The Catch sucked me in during season one with the amazing love story and action and of course, the fashion. Love, Action, and Fashion….check, check, check! It is so awesome that Disney brought me back to interview Sonya Walger and Allan Heinberg. It was a geeking out moment for me meeting Allan Heinberg. He has worked on some of my favorite shows – are you ready for this list!? – Sex and the City, Gilmore Girls, and Scandal! This list is filled with fashionable and strong willed woman! It is amazing to see him do the same thing with The Catch. I am very excited to share my interview with Allan and Sonya!
Alice & Margo Relationship
Sonya Wagner, “Margot is having to go to Alice and work for her, and from season one, there was that whole thing- everything with Ben.” Now Margot hires Alice to work for her. “It’s really fun is that Alice and Margot discover they have perhaps more in common than they thought, and there’s a begrudging mutual respect while still there’s a lot of wariness because Margot is Margot so you wanna be careful of that. That was one of the things- those beautiful therapy scenes that Allan wrote us in season one. What I think was so lovely there was that Margot had this moment of realizing they, they were both betrayed by the same guy. They actually have all this common ground and moves into season two where I think they realize they’re both strong, empowered, intelligent women who can go toe-to-toe, and neither one is gonna stand down. Then when they realize neither one is gonna stand down, then they have to work together. I love the relationship. I obviously just love doing scenes with Mireille, so it was fun.”
Credit/Caption: (ABC/Bob D’Amico)
ABC’s “The Catch” stars Sonya Walger as Margot.
What’s ‘The Catch’?
The Catch was reshot and recast after the first pilot did not work. The new creator Allan Heinberg discusses what the catch means to him. “For me, before I came onboard, a version of the show already existed and it was a reference to Alice catching Ben. That was her drive. But, for me, it was about love, like, you can’t have it all, there’s always gonna be a catch. The guy you fall in love with who turns out to be your soulmate- it’s also the guy who stole all of your money and is a career criminal. In love, it’s never the whole fantasy. There’s always something pulling you back down to Earth. As much as you want to be fully, I think a lot of us look at love as an escape from our daily lives. The catch is what real love is, is something less romantic and a lot harder to achieve. That’s the we’ve been proceeding – there’s always a catch with these relationships and, how do you work it through?”
Credit/Caption: (ABC/Richard Cartwright)
PETER KRAUSE, MIREILLE ENOS
Allan Heinberg has been with Shondaland for about ten years. He has worked on Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. He talks about his inspiration for the first episode of The Catch. He used referenced the Thomas Crown Affair. This is one of my favorite movies of all time and I totally pick up on it right away. That is how I described the show to my husband. Mireille Enos and Petere Krause are definitely Rene Russo and Pierce Brosnan! The clothes and the writing are perfection!
Credit/Caption: (ABC/Image Group LA)
Allan Heinberg is the Showrunner and
Executive Producer of ABC’s “The Catch.”
Allan Heinberg confirms it for me, “We referenced the Thomas Crown Affair in the pilot; we referenced Ernst Lubitsch called Trouble in Paradise in episodes two, three, and four. Remember the princess who comes in, and Ben befriends her – that’s all a steal from Trouble in Paradise which is one of the best movies ever made. I’m a pop culture junkie, so I try to put as many Easter eggs as possible. No ‘Lost’ references yet.”
The Catch Fashion
Sonya Walger tells us about how much she loves the fashion for the show. “It’s my favorite thing is going in for a wardrobe fitting, and that is not usually the case. Usually, you go to wardrobe fittings and there’s a tired lady who’s like, hi, we don’t do black on this show, so here are the fairy pantsuits. That’s usually what wardrobe is like. When you go in with Peggy, and there’s just a rack of the most exquisite dresses.” We interviewed Peggy last year. Read the interview with Costumer Designer, Peggy Schnitzer here.
“Peggy is wonderful, and has just the best eye, and this is the fun of doing season two of the show is, she now knows my body better than I do, so the dresses are not ones that I would pick. I’m the mother of two and I’m lucky to get dressed in the morning, so just to be zipped into a thing with heels, and the hair, and it’s glorious. It just means by the time I’ve been through the works, Margot’s there. An enormous part of being a character is having the right look, jewelry, hair, and makeup. It’s like zipping on a suit and then half your work is done.”
Credit/Caption: (ABC/Richard Cartwright) ROSALIND CHAO, JOHN SIMM, ABRAHAM LIM
Credit/Caption: (ABC/Richard Cartwright)
ROSALIND CHAO, JOHN SIMM, ABRAHAM LIM
Allan talks about pushing the envelope with fashion. “I have to say, the, the show is crazy in like a great way, but it makes it really fun wardrobe wise because, tonight they are going to a high-stakes underground casino or the Barbara Streisand outfit that you wore to the bank with the bob wig. She walks in as Barbara Streisand and I’m like, can we get away with this? Is it too much with the glasses and the lips? No, it’s not too much. It’s fine. Sex in the City was a bit like this, too, where we just kept pushing and pushing. Peggy has such a clear sense of the actor and the character, that it just is a delight. One time Gina Torres wears a terrible coat. In episode six or seven, but it’s supposed to be terrible, but I was like, just maybe too horrible. You’ll know what I’m talking about. But that was the one time in two seasons where I was like, does it really have to be on television? Yes. Otherwise, perfect.
New Character Played by Gina Torres
Gina Torres is a new character in season 2 of The Catch. I nearly jumped for joy when I saw her. She is from a beloved show of mine, Firefly. The show only lasted one season, but was so beloved by fans that they made a movie Serenity. Gina played Alan Tudyk’s wife. If you like Sci-Fi, you must see this!
Sonya chimed in on how much she love Gina. “She’s in every episode. Yeah. She’s fantastic. And she can wear clothes like nobody’s business.”
Credit/Caption: (ABC/Richard Cartwright)
JOHN SIMM, GINA TORRES
Heroes Vs. Villains
Allan talks about Heroes vs. Villains. “It is interesting on the show is that the heroes and villains are so clearly drawn at the front of it, right? He’s a bad guy who took all for money. She’s someone who was victimized because she fell in love, and then it shifts so quickly so that even someone like Margot Bishop who kills people for a living- by her own admission becomes someone you actually feel for, and root for. That’s the beauty of it.”
“At the first lunch with Sonya, she said what if the way that Alice and Margot finally meet is that Margot is pretending to be Alice’s therapist? I was like, I don’t know how to do that right now, but that is the best idea I’ve ever heard. So I came back to the writer’s room with that idea, and they were all really eager for it to be in, like, episode two or episode three. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. At the lunch, we talked a lot about the relationship between Judi Dench and James Bond. I was really writing for Pete and for Sonya and, and the previous version, they were sort of being put into something that had already existed. And this was me as a fan saying, I want you with your smartest, most British, and most crafty. Margot’s role is interesting because she’s barely in the pilot. She’s got Two scenes. You just have to trust me on this- this becomes your story. Your family becomes a huge part of what this is. The benefactor is gonna be either your mother or your brother, and trust me, it will develop. Sure enough by episode two, three, four, you just start to see it shift and grow so that it really in some ways becomes as much Margot’s show as anybody’s show.”
Have you watched The Catch yet?
The Catch airs Thursdays at 10/9c on the ABC Television Network!
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Thank so much to ABC for this behind the amazing interviews and previews of the show.
You’re doing such a positive type of content. Hope that you will continue doing this!