


Murder mystery "The Afterparty" streams on Apple TV+
Tension often runs high at weddings. Emotions can run amok, making it feel like anything can happen. But what if an actual murder occurred, at a wedding?
This is the premise of season two of The Afterparty.
A mystery comedy, each episode of the series explores a different character’s account of one fateful evening, told through the lens of popular film genres using unique visuals.
Tiffany Haddish reprises her role as the investigating detective from season one as Sam Richardson, Zoe Chao, Ken Jeong, Paul Walter Hauser, John Cho, Elizabeth Perkins, Zach Woods, Jack Whitehall, Poppy Lui, Anna Konkle and Vivian Wu as wedding attendees. Chris Miller, Phil Lord and Anthony King serve as executive producers.
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Chao (Zoe) and Richardson (Aniq) also appeared in the first season, with Miller explaining, “Well, Zoe and Aniq were really the emotional heart of the first season, so it felt cruel to not bring them back It seemed like it’d be fun to get them to work together this time to solve a murder at a wedding. And then we just worked at trying to think of some funny characters, some interesting stories, some interesting twists.”
He adds, “And Detective Danner is the Poirot of the series.”
Which seems apropos given Haddish’s self-proclaimed obsession with, as she says, ‘figuring out who done it.’
Tiffany Haddish in "The Afterparty."
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“I’m a female. We always want to know who did it and what happened” she explains.
But she admits that she has her limits, “I don’t go through no men’s phones no more. I learned my lesson,” but, she continues, “I am obsessed with trying to figure [things] out — like I will binge watch something or, like, sometimes they give you the first two episodes and I will write out what I think is going to happen to test my psychic powers. And then I find out I was wrong.”
As for choosing the genre to use to tell each characters story, Miller says, “It really all comes down to what their story and what their point of view is and how the characters sees the world and what seems to fit for them. So, it's sort of this weird chicken and egg thing where you're figuring out how can each character tell a distinct story in a distinct style?”
To do this, Miller admits, “We had six different whiteboards that were double-sided, and it looked like [the movie] A Beautiful Mind with yarn and magnets and tables of timetables, who is where, when…”
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He adds that, “ every aspect of it is like a complicated Jenga tower that if you pull one little thing out the whole thing crumbles, and it is a real, real mind eraser.”
Miller reveals that as for the genres this season, “We’ve got a unique rom-com, we’ve got a Jane Austen one [and] a film noir one. We’ve got a heist one, we’ve got a ‘90s erotic thriller, a Hitchcock ‘50s thriller [and] we’ve got an epic romance.”
King says that it was, ‘an enormous undertaking to keep track of it all,’ because, “you have these recurring scenes that are happening again and again throughout the season, and so when you change something in episode eight, you’re like, ‘well, now we have to go back and rewrite that scene in every other episode.’”
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But, he says that once the scripts were nailed down, “It’s like giving people a lot of props and a set, and then watching them tap dance, and it’s pretty extraordinary.”
However, Whitehall says, “It’s a compliment to [the EPs] that as an actor I’ve never felt more stupid than when I did doing The Afterparty. It’s so complex and it’s so brilliantly constructed.”
Hauser likens Miller, Lord and King as ‘wizards of their own creation,’ as he explains, “I feel very protected from a story perspective, where if I was losing my way in a scene they would come over and be like, ‘No, no, no, this makes sense, because this happens with that.’ It was nice to have that sort of mental compass the whole time.”
Jeong describes the cast working together using the analogy of, “This was like the '92 Olympic dream team of basketball players, where everyone was just a star, and everybody had this harmonious working relationship. I think what struck me the most was just how collaborative every single person was.”
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All of the actors may have worked well together, but that doesn’t mean that any of them actually know who the killer is.
“Yeah. None of them know,” says Miller.
“They all think they did it,” says Lord.
Miller reveals, “We filmed ten different endings and they all are the killer, and we’re going to pick the best one for the finale.”
‘The Afterparty’ is available for streaming beginning Wednesday July 12th on Apple TV+