Posted in: Netflix, TV | Tagged: Amanda Burrell, Christian Convery, exclusive, interview, jeff lemire, netflix, nonso anozie, Susan Downey, sweet tooth

Sweet Tooth EPs on Creating "Storybook Dystopia" for Netflix & More

Netflix's Sweet Tooth EPs Susan Downey and Amanda Burrell spoke with Bleeding Cool about the final season, Gus' journey, and much more.

When Sweet Tooth executive producers Susan Downey & Amanda Burrell and showrunner Jim Mickle set to adapt Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth as a Netflix series, there were goals they wanted to establish to even the original dystopian story the comic from its darker tones but retain the core of the spirit of the comic. The story follows Gus (Christian Convery), a human-deer hybrid, who sets on his journey to find his mother, Birdie (Amy Seimetz). Along the way, he gains traveling companions in Jeppard (Nonso Anozie), Becky (Stefania LaVie Owen), and Wendy (Naledi Murray), who help him as they also try to uncover the mysterious origins of the deadly Sick traveling through the Alaskan wilderness. Downey and Burrell spoke to Bleeding Cool about the future of the series, working with Lemire on the adaptation, season three challenges, Convery's growth, and more.

Sweet Tooth: Braving the Three-Season Journey

Bleeding Cool: When it came to the third season of Sweet Tooth, was it always planned to be a three-season journey, or are there possibilities to continue the story beyond that?

Burrell: When we pitched the show, Jim [Mickle] had a clear sense of a season two and a season three. After our first season aired, we were ordered for a seasons two and three, Netflix was like, "We feel like we want to have a lot of conclusions at the end of the third season so let's wrap it up." That felt like an opportunity for us, so we were excited about it, and we were able to land a lot of these story conclusions because of it.

With the darker tone of the comics. Was it something that was difficult to change when initially conceiving the series with certain characters & events? With creator Jeff [Lemire] as a series consultant, were there any dramatic differences compared to the comic?

Downey: It has a very different tone than the comics, which are much darker and bleaker. Oddly, it wasn't difficult to make that shift because there are core things in the comic book that remain. There's the journey that Gus is going on; there's the concept of the Sick. Ultimately, for us, along with Jeff Lemire, we were all at a place. Remember, this was pre-pandemic, where we still wanted to put something out there that played around with the concept of family, otherness, and all of that, but we wanted to do it with a sense of hope. We didn't want to come at it from a dark place. We are creating what we call the "Storybook-kind of dystopia." We wanted to make sure that we were creating an environment that we wanted to go to, that we wanted to spend time that audiences would want to return to and Jeff was very on board. He also had this comic book when we started. It was already ten years old at that point, and Jeff, as a human, had evolved. He has a child named Gus, and he was in a different place, so he was very much on board with us, sticking to certain principles that are found in the source material but creating a world that was more inviting.

What were the biggest challenges coming into season three, and what did you want to accomplish, and did you feel like you accomplished those goals?

Burrell: We're very happy with the season. It's always about the amount of storytelling you want to fit in and the journey you want this character, who we love so deeply, to go on and then also wrapping it all up in the end in a satisfying way. That was probably the biggest challenge.

Downey: The biggest challenge was figuring out what that face-off in the cave was going to be, to be perfectly honest. There were a lot of incredible ideas evolved in facing that challenge, including revisiting Pubba (Will Forte) and Gus taking a moment because for the first time, he verbalized such a disdain for humanity's capabilities and then has to take a moment to reorient and figure out what matters to him and getting all of that right, both from a storytelling performance and character visualization. All of that was difficult because what happens in that cave is what we've been building to and determines what comes after.

Can you break down Christian's growth as an actor and how he evolved with the character of Gus throughout the series?

Burrell: When we met him and cast the pilot, he was eight, about to be nine. He was a really young little boy. He was always so bright, professional, and took everything very seriously, but he was that naive little Gus. Over the course of this, it mirrored the coming-of-age journey for Gus. It was in the beginning. It was him learning from all of us. It was a lot of that little boy in that process. In season two, he got to find his peers and the other hybrids deep in his relationships with his friends, and they became important. In the final season, we got to access all of his deep wells of emotion and his ability to read and understand the nuanced material, evolution, and darkness, which he was ready to dig into. It all mirrored his journey in a big way.

Downey: What we say about it is over the course of the three seasons, we've watched a truncated timeline of Gus going from being a child to an adult. Each season marks a different evolution… well, a different stage in that journey.

What creative freedom has a platform like Netflix provided you wouldn't have gotten on another on cable or broadcast?

Downey: It's so hard to know because Netflix has been such an incredible partner on this. They got this show from the jump, and they've been so supportive. The way that they guided us through the development of the three seasons and it's hard to imagine it anywhere else. I would hope that great programming would find an audience regardless of where it landed.

Burrell: They also were excited about the opportunity of having a family sit down and watch it together, which they didn't want to be in a particular box. They wanted remote viewing with this, and I think Netflix is specifically prime for that. It feels like it was the right home, and we're really grateful.

Season three of Sweet Tooth, which also stars Adeel Akhtar, Rosalind Chao, Kelly Marie Tran, Cara Gee, and Ayazhan Dalabayeva, premieres June 6th on Netflix.

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