“I love this episode . . . it was a bitch to shoot,” Sharp Objects star Chris Messina said, kicking off his interview with Vanity Fair’s companion podcast, Still Watching. This week’s episode, “Closer,” breaks with the show’s usual format to take place almost entirely in and around one location: Adora Crellin’s (Patricia Clarkson) stately home. Shooting largely outside in the blazing heat, director Jean-Marc Vallée put his cast and crew through their paces in order to capture one of the most intricately staged, slow-burning games of cat and mouse ever seen on television. At the end of the hour, though, it’s still unclear which characters are the cats and which are the mice. You can listen to Messina’s full interview here:

Calhoun Day—an eerie annual “celebration” of a sexual assault that is part of the town’s foundational mythology—is set up on Adora’s manicured front lawn, and for every shot of a murder suspect or a philandering husband squinting into the sun, Vallée made sure there was a corresponding shot of another character watching them. Adora’s lawn becomes a goldfish bowl or panopticon of all the town’s sins. But because of this carefully intricate web of perspectives—and Vallée’s improvisational approach to shooting, Messina points out—there was very little downtime for the overheated cast and crew. Some extras, he recalls, fainted—or were just about to—in the glaring sunshine.

Shooting conditions got so unbearably hot at one point that series star and executive producer Amy Adams purchased an ice-cream truck and put a halt to production, so everyone could enjoy a sweet treat and cool down. “It was so hot,” Messina explains. “You just wanted to pour the ice cream over your head.” Thankfully, the actor got another break when, during the episode, his character takes a tour of the interior of the house with Clarkson’s Adora as his guide. Messina explains how his personal history with Clarkson—the two worked on 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona—helped the actors power through a tricky, lengthy monologue about interior design.

The episode closed with one more challenge for Messina: a very revealing sex scene, where his partner, Adams’s Camille, keeps her clothes on due to the damage on her skin, while his character, Detective Richard Willis, strips all the way down. Messina agrees with countless actors over the years who point out that there’s nothing at all intimate about shooting a bedroom scene with a large crew looking on. Still, watching it back much later, he says he was grateful for Vallée’s commitment to using only natural light to film in that pitch-black motel room. “The vain aspect of me was like, ‘I’m so glad that it’s pretty dark, and you can’t see that much of me. That’s probably better off.’”