What are some of the greatest TV duos of all-time? There’s Statler and Waldorf, of course. Mulder and Scully. Norm and Cliff. Troy and Abed. Olivia and Paula. Who are Olivia and Paula? They’re the terrifying teens at the heart of one of the best shows of 2021 so far, HBO’s The White Lotus, and if you don’t recognize their names, that’s fine. They don’t know you, either. But they will make fun of you on Snapchat.
The New York Times spoke to Sydney Sweeney (Olivia) and Brittany O’Grady (Paula) about the zoomer vacationers, including creator Mike White asking them to listen to a podcast to get into character. Which podcast? “Red Scare,” Sweeney revealed. “I mainly listened to it for the frequency of the voices of these girls and the timing and the monotone. It was so dry and drawn out and slow. I would just emulate and copy that as much as I could and then bring it into the present day, Gen Z-esque-type woke Twitter girl.” Hosted by Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, the Cut described Red Scare as “a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they’ve spawned.”
Sweeney said that when White told her and O’Grady to listen to the podcast, “I was like, ‘What is this?’ I have never really listened to podcasts.” You probably never thought “listening to podcasts” would make me feel ancient, but here we are.
I’ll be deathly afraid of these two characters for the rest of my natural-born life pic.twitter.com/KA3TFiGyQn
— Sam Sanders (@samsanders) August 17, 2021
(Via the New York Times)