Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 Episode 2: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE SETS
Episode 302 of Awkawfina is Nora from Queens is mostly a hilarious spoof of reality shows that is somehow a mix of Love Island meets Squid Game meets Survivor.
We all had a great time working at the location that was the setting for the “Too Hot to Survive” reality show house.
It was towards the end of the job so most of the crazy stress was over and the day we were dressing was a BEAUTIFUL day to be in a mansion overlooking the ocean.
…sadly the day of filming was raining and overcast so you don’t get to see as much of the house on screen as we enjoyed the day before working to put together the set.
Me and Ashley our assistant set decorator enjoying the beautiful day by the water on the terrace
Leadman Nate chilling on the same terrace where they filmed the shot below
Ashley, Soph our locations rep, and me having a fabulous lunch in the sun
Kiran working at set after doing a location run in around the same spot Nora shot this tag
That Giant Pink Bear
to heighten that over-the-top-nothing-is-too-loud aesthetic of reality TV show homes, we rented some oversize bright colored animal statues like the pink bear you see here:
But that pink bear statue HEAVY.
It took 6x set dressers to safely carry it across the room when we were putting the house together
THE CRAZY BIG BED
The script mentioned there was a “GIANT BED”
When I was shown the size of the room we were putting the bed in (usually the family’s living room) and measured how big everyone wanted the bed (15’ feet wide x 12’ feet deep) I knew it was going to be a little bit of a challenge since it was far more enormous than any commercially available bed.
Luckily Assistant Set Decorator Ashley Bradshaw got to work figuring it out and calculated we could use 6x queen sized mattresses and bed frames to create a bed this large, so what you see below are SIX QUEEN MATTRESSES!
the set dressers putting together this epic bed comprised of 6x queen sized beds
From L to R: Ashley Bradshaw, assistant set decorator and the queen who figured out this bed; Laura Miller our wonderful production designer, and me looking very tired.
FUN TRIVIA
The actress, Greta Titelman, who plays poosh in “Too Hot to Survive” is also the same actress who…
Greta Titelman on “Too Hot to Survive” in Awkwafina is Nora from Queens
who played the “Countess Leonora” in Season 5 of Search Party which I also decorated! You can learn all about the Lyte HQ set she appeared in on the blog here.
TURNINg a C TOWN into a G mart (AKA H Mart)
One of the other storylines in this episode is Wally and Grandma’s power struggle over her old stool and eating healthier.
The script had them shopping in “G Mart” (obvious spoof/dupe of the legendary Asian grocery store chain H Mart).
Seeing as our production was based in Queens, seems crazy we didn’t just film inside one of the HUNDREDS of Asian grocery stores in Queens right?
Nope, we actually filmed in a C-Town in Queens a regular degular supermarket that didn’t even have an “Asian Foods” aisle…
this establishing exterior shot? A LIE. We were filming in a C-Town grocery store that didn’t even have an Asian grocery aisle!
So we had to BUY a few three aisle segments worth of Asian groceries to replace on the C-Town shelves for filming.
I went one day to Food Bazaar (one of my favorite NYC supermarkets and actually owned by Korean-Americans) with Kiran and we bought three shopping carts worth of Asian groceries. It looked something like this:
C-Town to G Mart pretending to be H Mart a hilarious NYC supermarket alphabet soup.
The episode starts with Grandma using her treacherous stool “Jessimae” to reach some high piles of tupperware.
Once I saw that in the script, I had our whole Art Department keeping old takeout containers and rounding up old food containers to use as tupperware.
Cause as anyone related to Chinese immigrants knows: Grandma isn’t going out and buying any new tupperware! The only tupperware Chinese grandmas know are recycled food containers they refuse to throw out but prefer to reincarnate into tupperware!
Set Dec buyer Margie even bought a few lots of old food containers off of eBay so we could create a beautifully chaotic menagerie of immigrant “tupperware.”
So you can imagine my heartbreak when watching the show and seeing in consternation what ended up on screen was a bunch of VERY new looking tupperware 😭😭😭😭😭
Sometimes things like this happens: we have all the right stuff, we dress it in, and then what actually happens when they are filming is something else entirely. Most of the time I’m not on set so I wasn’t around when these choices were made.
How I felt seeing the wrong tupperware when I know we went through a lot of care and intention to gather the “right” kind of tupperware:
how I felt seeing what tupperware was actually used for the scene and shot
Here’s my actual grandma holding one of her favorite “tupperware” receptacles: reused soft tofu containers to do some gardening in her home in Boston.