Brooklyn 99 Star Discusses Directing Holt vs. Disco Strangler Showdown
In the Feb. 28 episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Capt. Holt tracked down his longtime nemesis, the Disco Strangler, with an assist from Terry and Charles. Believed to be dead, the notorious serial killer — who uses yo-yo strings to throttle his victims — faked his own death as part of an elaborate prison break. The hunt culminated in a not-so-epic showdown between Holt and “the most dangerous man in America,” now a partially crippled octogenarian who weighs in at just 93 pounds.
The sidesplitting sequence was helmed by series star/first-time director Stephanie Beatriz, who was positively giddy about the opportunity to lend her vision to the scene.
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“I was beside myself with childlike creativity that day on set,” Beatriz tells TVLine. “That scene in the street with the two of them facing down, I kept having all these images of old spaghetti westerns. Those are [what] I pulled from to show our director of photography [Rick Page]. Andre [Braugher] was like, ‘I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean,’ then I got to open up my binder and show him weird pictures that I’d been drawing.”
The Disco Strangler scenes were “so zany and wacky and fun,” Beatriz says, and quite a departure from the episode’s #MeToo-themed A-plot. “I was really excited to do that plot line with Terry [Crews], Joe [Lo Truglio] and Andre, because I think the three of them — whatever that chemical mixture is between those three guys together — is just so funny and so weird.”
Did you enjoy watching Capt. Holt face off against the Disco Strangler?
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