‘The Resident’: Manish Dayal on Directing an ‘Ambitious’ Episode, Plus Watch a Sneak Peek (VIDEO)
Manish Dayal is the first actor of The Resident to step behind the camera for an episode, February 22’s “Hell in a Handbasket.”
For the star, who previously directed the short film Fifteen Years Later, “it was a bit of happenstance” that it turned out to be this episode, he tells TV Insider. “The schedule lent itself for me and my character to sort of step aside a little bit for a couple of episodes in order for me to direct this. I read the script and it was terrific. It’s an ambitious episode with the opening stunt that kind of takes you into sort of three or four different storylines all happening at one time.”
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And those storylines have three women — Dr. Billie Sutton (Jessica Lucas), Dr. Kit Voss (Jane Leeves), and Nurse Jessica Moore (Jessica Miesel) — at the center of them. “These powerful women are put in very difficult situations and they have to overcome things that are not just unfair to them and sort of stacked against them, but it is this idea that they have to go beyond the norm,” Dayal previews. “[They] really shine in that way, and I think everyone can find a piece of themselves in one of these storylines.”
As the director, he looked at it as his job to figure out the theme of the episode. “What is the idea that you want people to have? What is the emotion you want them to leave with? And that idea can carry on throughout all the storylines,” he explains. “To me it really felt like this is an episode where we’re seeing characters overcome their past. They’re overcoming things that held them down.”
For Billie, who has come face-to-face with the man who raped her when she was 13, a fact she’s been trying to keep from her son, Trevor (Miles Fowler), she’s dealing with “something that she otherwise would never have wanted to,” Dayal says. “That burden is the very thing that limits her from moving on herself.”
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Meanwhile, Chastain is facing some problems at well. Kit is fired temporarily from Chastain because they need to take the heat off of the hospital in some way, and so she sort of falls on that sword,” he teases. Watch our exclusive sneak peek above for more.
Plus, the hospital is dealing with a nursing shortage, and Jessica is at the heart of that storyline. She’s “bearing the brunt of that, so we see her experience and how being an underpaid and undervalued nurse affects her as a professional,” Dayal continues.
But for him, the most technically challenging scene comes near the beginning of the episode, a stunt that leads to the medical case of the hour. At first, it was “this massive stunt with all kinds of things and flips and we had to sort of tone it down after we really went over the storyboards and figured out how we’re gonna do this,” he explains. “We have to keep our actor safe, but we also had to figure out how to shoot it practically versus on stage. My hats are off the producers for that because they really figured it out. My job was to direct the actor and the story and to storyboard everything.”
Production designer Paul Peters built a set of Chastain’s exterior behind the stage for the scene. “It’s really amazing what he did, and without it, we wouldn’t have had those dynamic low angle shots that we needed to really sell the stakes of her fall and just how high she is,” Dayal says. “We used a lot of green screen in there in order to get us that altitude that we needed. When we were practically shooting, we had our stunt woman hanging to get those shots. Coordinating all that and shooting it completely out of sequence, according to the storyboard, was pretty challenging, but I think it turned out really great. And ultimately we go on this little medical journey in the episode with her.”
The Resident, Tuesdays, 8/7c, Fox
