http://www.indiewire.com/2018/06/atlanta-bibby-nadine-robert-powell-gail-bean-emmys-fx-1201976439/
Robert S. Powell and Gail Bean reveal the stories behind guest-starring on the FX comedy.
Hanh Nguyen
Robert S. Powell and Gail Bean, “Atlanta”
FX
“Atlanta’s” oddball characters drive the series, and in its second season, new faces came along to alternately inspire and challenge the show’s core group of friends. These guest stars were often tasked with carrying the bulk of the humor in the scene, which quickly made them fan favorites.
From a flibbertigibbet barber to the best friend who can’t handle being high, these characters managed to become scene stealers in Season 2. IndieWire spoke with Robert S. Powell III and Gail Bean, who revealed how they brought to life their colorful characters Bibby and Nadine, respectively.
Blindsided by Bibby
Veteran stand-up comedian Robert S. Powell III had never acted in his life and was completely thrown for a loop when he realized that “Atlanta” wasn’t just giving him a background part but had created a whole episode in which he carried most of the dialogue. Even more intimidating, he only discovered this fact when he received the script for “Barbershop” two hours before he was supposed to start filming.
“When I first got the part, I was under the impression that I was going to be an extra in the barbershop scene,” said Powell. “I did not know that Bibby existed until 7 a.m. on my first shoot day. And I had to shoot at 9 a.m. I had never seen the script. I didn’t know who Bibby was.”
This was no minor lapse in communication, but a major SNAFU that caused the comedian massive anxiety.
“I had a real-life panic attack,” he revealed. “I let go of my manager who forgot to send me the script. I actually fired him, I fired my agency. I left because of this. I really thought it was unprofessional. They thought they had been sending me the scripts but what they had been sending me was this travel PDF that they thought the script was attached to.”
Brian Tyree Henry and Robert S. Powell III, “Atlanta”
Guy D'Alema/FX
And even though Powell had been receiving these documents, he never realized that he was really missing scripts because he didn’t expect to have any real lines.
“I was thinking I was going to be an extra in a barbershop scene; how many jokes could I have on this show? This Golden Globe, Emmy-winning show?” he said. “I can’t have that much of a say to begin with seeing that I’m not an actor and this is my first time ever acting, this is my first time ever being on a television set in my life. I can’t have much to say. But maybe that’s why my people didn’t send it to me.
“And when I get there, they told me, ‘We got you a new trailer.’ I’m like, ‘Why the hell would an extra need a new trailer? What would I need a new trailer for?’ I didn’t think none of that either because I’m new and I’ve never been on TV before. And then when they brought the script and how the day was going to go, yeah it was a bit of an ordeal. But it worked out.”
Despite the shock, Powell rallied. “I started cramming as much as possible. I decided to take this almost shot-by-shot and try to memorize as much as possible,” he said. “I hid notes around the set for myself, things of that nature. I just tried to start cramming real hard and try to not let the people know who had entrusted me with the entire episode that I did not know what I was doing. So my goal, honest to god, was just trick them all day.”
A Natural Fit for Nadine
Gail Bean, who has appeared on “Chicago PD” and “Insecure,” had a far more straightforward experience landing her role. She felt it was her destiny to play Nadine, one of the friends who goes with Van (Zazie Beetz) to a house party at Drake’s house in the episode “Champagne Papi.”
“When I got the email for the audition invitation, I immediately was like, ‘Oh this is me,’” said Bean. “It read, ‘A nice girl, a bit of a tease. While her friends see her as naive, Nadine can hold her own in any social situation. She’s a bit on edge from work-related problems… And unlike all the other girls who ooze sexuality, she offers friendship and relationship advice to men around her.’ Now that’s me in real life. I have a lot more friends, I have five older brothers, I’m the only girl. So I’m extremely comfortable around guys in a homegirl way. I don’t use the whole sexuality thing.”
Gail Bean, Adriyan Rae, Zazie Beetz, and Danielle Deadwyler, “Atlanta”
FX
For her audition, Bean did two scenes that could have taken place at the party.
“It was just me in line at the bathroom and somebody was cutting in and bumping into us, and I said something, but Zazie’s character Van is the one who got a little hostile,” she said. “I believe the second scene I did for the audition was… It was a whole weird thing where I was talking to Young Thug, and he was having a situation with one of his females and I was supposed to be giving him advice on how to handle it. And then Darius shows up, of course, like he always does and I’m like, how does he know Young Thug, and he’s like, ‘Oh, he was my ride for the party.’”
Bean is from Atlanta originally but moved to Los Angeles to act, which makes appearing in “Atlanta” that much sweeter.
“I never shot anything in Atlanta [before this],” she said. “When I left, a lot of people said, ‘You never made it. Why would you move to LA? It’s much bigger. If you didn’t make it here, what makes you think you can make it in LA?’ So it was really nice to go where the dream started and be with my family. If that’s going to be my first project that I shoot at home, why not be the award-winning ‘Atlanta,’ which is true to the city?”
Becoming Bibby
In “Barbershop,” Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) goes in to get his hair cut by Bibby (Powell), who seems to be doing 10 things at once, and none of them are actually his job. He’s committed himself to so many tasks, in fact, that he has to take Alfred along with him on his errands around town before finally ending back up at the barbershop hours later.
Even though Powell didn’t know he was playing Bibby at first, the character was familiar to him because of his own personal experiences. The comedian estimates that he’s spent four to five hours in the chair before for a cut that should only take 15 minutes.
“My barber was almost as bad as Bibby. He’d sit down and eat a whole barbecue plate in the middle of cutting my hair,” said Powell. “I’ve had barbers leave and come back in the middle of cutting my hair. Most African American barbershop experiences you need to be prepared to be there for four hours and do what you need to do. Your haircut is between 8-12, it’s like cable [installation] or waiting on the gas people.”
Powell based his performance of Bibby on several people, including one person close to him that he even names in the episode.
“My impression of Bibby was four or five friends of mine that I just crammed together that always needed to be doing one thing but couldn’t focus on that and always had seven or eight balls in the air at one time,” he said. “They had so much going on that they would give you anxiety. You don’t have going on what they had going on but it would still make you uncomfortable for you to even think about. So I tried to convey that as much as possible.
“The best friend of mine, who has since passed in a motorcycle accident, he was almost exactly like Bibby,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I say his name at the end. If you remember the last scene when I get out of the truck and I’m walking up the stairs and my phone rings and I say, ‘Smooth, I can be right there,’ that’s my friend that died in the motorcycle accident.”
Since Powell hadn’t acted before, he requested very specific instructions from Donald Glover, who directed the episode. “At one point, I even had to ask Donald, ‘Show me the face that you want me to make that I’m not doing right now,’” he said. “So he had to boil it down sometimes to that level for me, but he did it, and it worked out. It was fantastic. And I can tell how well or how bad I did based on how fast he got to me during the cut. If it was really bad, he got to me very fast.”
Despite his lack of experience, Powell was trusted to do some improv after he had done the scenes as written for a few takes. His ad-libs included Bibby’s physical mannerisms, such as when he physically leans on Alfred’s head at one point while talking on the phone.
“I didn’t ask [Henry]. It was just impromptu,” Powell said. “I started to ask him but I needed the reaction from him that I wanted to get so I didn’t tell him at all. We had done it the correct way like nine or 10 times before I started doing things of that nature. There’s another time that I included something like that too, at the very end where I’m playing with this little scruffy thing on this guy’s head that they included in there. I didn’t think that was going to be in the shot. I was just doing that to make the crew laugh on the set but that wound up in the thing.”
Inebriating Nadine
Amy Seimetz directed “Champagne Papi” and also encouraged the actors to improvise in certain situations. The opening scene that introduces the viewers to Van’s friends relied heavily on what came naturally to the actresses.
“That entire opening scene, about 85 percent of that is improv,” said Bean. “[Seimetz] was like, ‘I just love it… Talk like you guys would talk.’ So she allowed us to bring a lot of ourselves to it. It just worked. She wanted us to be there and have fun. And that’s what we did.”
Something that didn’t come naturally to Bean, however, was acting high. In the episode, Nadine is pressured into consuming a gummy edible at the party. Not used to taking any sort of substances, she immediately shows signs of being high and unable to deal with the sensation. Her resulting paranoid prompts her to call the police to report that she’s “dying.”
“I’m not a smoker. I’ve tried it a couple of times, but have never done edibles before in my life,” said Bean. “So I started asking people, “What is it with edibles? Is it the same as smoking weed?’ Everybody’s like, ‘No, it’s a completely different high.’ In regards to the seriousness of the incident, like calling the police and thinking I was going to die, I took those experiences from what other people told me, especially from what Zazie told me. She’s like, ‘You see a window. It’s like huh, I should jump out of it.’”
Bean also directly based her mannerisms while high on a friend of hers.
“One of my sorority sisters, she smokes,” she said. “I used to ask her every time I’d see her, I’d say, ‘bytch, you high? Are you high?’ And she’d always say yes. So I really took a lot of how she would move her body — my character’s body movements and [the heavy] lids, my eyes, my slowness.”
Nadine ends up hanging out with Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) by the pool, where they discuss philosophy and how life might just be a simulation.
“We talked a little bit but not anything related to the scene, to be honest. We talked about his tattoos, we talked about where he’s from, where I’m from. We talked about regular life to make that bond and that chemistry,” she said. “In the scene, he went with me, I went with him in regard to wherever he went with the character,”
Life After Bibby and Nadine
Although Powell hopes that Bibby might return to “Atlanta” someday, he’s been busy with his stand-up and will appear in a stand-up special executive produced by Norman Lear. Meanwhile, the comedian is just happy that Bibby has made such an impression on the audience.
“Everybody says that they know Bibby, that Bibby is their uncle, their cousin, their brother, their daddy. Even women, even beauticians. I have met a thousand Bibbys,” he said. “People have called me requesting photos to go up in their beauty shops and barbershops, to give like Bibby Awards, if you steal somebody off or you did something that’s so bad. These are real requests.”
As for Nadine, on multiple occasions, Glover had mentioned that she could return to the show. Bean already has ideas about what her character could do.
“If I had my choice I would explore Nadine and Darius’ relationship, and Nadine and Van because now we’re starting to see that Van has come into her own,” she said. “Also, we’ve only seen intoxicated Nadine, inebriated Nadine. What is she like when she’s not on drugs? What is she like around guys? As one of Van’s close friends, what does Earn think of her?”
In the meantime, Bean has been working. She appears in Comedy Central’s “Detroiters,” which returns on Thursday, June 21, and in FX’s “Snowfall,” which returns for its second season on July 19.
Robert S. Powell and Gail Bean reveal the stories behind guest-starring on the FX comedy.
Hanh Nguyen
Robert S. Powell and Gail Bean, “Atlanta”
FX
“Atlanta’s” oddball characters drive the series, and in its second season, new faces came along to alternately inspire and challenge the show’s core group of friends. These guest stars were often tasked with carrying the bulk of the humor in the scene, which quickly made them fan favorites.
From a flibbertigibbet barber to the best friend who can’t handle being high, these characters managed to become scene stealers in Season 2. IndieWire spoke with Robert S. Powell III and Gail Bean, who revealed how they brought to life their colorful characters Bibby and Nadine, respectively.
Blindsided by Bibby
Veteran stand-up comedian Robert S. Powell III had never acted in his life and was completely thrown for a loop when he realized that “Atlanta” wasn’t just giving him a background part but had created a whole episode in which he carried most of the dialogue. Even more intimidating, he only discovered this fact when he received the script for “Barbershop” two hours before he was supposed to start filming.
“When I first got the part, I was under the impression that I was going to be an extra in the barbershop scene,” said Powell. “I did not know that Bibby existed until 7 a.m. on my first shoot day. And I had to shoot at 9 a.m. I had never seen the script. I didn’t know who Bibby was.”
This was no minor lapse in communication, but a major SNAFU that caused the comedian massive anxiety.
“I had a real-life panic attack,” he revealed. “I let go of my manager who forgot to send me the script. I actually fired him, I fired my agency. I left because of this. I really thought it was unprofessional. They thought they had been sending me the scripts but what they had been sending me was this travel PDF that they thought the script was attached to.”
Brian Tyree Henry and Robert S. Powell III, “Atlanta”
Guy D'Alema/FX
And even though Powell had been receiving these documents, he never realized that he was really missing scripts because he didn’t expect to have any real lines.
“I was thinking I was going to be an extra in a barbershop scene; how many jokes could I have on this show? This Golden Globe, Emmy-winning show?” he said. “I can’t have that much of a say to begin with seeing that I’m not an actor and this is my first time ever acting, this is my first time ever being on a television set in my life. I can’t have much to say. But maybe that’s why my people didn’t send it to me.
“And when I get there, they told me, ‘We got you a new trailer.’ I’m like, ‘Why the hell would an extra need a new trailer? What would I need a new trailer for?’ I didn’t think none of that either because I’m new and I’ve never been on TV before. And then when they brought the script and how the day was going to go, yeah it was a bit of an ordeal. But it worked out.”
Despite the shock, Powell rallied. “I started cramming as much as possible. I decided to take this almost shot-by-shot and try to memorize as much as possible,” he said. “I hid notes around the set for myself, things of that nature. I just tried to start cramming real hard and try to not let the people know who had entrusted me with the entire episode that I did not know what I was doing. So my goal, honest to god, was just trick them all day.”
A Natural Fit for Nadine
Gail Bean, who has appeared on “Chicago PD” and “Insecure,” had a far more straightforward experience landing her role. She felt it was her destiny to play Nadine, one of the friends who goes with Van (Zazie Beetz) to a house party at Drake’s house in the episode “Champagne Papi.”
“When I got the email for the audition invitation, I immediately was like, ‘Oh this is me,’” said Bean. “It read, ‘A nice girl, a bit of a tease. While her friends see her as naive, Nadine can hold her own in any social situation. She’s a bit on edge from work-related problems… And unlike all the other girls who ooze sexuality, she offers friendship and relationship advice to men around her.’ Now that’s me in real life. I have a lot more friends, I have five older brothers, I’m the only girl. So I’m extremely comfortable around guys in a homegirl way. I don’t use the whole sexuality thing.”
Gail Bean, Adriyan Rae, Zazie Beetz, and Danielle Deadwyler, “Atlanta”
FX
For her audition, Bean did two scenes that could have taken place at the party.
“It was just me in line at the bathroom and somebody was cutting in and bumping into us, and I said something, but Zazie’s character Van is the one who got a little hostile,” she said. “I believe the second scene I did for the audition was… It was a whole weird thing where I was talking to Young Thug, and he was having a situation with one of his females and I was supposed to be giving him advice on how to handle it. And then Darius shows up, of course, like he always does and I’m like, how does he know Young Thug, and he’s like, ‘Oh, he was my ride for the party.’”
Bean is from Atlanta originally but moved to Los Angeles to act, which makes appearing in “Atlanta” that much sweeter.
“I never shot anything in Atlanta [before this],” she said. “When I left, a lot of people said, ‘You never made it. Why would you move to LA? It’s much bigger. If you didn’t make it here, what makes you think you can make it in LA?’ So it was really nice to go where the dream started and be with my family. If that’s going to be my first project that I shoot at home, why not be the award-winning ‘Atlanta,’ which is true to the city?”
Becoming Bibby
In “Barbershop,” Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) goes in to get his hair cut by Bibby (Powell), who seems to be doing 10 things at once, and none of them are actually his job. He’s committed himself to so many tasks, in fact, that he has to take Alfred along with him on his errands around town before finally ending back up at the barbershop hours later.
Even though Powell didn’t know he was playing Bibby at first, the character was familiar to him because of his own personal experiences. The comedian estimates that he’s spent four to five hours in the chair before for a cut that should only take 15 minutes.
“My barber was almost as bad as Bibby. He’d sit down and eat a whole barbecue plate in the middle of cutting my hair,” said Powell. “I’ve had barbers leave and come back in the middle of cutting my hair. Most African American barbershop experiences you need to be prepared to be there for four hours and do what you need to do. Your haircut is between 8-12, it’s like cable [installation] or waiting on the gas people.”
Powell based his performance of Bibby on several people, including one person close to him that he even names in the episode.
“My impression of Bibby was four or five friends of mine that I just crammed together that always needed to be doing one thing but couldn’t focus on that and always had seven or eight balls in the air at one time,” he said. “They had so much going on that they would give you anxiety. You don’t have going on what they had going on but it would still make you uncomfortable for you to even think about. So I tried to convey that as much as possible.
“The best friend of mine, who has since passed in a motorcycle accident, he was almost exactly like Bibby,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I say his name at the end. If you remember the last scene when I get out of the truck and I’m walking up the stairs and my phone rings and I say, ‘Smooth, I can be right there,’ that’s my friend that died in the motorcycle accident.”
Since Powell hadn’t acted before, he requested very specific instructions from Donald Glover, who directed the episode. “At one point, I even had to ask Donald, ‘Show me the face that you want me to make that I’m not doing right now,’” he said. “So he had to boil it down sometimes to that level for me, but he did it, and it worked out. It was fantastic. And I can tell how well or how bad I did based on how fast he got to me during the cut. If it was really bad, he got to me very fast.”
Despite his lack of experience, Powell was trusted to do some improv after he had done the scenes as written for a few takes. His ad-libs included Bibby’s physical mannerisms, such as when he physically leans on Alfred’s head at one point while talking on the phone.
“I didn’t ask [Henry]. It was just impromptu,” Powell said. “I started to ask him but I needed the reaction from him that I wanted to get so I didn’t tell him at all. We had done it the correct way like nine or 10 times before I started doing things of that nature. There’s another time that I included something like that too, at the very end where I’m playing with this little scruffy thing on this guy’s head that they included in there. I didn’t think that was going to be in the shot. I was just doing that to make the crew laugh on the set but that wound up in the thing.”
Inebriating Nadine
Amy Seimetz directed “Champagne Papi” and also encouraged the actors to improvise in certain situations. The opening scene that introduces the viewers to Van’s friends relied heavily on what came naturally to the actresses.
“That entire opening scene, about 85 percent of that is improv,” said Bean. “[Seimetz] was like, ‘I just love it… Talk like you guys would talk.’ So she allowed us to bring a lot of ourselves to it. It just worked. She wanted us to be there and have fun. And that’s what we did.”
Something that didn’t come naturally to Bean, however, was acting high. In the episode, Nadine is pressured into consuming a gummy edible at the party. Not used to taking any sort of substances, she immediately shows signs of being high and unable to deal with the sensation. Her resulting paranoid prompts her to call the police to report that she’s “dying.”
“I’m not a smoker. I’ve tried it a couple of times, but have never done edibles before in my life,” said Bean. “So I started asking people, “What is it with edibles? Is it the same as smoking weed?’ Everybody’s like, ‘No, it’s a completely different high.’ In regards to the seriousness of the incident, like calling the police and thinking I was going to die, I took those experiences from what other people told me, especially from what Zazie told me. She’s like, ‘You see a window. It’s like huh, I should jump out of it.’”
Bean also directly based her mannerisms while high on a friend of hers.
“One of my sorority sisters, she smokes,” she said. “I used to ask her every time I’d see her, I’d say, ‘bytch, you high? Are you high?’ And she’d always say yes. So I really took a lot of how she would move her body — my character’s body movements and [the heavy] lids, my eyes, my slowness.”
Nadine ends up hanging out with Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) by the pool, where they discuss philosophy and how life might just be a simulation.
“We talked a little bit but not anything related to the scene, to be honest. We talked about his tattoos, we talked about where he’s from, where I’m from. We talked about regular life to make that bond and that chemistry,” she said. “In the scene, he went with me, I went with him in regard to wherever he went with the character,”
Life After Bibby and Nadine
Although Powell hopes that Bibby might return to “Atlanta” someday, he’s been busy with his stand-up and will appear in a stand-up special executive produced by Norman Lear. Meanwhile, the comedian is just happy that Bibby has made such an impression on the audience.
“Everybody says that they know Bibby, that Bibby is their uncle, their cousin, their brother, their daddy. Even women, even beauticians. I have met a thousand Bibbys,” he said. “People have called me requesting photos to go up in their beauty shops and barbershops, to give like Bibby Awards, if you steal somebody off or you did something that’s so bad. These are real requests.”
As for Nadine, on multiple occasions, Glover had mentioned that she could return to the show. Bean already has ideas about what her character could do.
“If I had my choice I would explore Nadine and Darius’ relationship, and Nadine and Van because now we’re starting to see that Van has come into her own,” she said. “Also, we’ve only seen intoxicated Nadine, inebriated Nadine. What is she like when she’s not on drugs? What is she like around guys? As one of Van’s close friends, what does Earn think of her?”
In the meantime, Bean has been working. She appears in Comedy Central’s “Detroiters,” which returns on Thursday, June 21, and in FX’s “Snowfall,” which returns for its second season on July 19.
