LOS ANGELES -- Playing dead is easy, according to actor Zach Woods.
“I’ve underplayed things probably to the point of tedium in so many projects, this is just taking it a little bit further,” he explains. “I just imagine myself in hell.”
The assignment: Playing the victim in the second season of “The Afterparty.”
Woods is the groom at a posh wedding who doesn’t seem to have a clearcut enemy and yet winds up dead.
In the show’s 10 episodes, Woods interacts with various family members and guests. Several have a reason to want him dead but, who did it?
That’s the question a character from the first season -- Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) -- hopes to answer.
In the first season, she sussed out who was responsible for the death of pop star Xavier at a high school reunion afterparty. Among the suspects: Aniq Adjaye (Sam Richardson), an escape room designer, and Zoe Zhu (Zoe Chao), his high school crush. Conveniently, both happen to be at the wedding, too.
Created by Christopher Miller, “The Afterparty” is told from a different character’s perspective in each episode. Additionally, those episodes suggest the work of famous directors.
In Season Two, there’s a little Wes Anderson here, a little Alfred Hitchcock there.
“It all comes down to the characters and what their story and what their point of view is,” Miller says. “It’s sort of this weird chicken and egg thing where you’re figuring out how each character can tell a distinct story in a distinct style.”
Anna Konkle, who’s featured in the Wes Anderson indie edition, says she was intimidated coming into the series. “There was something about doing my own work where it was like if I disappoint someone, it’s me,” the co-creator of “PEN15” says. “Everyone here is brilliant.”
Also in Season Two: John Cho, Paul Walter Hauser, Ken Jeong, Poppy Liu, Elizabeth Perkins, Jack Whitehall and Vivian Wu.
Whitehall, a British comedian, says he was so awed by his co-stars, directors and writers, “I’ve never felt more stupid than when I did ‘The Afterparty.’ It’s so complex and so brilliantly constructed.”
To make sure the actors had a chance to tweak their performances in each episode, they were given the scripts before shooting began. “With this type of show, the whole season has to be fully formed and crafted before you can start shooting a single thing,” Miller says. “You’re seeing the same moments from multiple points of view and the whole thing has to work together like a little jewel box.”
Cho says he leaned on the actors and directors to help him keep the details in mind. “It was just really tough, so I felt very fortunate that it was a good relationship because I leaned on it so much more than is typical.”
Because the episode styles differed, the actors had to determine how broadly they should play their characters. “Every aspect of it is like a complicated Jenga tower,” Miller says. “If you pull one little thing out the whole thing crumbles.”
Commitment, Hauser says, is essential. “That kind of builds a certain type of comedy energy that can be really successful.”
An Emmy nominee for “Black Bird,” Hauser says he always wanted to be part of a murder mystery. “But I didn’t want to disappoint.” Actors like Konkle, he says, were incredible with improvisation. “This woman never disappointed. Every time she did an improv or had like a line-o-rama, we were all off camera stabbing ourselves trying not to laugh because she’s a really, really great improviser.”
Different genres required different sensibilities, Richardson says. “You want to bring a different energy to whatever take you do. So there’s a kind of playfulness that we all got to bring to the script.”
Woods, however, has a different take: “If you have incredibly limited range, you don’t have to make those kinds of difficult decisions.”
“The Afterparty” airs on AppleTV+.
