When Make It Or Break It premiered last summer, the first thought that popped into my mind was…how did they know that has been my idea for a show for years? But in all honesty, one of my other loves in life is gymnastics. I follow the sport closely, and I used to be a gymnast. So when I found out about a show that combines two of my greatest interests, I could hardly contain myself. I recently had the chance to visit the amazing set of the show (I even got to step foot in The Rock), and speak with the creator, executive producer and the cast members. It was an amazing visit and I’m so excited to finally be able to share with you all of the interviews. The mid-season premiere is less than a week away, and when I caught up with Paul Stupin (Executive Producer), we chatted about the upcoming season, how they built The Rock, and his gymnastics research and education.
So I’ve always said there should be a show about gymnastics…
I agree!
I am a huge gymnastics fan, and I was a gymnast a while ago. What was the motivation behind writing a show about gymnastics?
Well, initially I was not aboard when Holly did the pilot. But when the opportunity came up to potentially come on board, the first thought was…wow how freaking cool is that? Because I had watched the Summer Olympics, that’s the one element of the Summer Olympics which I absolutely did not miss. And the thing that I found so appealing about it was that not only does it give us an opportunity to sort of create these great characters and their interactions and follow their lives and their romances and all the fun personal stuff. But it’s got this totally cool overlay with the gymnastics to which we can filter all of that. And so I just thought it was a great new spin on an ensemble drama show that gave us a chance to visually do something really fun and interesting.
Holly was saying that there was a ton of research done about the gymnastics world. Is that an ongoing process?
Well there are whole elements in terms of what we do to keep the verisimilitude alive and what’s so interesting about it is initially we’ll be sitting at the writers room and someone will come up with well something happens and they’ll be an injury. Well then the question is — what the hell happens and what’s the move and what’s the injury so I think we want to be as true to that world as we absolutely can be. And I think we’re doing a — one of our characters in the season finale had an accident, so especially in terms of how we follow that arc and that storyline. We want to be true to what an actual gymnast might experience. The other thing that’s funny –I don’t know if Holly mentioned it — when we’re sitting in the writers room and we come up with some interesting gymnastics thing — someone will go “well then she’ll do the flippity flip, and then after a really cool flippity flip,” so we have a gymnastics coordinator who comes in and [we] say “we need a great flippity flip for this, what do we do?” And I’ve learned all sorts of cool [terms] — the shushunova, things that I never knew about and it’s a gymnastics education for me, too.
I spoke with all the girls over the summer, and they all said they watched a lot of gymnastics on Youtube. Did you do the same thing?
Well, I just have loved gymnastics, so it’s so much fun. And I’ll tell you, when we’re shooting gymnastics, it’s so much fun. It really does feel like the Cirque De Soleil is happening because not only will we have on days we are shooting at The Rock our girls, but we’ll also have these incredible gymnasts in some cases the national champions, here doubling them. And then in the background we have other gymnasts playing background gymnasts, so it’s just this sort of visual treat. And all this fun action and eye candy to look at…it’s just really nice.
The TV Chick 