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Watch The Minds Behind Peacock's Twisted Metal Break Down the Show...While Playing Twisted Metal
The stars and creator of the new Peacock genre comedy discuss what it was like to create mayhem.
How do you bring the mayhem of Twisted Metal to the screen? That's what creator/showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith and stars Anthony Mackie and Stephanie Beatriz set out to discover when they launched production on the upcoming Peacock original series. Now, in a new featurette, they're breaking down how it all came together...while playing a little Twisted Metal themselves.
On Thursday, Peacock dropped a new (pre-recorded back in January, ahead of both the writers and actors strikes, which remain ongoing) look at the series based on the beloved video game franchise of the same name, which features Smith, Mackie, and Beatriz all just hanging out and playing some Twisted Metal, digging back into the classic Playstation era of the game while discussing how they made the show. Right away, two things are very clear: Smith has played a lot of Twisted Metal and is very good at blowing Mackie to pieces, and this show was a blast to get made.
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As the trio power through their gaming session, they discuss everything from character development to production design to what it was like to get behind the wheel in some real-life Twisted Metal scenarios. Check out the video below:
There are a lot of interesting tidbits in this featurette, but one of the best is Smith's breakdown of why the show' post-apocalyptic world is also frozen in time around the turn of millennium. According to the showrunner, the world basically ended in 2002, which explains why things like malls, CDs, and really old mobile phones are still precious commodities out in the wasteland. For Mackie, whose favorite activity used to be driving around blasting his CD collection, that worked out just fine.
And yes, that's really Mackie driving in a lot of the show's key moments. During the game, he reminisced that he actually did get to drive his character John Doe's car through a mall, reach out the window, and snag a pair of Foot Locker shoes from a display case on his way through. Then there's Beatriz, who wasn't a natural driver, and had to learn to drive stick "in 15 minutes" for a single scene in which she has to get behind the wheel.
If it all sounds like mayhem, that's because it is, but in a fun way. The fun begins when Twisted Metal hosts its San Diego Comic-Con world premiere at 10:00 p.m. Pacific tonight. All 10 episodes of the show's first season will then drop one week from today, July 27, only on Peacock.
