VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Stephen Moyer On Finding ‘Funny & Dark’ Sides Of Women’s Stories On ‘Flack’

Director Stephen Moyer discussed how his Amazon Prime Video series Flack tells women’s stories that are “quite funny and dark” in his new uInterview.

The series follows Robyn, a public relations consultant played by Anna Paquin (who’s married to Moyer in real life). Robyn is in charge of mitigating celebrity scandals but often finds herself unable to avoid causing scandals in her own life. Moyer said that his inspiration while working on Flack comes from the “incredibly strong” quality of current TV shows.

“The quality of what people are doing, and the scraping away at the surface of humanity that’s going on is incredibly deep and detailed right now,” Moyer told uInterview Founder Erik Meers. “And so our show was always we wanted to talk about women. We wanted to talk about women in the world and how world women dealing with the everyday complexity of the world.

“What that means when you’re you know not that we have this necessarily so much, we do with Ruth, Genevieve [Angelson]’s character, but talking about the sort of weight that is put on a woman in terms of when she has children, but still needing to be beautiful, and a great mum, and still working and you’re not allowed to be at home and be a mum because it’s not seen to be enough. So how do we deal with all of that?”

The all-female leading cast allows the series to show how women can build each other up or tear each other down.

“A lot of these things that happen, even though we’ve got this giant patriarchy, is brought on by other women you know and what they think of other women and the standards that they hold and the way that the expectations that they put on each other.”

Moyer said he wants to tell these stories in a way that’s “complicated and difficult and dark and talking about addiction, but it’s really funny. And also talking about stuff where the glossy side of celebrity is like scraped away and we see that the people underneath are human as well. … Something I use a lot is you know like a swan on the surface and yet the feet are paddling along underneath and you don’t see that aspect of it and that’s kind of who Robyn is.”

“And Martha coming in this year, Martha Plimpton, who plays Anna’s mum, was really interested in sort of – even though she came in for one episode – her and Anna talked extensively about who Robyn was because of Clara’s [troubled] you know as a human and how Robyn becomes the person she is. And representing that on camera and making it difficult for people to watch. It’s not supposed to be easy. We’re not interested in making it easy. It’s not just a comedy, it’s a dramatic piece of work that happens to be quite funny and dark.”

Watch Flack on Amazon Prime Video. Check out the Season 2 trailer below.