The Big Picture

Jen D’Angelo brings her comedy expertise to Hulu’s Quiz Lady starring Awkwafina and Sandra Oh as Anne and Jenny, sisters on a mission to get Anne on her favorite show, “Can’t Stop the Quiz.” The idea for Quiz Lady was inspired by D’Angelo’s determination to get her brother on Jeopardy. During her chat with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, D’Angelo highlights the importance of behind-the-scenes heroes like AD Kayse Goodell, discusses why it’s important for writers to remain involved throughout the production process, teases what to expect from Hocus Pocus 3, and more.

Writer and producer Jen D’Angelo got her start writing on shows like Workaholics before taking on a pretty big feat – bringing back the Sanderson Sisters in the Disney+ sequel, Hocus Pocus 2. Comedy is clearly D’Angelo’s bread and butter because after rebooting the holiday classic, she’s back with Hulu’s Quiz Lady starring Awkwafina and Sandra Oh as estranged, polar opposite sisters on a mission to rescue their dog, Mr. Linguini, and cover their mother’s gambling debt.

The premise sounds odd, but in an interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, D’Angelo explains that this is an idea that’s been circulating for years. Inspired by her own “Jeopardy whiz” brother, D’Angelo’s script reunites game show-obsessed Anne (Awkwafina) with her older, more erratic sister, Jenny (Oh), under less-than-ideal circumstances. Their mom is MIA from her nursing home and when the sisters convene to help find her, it’s revealed that she may be on the run from gambling debts that now lie on their shoulders when Anne’s beloved pug, Mr. Linguini, is taken as collateral. To clean up this mess, Anne and Jenny have to face childhood traumas, find common ground, and embark on a game show adventure! Directed by Jessica Yu, Quiz Lady also features Will Ferrell, Jason Schwartzman, Holland Taylor, and more.

During their conversation, D’Angelo tells Perri all about how, once the roles were cast, Awkwafina and Oh were key to reshaping their characters, and how their collaboration with Yu honed the details of the script even further. D’Angelo also highlights the heroes behind the scenes, like the tough job of the ADs and the invaluable resource of having writers on set, and shares the inspiration behind Mr. Linguini. She also offers up a big tease for Hocus Pocus 3!

For all of this and more, check out the full interview in the video above, or you can read the interview transcript below.

Image via Hulu Quiz Lady A gameshow-obsessed woman and her estranged sister work together to help cover their mother’s gambling debts. Release Date November 3, 2023 Director Jessica Yu Cast Awkwafina, Sandra Oh Main Genre Comedy
PERRI NEMIROFF: What would you say was the break story moment, the idea that came to you that made you think, “We have something special here and it’s time to move on it?”

JEN D’ANGELO: So, it’s an idea that I’ve had for kind of a while. It’s based on my older brother who is a Jeopardy whiz and all growing up, it was extremely frustrating to try to play Jeopardy alongside of him and just be destroyed. [Laughs] But he’s so smart and it’s been his dream to get on Jeopardy. He’s auditioned so many times, and he always makes it into the contestant pool, but never gets the call to go on the show. When I first moved to LA, I was working as an assistant on a Sony TV show, and so I would have to drive onto the Sony lot all the time and I would drive past the Jeopardy stage, and I was just like, “It’s right there. If I could just get my brother onto Jeopardy, it would make his whole life!” So that was the initial idea and then I just kept circling back to it and just being like, “I feel like that’s such a fun jumping-off point for a story about two estranged siblings coming back together.”

Has he still not been on Jeopardy?

D’ANGELO: No. Can you believe that?

I don’t even know him and I’m already very invested in this. How do I campaign to get him on Jeopardy?

D’ANGELO: I really am just like, if this movie winds up just being the way to get him on Jeopardy, I mean, nothing will make me happier.

I’m here to do whatever I can to make that happen!

Image via TIFF, 20th Century Fox

So you’ve had this idea for a good while now. What would you say is the biggest difference between draft one of the screenplay and now what everyone’s going to see in the final film?

D’ANGELO: Oh my gosh, great question. I think the characters really just have evolved so much. Once we got Awkwafina and Sandra Oh on board, it was so fun to really craft these characters with them. They had so many great ideas and they just were so excited to really throw themselves into this. My very pretentious metaphor for writing characters is that it’s like sculpting a statue where it’s like the writer, just on their own, kind of makes the rough shape and then the actor and the director come in and you sort of do all the fine detail work together. It’s so fun to just sort of uncover this character as it comes to life. So I think the central two characters are the things that changed the most because they wouldn’t be who they are if it weren’t for Awkwafina and Sandra.

One of my follow-up questions to that is one of my absolute favorites because I love talking about how things can evolve through every single step of the filmmaking process. Is there anything in the final film that you wound up loving more than you ever expected where someone who’s involved in the making of Quiz Lady did something with it that maybe made you realize that something in your own script was even stronger than you ever thought it was?

D’ANGELO: There were so many moments. Nothing delights me more than when you really get a sense of how many people work on a movie, and how excited they are, and their individual skill sets, and what they bring to it. One of the moments that I think about a lot is when we were shooting the audition scenes in the hotel and Jeff Mann, the production designer, was just like, “Hey, come take a look at this,” and he showed me that they had printed up signs for an egg donation charity, I think. That’s the conference that’s going on. It’s about egg donation. And that’s just based on one throwaway joke from later on in the script, but he was just like, “I thought it would be funny to put this sign back here.” It’s the type of thing that no one will ever notice. Maybe on your third watch you’ll notice this sign in the background. But stuff like that I just love so much. Every aspect of this movie just delights me to no end because it really just represents so much love and hard work from hundreds of people, and they did such a great job.

Image via Disney

I will preface this question by saying it is very, very unfair and every single person who worked on this movie matters, but can you name one person who’s not the star of the movie, they’re not the writer-producer or director, but someone that we need to know their name because of how heavily they contributed to making this something special?

D’ANGELO: Oh my gosh. I mean, Kayse Goodell was our first AD and she was incredible. That is the hardest job, I think, on set.

ADs always deserve more credit. Always the unsung heroes!

D’ANGELO: They do! Yeah, we would be nowhere without them. We would be behind, we would still be on set, we would never wrap. But yeah, that job is extremely difficult and it’s also very difficult to do without people just really hating you because you have to be such a taskmaster. But Kayse was so incredible. She really contributed so much to that set running so well and just making it so that everyone was able to do their jobs really well. So she was the unsung hero for sure.

I love hearing about a good AD.

Here’s a part of the process that I am always eager to shine a light on, but especially after coming out of the recent writers’ strike. What does it mean to you to be both a writer and producer on a project, and also, what value do you think it brings to a project when a writer’s work does not stop with writing the script, but they are involved throughout a production?

D’ANGELO: Totally. I love that you ask that question. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was huge. I mean, I was so grateful that I really got to be involved through every step of the way. I was on set in New Orleans. I lived there for the whole time and got to be on set every day. I was really involved with post. And it’s such a gift because, I think, it’s so hard to kind of define what screenwriting is because it’s not just typing; it’s everything. It’s storytelling, and that happens throughout the entire process. Editing a movie is just writing a movie visually again, so there’s so much stuff that you can uncover.

I think writers can also be a big asset on set. There are times where something goes wrong, like, “Oh, there’s something wrong with this location,” or, “Oh, the crane broke and so we can’t do this thing now.” And if you have the writer there, they can help in the solution because it’s like, “Okay, we might not be able to accomplish this exactly as we saw it, but the story intent could be accomplished this way instead,” so you might actually wind up saving time and money by not just sort of being stuck to the script. There’s ways to accomplish what you need to accomplish by rewriting it as you’re going. That was so incredible to be able to be a part of it and be a part of solving the problems that come up and finding creative solutions for all of the many snags that movies will naturally run into.

So, so true. That’s something I will always continue to highlight!

Image via Disney

I’m gonna follow up that serious question with some sillier, lighter ones. I am obsessed with dogs, so I need to know everything about Mr. Linguini. First, was Mr. Linguini always scripted to be a pug?

D’ANGELO: Yes. I’m also obsessed with dogs, as you probably could assume. Mr Linguini is based on my very good friends – they have a pug named Aggie. It’s short for Agador Spartacus. They named her after Hank Azaria’s character from The Birdcage. Aggie, she’s now 11, she’s a grande old dame, but I love her so much, and she always makes me laugh because just the sound of a pug snoring, there’s nothing funnier, more disruptive or more soothing. It’s all three. So she just really made me laugh.

And then, yeah, in thinking of Anne as this character who’s really turned inward and shut herself off from the world, I thought that a pug is just the perfect companion for her. In many ways, I think of Anne as someone who was raised by TV, so she has the personality of Terry McTeer. So, she was a six-year-old girl with the personality of a 40-year-old man, and I feel like that’s what a pug is like. They are these adorable little puppies, but they’re so just old and world-weary.

There’s nothing more relatable than a young adult raised by TV, who also fills a hole in her heart with a dog.

D’ANGELO: Yeah, I mean, that’s literally me. [Laughs]

I know, I share that, too! In that case, who is your dog? What’s your dog named after?

D’ANGELO: So my dog is named Wally. His full name is Walnut.

I have a Wally!

D’ANGELO: Really?

I swear. Named after WALL-E from Pixar’s movie.

D’ANGELO: We were also like, “We want to name him Walnut, we’ll call him Wally.” It’s sort of after WALL-E because we love that movie. What kind of dog is he?

Wally is a Mini Dachshund. A white Mini Dachshund so very unusual-looking! He is a sweetheart. What type of dog is your Wally?

D’ANGELO: We think he’s like a Maltipoo. When we got him, they were like, “We think he’ll be 40 pounds,” and we were like, “Great. Perfect.” And then he tapped out at 12, and we were just like, “Great. We have this little fluff.” But we love him so much. My husband and I frequently refer to him as our boss. He really runs our home.

That makes all the sense in the world to me. All of our pets should always run our lives. That is how I operate, at least.

Image via TIFF, 20th Century Fox

Some silly game show questions for you now! What game show do you think you would be best at, but then I also want the opposite, the reality TV competition show that you would never ever want to be on because you would stink at it?

D’ANGELO: Oh my gosh. I mean, I love Survivor and it’s my dream to go on Survivor, but I would never do it because I think it would drive me insane. But also, I’m not a very strong swimmer and I live in fear of being on some fail compilation video of, like, me belly-flopping into the ocean. So, I would never go on Survivor even though I want to.

I feel like I really want to go on Jeopardy. I feel like I could be good at it, but I’m also so scared that I would choke and look stupid. But I do love trivia so much so I kind of feel like I could be okay, but I don’t know. And I’ll never know because my brother has to get on, and then that’ll be enough. [Laughs]

Image via 20th Century

I feel like I would be good at Jeopardy one out of every five days of the week.

D’ANGELO: Exactly. That’s how I feel. It would be so dependent on if I could do well or if I would just be so catastrophically – I would be the Marybeth Windlemore. I would just completely freeze and get scared.

I might be that as well!

I have to wind down with you so the inevitable is going to happen. I have to squeeze in a couple of Hocus Pocus 3 questions because I love Halloween, I love that movie, and now that franchise. First, a safe question for you. It is obviously hugely exciting to get to continue on with a franchise and saying yes to writing another script had to be a no-brainer, but what about for you as a writer evolving your craft? Is there anything about Hocus Pocus 3 that makes you think, “This is the next best step for me in order to add more skills to my toolkit?”

D’ANGELO: Yeah, I think it’s such an interesting challenge. I think with Hocus Pocus 2 you had the challenge of revisiting these beloved characters and wanting to really make it worthwhile, this sequel. I feel like we had so much fun making it, it turned out so well, I’m so thrilled and honored and humbled by the response that I got, and so it’s so exciting to be able to go do a third one. But it is its own new challenge of like, “Well, now we have different expectations going into this.” That fan base is so devoted, as am I. I am just as much a fan as everybody else. So I’m like, “Yes! I have my own theories about what we could see and what things mean, and where we could take these characters.” It’s interesting to be like, okay, now we have even more possibility, and it’ll be a challenge to sort of pick the avenue and really make the movie stand on its own.

I have a feeling you’ll crush that challenge!

Now I’m going to squeeze in a question that I feel like you’re not going to be able to answer, but I’m at least going to try. Assuming we have not seen the last of the Sanderson Sisters, do you think that Winifred can still be devilishly delightful, but also reflect the fact that she actually learned something at the end of the second movie?

D’ANGELO: Oh, totally. Because I think with the Sanderson Sisters, the thing that makes them so fun is that they really are like herding cats. So I’m like, yes, Winifred learned a very valuable lesson. She loves her sisters more than anything in the world, but she will also just immediately get distracted by whatever is put in front of her. So if you dangle the carrot of a potential revenge against Salem, which she has always wanted, you know, she might have a backslide where she gets singularly focused on the wrong goal again.

Watch on Hulu