‘Only Murders in the Building’ Stars and Creator on Traveling to L.A. and Taking “Experimental Leap” in Season 4
Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez are back and solving yet another murder in the fourth season of their hit Hulu comedy Only Murders in the Building.
The series covers new territory this season, taking the beloved trio out of their apartment building to Los Angeles for the installment’s premiere episode, a first for the New York-set comedy.
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The show’s cast, as well as showrunner John Hoffman, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter at Thursday’s Hollywood premiere at Paramount Studios about how season four expands the world of the Emmy-winning series.
“Obviously, we have a great cast and we are going to Hollywood,” said Gomez of how the latest iteration takes the show to a new level. “It was fun to shoot here for a blink of a second.”
“It was so much fun coming out here to shoot … where I grew up and [Short] lived here for so many years,” added Martin.
“We have a victim this season that is a Hollywood stunt double, and marrying that with the success of this podcast our trio has done, it didn’t feel like too far a leap to think that Hollywood might be tapping at their door to make an adaptation,” said Hoffman about taking the show to L.A. “So all of that felt like a good reason to come to Hollywood for a moment, but take it right back to New York because we are a definite New York show, and it will always be that.”
The series further pushes past its previous boundaries this season with a found-footage episode that was shot on cell phones, security cameras and the like instead of traditional television cameras.
“It was really fun, because it was real mini cameras, iPhones and hidden cameras,” said Martin of working on the season’s sixth episode. “And it was really fun because once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”
“Episode six is our sort of more experimental leap we took, which basically sprung from a season in all forms of looking at film and movies and what they’ve done,” said Hoffman. “Films have only been around for a little over a hundred years, so I thought, let’s experiment with an episode that is all through cameras, and let’s see what that feels like.”
“The sloppier it is the kind of better, which fits in with Marty’s performance style,” added Martin with a laugh. “No, we had a good time shooting those scenes.”
Michael Cyril Creighton’s character Howard Morris plays cameraman for part of the episode, filming on an iPhone.
“For one scene, I actually am the cameraman,” said Creighton of how the episode was shot technically. “And there are a couple scenes where the camera is on me and I do flip the camera, but for the most part it was doing a dance with one of our incredible camera operators, Dan.”
Creighton, who’s been with the cast since season one and a series regular since season three, admits he was doubtful at first that the experimental episode would work, but then he saw the final product.
“We would shoot every scene three or four different ways, and it was wild,” said Creighton. “I had no idea how they were going to pull it off, and then when I saw it, I was amazed. The vision of the director, the editors, the writers, it came to life in a really good way.”
“Everyone took to it,” added Hoffman. “And it does give a bit of a jolt to the season in some way that feels different for the show.”
Season four of Only Murders in the Building premieres on Hulu Aug. 27, with episodes dropping weekly thereafter.
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