Apple TV+’s latest series Roar is all about telling stories of “ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances.” Roar’s co-creators, Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, are also the incredible women behind GLOW. Many of GLOW’s stars — Alison Brie, Betty Gilpin, and Chris Lowell — are a part of Liz and Carly’s new series. HollywoodLife got the chance to speak EXCLUSIVELY with Liz about reuniting with some of GLOW’s finest.
“Sometimes you get lucky,” Liz told HollywoodLife during Roar’s press junket. “It’s funny because Chris and Ali actually did not have a lot of one-on-one scenes together in GLOW if you actually think about it. They oddly have very few one-on-one scenes. I think maybe one. So that to me was sort of hilarious to think about that they actually didn’t interact that much on our previous show. But they were thrilled obviously to see each other, and the other reunion that people may not realize is that a lot of our crew from GLOW came on board Roar, so our hair and makeup teams, our costume team, we had so our production designer, we had so many people that we had previously worked with come with us to build 8 worlds, which was super lucky. I think it was also nice for them to see some familiar faces behind the camera.”
GLOW, which aired on Netflix for 3 seasons, centered around a group of women who perform in the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling organization. Similar to GLOW, Roar revolves around women and their stories. Roar is based on a book of short stories by Cecilia Ahern.
“The thing that was so exciting to us as we read the book — Carly Mensch and I — was each story had this very sticky idea right from the jump. The stories are actually called The Woman Who Found Bite Marks On Her Skin, The Woman Who Was Kept On The Shelf, and there are these ideas that are either literalized or taken through the whole story. These elements of surrealism or magical realism to tell stories of these ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances felt really, really appealing to us as a new thing to try to do. Because we’re always telling female-centered stories, for the most part. I think this felt like another way to kind of attack it that we hadn’t done before,” Liz continued.
In addition to Alison and Betty, the cast of Roar is full of all-stars like Nicole Kidman, Cynthia Erivo, Issa Rae, and more. Liz explained how she assembled her entire talented cast.
“Nicole Kidman is one of our executive producers. She came on board from the very beginning and thankfully wanted to be in an episode, not just produce, so that was really thrilling,” Liz told HollywoodLife. “We wrote all the episodes first just because if you were to pitch an actress’s story fully, you might sound a little nuts, so I think we needed to prove it to ourselves that these stories translated to TV. And then we went to actresses that we either knew and adored, or were on our wish list of people to work with like Cynthia and Issa and Meera [Syal]. We sent them the script, and then we got on the phone with them to talk about it because I think Carly and I, coming from theater, we always want to also tailor scripts to the actor that wants to play it or get their feedback and put them in the script a bit more. We had a healthy back and forth with the actors who came on board, and we just got very lucky that so many women responded to the work and we’re game to try something a little different.” All 8 episodes of Roar will be available starting April 15.