Warning: This article contains spoilers forPsych 3: This Is Gus.
But all’s well that ends well, and Selene gave birth to a baby boy.
To say the scene was chaotic would be an understatement.
Dulé Hill as Gus and Jazmyn Simon as Selene in ‘Psych 3: This Is Gus’.James Dittiger/Peacock
Below, the foursome break down the entire shooting experience.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Steve, how much of what made it on screen was actually scripted?
Chris, I see you shaking your head.
Dulé Hill as Gus and James Roday Rodriguez as Shawn in ‘Psych 3: This Is Gus’.James Dittiger/Peacock
We had to just keep remembering all of the things going on.
It was just orchestrated chaos that just kept building and building.
It was one of the first things I wrote for the movie.
Jazmyn Simon as Selene and Maggie Lawson as Juliet in ‘Psych 3: This Is Gus’.James Dittiger/Peacock
I just knew that this is the part of the movie for me.
My favorite part of the whole experience is that we had Andy Berman shoot Ray Wise down in L.A. Just to watch the joy of Ray Wise seeing that thing and going, “Oh hohoho!”
HENZE:He had no idea what the set looked like!
He had no idea how it was going to be integrated.
Where are the laptops going to go with green screens that need burn-ins?
What if it’s in the background?
We’re going to put the laptops here.
Should they go on the table?"
It sounds like it was almost as chaotic as the scene itself.
FRANKS:I had drawn the whole thing, and the set wasn’t completed untilyou know our budgets.
[Laughs] So it was exactly what Chris said.
We only had so many burn-ins we were allowed to have.
We had to double-check we had to frame out the laptops as much as possible.
Everybody nailed all the regular stuff.
And then James added the crazy emotional breakdown at the end.
I’m like, “Is he just going too far?”
Because he’s literally crumbling from the experience of delivering the baby.
But I embraced it and went in and started pitching him the thing about the baby biting his finger.
It’s so hilarious yet so disturbing for the character.
We had to figure out where to draw the line.
James, you co-wrote this movie with Steve.
How did you react when you saw it?
So in a way, I think we reverse-engineered an entirePsychmovie out of this sequence.
It was a monster.
It was like 11-12 pages long, one location, the entire cast essentially at different points.
We know what each of us can do.
We can do this."
And what about you, Dule?
This was a culmination of that.
This was the rare occasion where you shot one scene over two days.
Can you walk us through how both of you as actors handled an experience with so many moving parts?
We got it down to 11 pages.
A lot of times what might be deemed as a mistake on another show is gold for us.
And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Was Gus' “C’mon, son” scripted?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ:Yeah, it was like the all-time epic on-the-nose “C’mon, son”!
HILL:I don’t think the length of the “son” was necessarily scripted.
We never actually find out baby Gus' name.
Do you know what his name is?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ:We do, actually.
RODAY RODRIGUEZ:It was on the crib.
HILL:Oh right!
I forgot about that.
But as of right this second, Baby Gus does have a first, middle, and last name.
Did you know from the beginning that you wanted him to get away?
RODAY RODRIGUEZ:Pretty early.
It was a seed that we were pretty sure we wanted to plant in the writing stages.
It was just a matter of, how do we want do it?
You gotta have the added scene at the end.
You gotta have that pineapple hanging out there.
We have lots of ideas of where we want to take them.
We have very specific ideas about the next step of this journey.
And we also have some pretty good ideas about what happens two or three movies down the line.
