In the latest issue of Details magazine, Carrie Brownstein shares 20 behind-the-scenes photos captured during the filming of Portlandia, which begins its second season in January.
Here are a couple of my favorites, with captions written by Brownstein.
The photo above:
“This is our core local cast. We get a lot of great guest stars, but we’re super proud of and really inspired by the local talent in Portland. The woman standing in between me and Fred — Ellen Bloodworth — she’s for real. A real character. We have a fantastic casting director named Simon Max Hill, and he’s great at working with local talent agencies. He draws from this pool of interesting people we’d want to hang out with anyway. We’re trying to cast the whole city so no one feels left out. That’s how inclusive we are.”
“Fred and I are playing ourselves. There’s been a police scandal, and the mayor of Portland asks us to redesign the city’s cop uniforms so the cops seem more friendly and accessible. We go a little over the top and design something that looks like we should be in the band Kraftwerk or some European electronic duo. Here, we’re taking a break from policing the skate park.”
“I went to a liberal-arts college and saw a lot of white people with dreadlocks. Putting that wig on for me was really just my way of coming to terms with white hippies. Here, Fred and I are playing “gutter punks,” and we’re panhandling in Portland. We embraced this pretty hard and immediately formed a drum circle on the street. I think once you’re wearing these outfits, the genetic makeup changes in your body—then a bucket appears and you just start drumming.”
See the rest of Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia photo collection in Details.