by Nora DominickBuzzFeedBuzzFeed Staff 🚨 There are MASSIVE spoilers ahead for Ponies Season 1! 🚨 How the idea for Ponies first came about Katalin Vermes / Peacock First, where did the idea of Ponies stem from? Did you draw from any particular media for inspiration when crafting the show? David Iserson: Personally, I really have a passion for this era. I really love the look and the music. I think that this is just a really interesting inflection point in history. And I had traveled in my 20s, not to Moscow, but to a bunch of other former communist cities like Prague, Berlin, and Budapest, where we ended up shooting the show. Those cities have their own complicated relationships with the past in this era, but there are, like, these kitschy museums for the '70s and '80s under the Iron Curtain.
It's a really visually interesting, stunning time period with lots of very interesting, weird design, media, music, and television. A very weird, fun-house mirror version of our own Western version of the '70s. So I think that was just something that really captured our imagination. We started talking about just setting something in this time period. Then there are just a lot of books about true stories of spy operations at the British and American Embassies. I think from that, one of the most interesting details was just how unsuccessful the Americans and the British were in running spy operations in Moscow. I think that kind of fell into contrast of sort of what we had seen in Cold War cinema and in other television shows. Even if it is cynical, there's always the sort of level of competency. So I think that there's something that felt very true about them being able to think outside the box and putting unlikely people in these situations, because the KGB were following everybody all the time. We wanted to write about women, two people, and friendship and relationships through the prism of these characters. So it all kind of came out of that. Casting Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson Katalin Vermes / Peacock Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson have such perfect chemistry as Bea and Twila. Were they your first choices for the roles? How was it working with them? David: We tend not to write with actors in mind. So for us, these characters kind of existed in our heads a little bit before we went to find actors for it. But after finding Emilia and Haley, I don't think we could imagine it with anybody else. Like, they just kind of met the moment, and knowing them, there's so much of themselves in these characters and in ways that, having seen so much of their work prior, I don't think they've always been able to showcase in their other work. Emilia is so much more of this character than Daenerys Targaryen. And, Haley has done so many coming-of-age films, but this is much more of an expression of who she is as an adult. You have these imaginations of what actors can do, and you hope for the best. And these actors just exceeded our expectations, both individually, like what they bring to the character, and the chemistry they have with each other. There actually was no way that we could have even guessed how much chemistry they would have, and how close they would be in real life, and how this show could be so much an expression of their friendship. I think we just got incredibly lucky with that, and and it really pops on screen when they come together. When we first saw it happen, in the table read or whenever they first read as these characters, it was such a relief that we had found them. The importance of two female characters who are similar but different Peacock Bea and Twila are so different on the surface when we meet them, but as the season goes on, they really have a core that is so similar. How was it creating these two different types of women that really complement each other? Susanna Fogel: I think part of it is the casting, just in the sense that there's a certain type of casting that happens where someone's playing the role that they always play, and you almost start to have, like, character blindness to what nuances might be in the writing, because you're like, Oh, they're just doing the thing they do. They showed up to do their thing. For us, just the fact that it was a little bit out of the box for Emilia to play this neurotic American '70s heroine, and for Haley to play, like, a grown-up, like a wife with real grown-up issues, in spite of her youthful confidence. It's like audiences are so cynical and so used to watching every version of everything. I think you always have to keep them awake. Just keep them awake and alive as they watch and engage with it. Otherwise, they'll just fill in the blanks and dull the nuances. Which is just to say that for this, I think that casting a little bit out of the box for type was the start of it. Just to sort of get people to notice those layers. It's not a story about how it takes eight hours for them to be able to tolerate each other because they hate each other.