primary villain of the show? It depends who you ask. To the viewer, I think he is the villain. In every timeline, Reggie seems to have the ability to play puppet master to these kids. There is a certain irony in that as different as the Sparrows are from the Umbrellas, they both share a common trauma that they were raised by this man.
Once he becomes less sedated after Klaus teaches him how to fake swallow the pills, he’s quickly going back to his plan to bring back the person he loves the most in the world, which is his wife. If you follow the timeline of three seasons, he started his plan 100 years ago. He’s been waiting a very, very long time to bring his wife back from the dead.
I would posit a theory to the fans, and to you, that for all the terrible things Reggie did this year, at the end of the day he knew that once he reset the universe, everything would go back to the way it was, meaning everyone would be alive again. Reggie thinks he gave them a gift. He took away their power. He took away the thing they most complained about. Now, that may not be true, but if you jump into Reggie’s mind for a second, I think he says “You guys got what you want. You don’t have to be burdened by this power anymore. You’re all normal again. You’re all just like everyone else. Have a good life,” which sets up a wonderful Season 4.
What would you like to do with Season 4? One of the stories I want to tell next year, if we’re picked up, is one of the graphic novel’s biggest mysteries. I don’t want to say what it is, but the fans will probably figure it out.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
