Dreaming and Dancing

The trouble with Aziraphale is he’s always going to be behind on what he hears and on technology. He doesn’t have anything in the Bookshop that plays music, apart from an ancient manual gramophone. He has LOTS of classical music, but very little that’s 20th Century, let alone “Last 50 years or so”. He’ll probably discover the Beatles somewhere towards the end of the next century.

I changed it because I’d moved the line from being said rapidly as they were facing doom, to being said at the end, as a final summing up. And knowing just felt like a deeper, bigger word than liking, in that context.

Professor Adrien Dupain-Cheng: oh, I hear he’s a professor now. Supposedly he works at this university!

Student: huh, I wonder if I have him for any of my classes

Adrien: nah you’d know

he fell in love with crowley when he dropped the bomb on the church to save aziraphale. crowley walked into the church, a place quite dangerous and painful for a demon to go into, but safe and familiar for an angel,, then had to destroy it to save the both of them.

aziraphale stood in the building that represented holiness and purity and divinity, all things that tie into Heaven and angels and all that, as it was destroyed by a demon, whom he then fell in love with. destroying the church was necessary for him to be able to love crowley, because his need for approval from his superiors and his role as an angel was his security. he felt needed and important as an angel, so he had to stop himself from choosing any other side.

but when the church was obliterated and only him and crowley were left standing, aziraphale wasn’t surrounded by reminders of his obligation to heaven. all he had in front of him was crowley, his best friend, his real source of security and affirmation that he was important these last 6000 years.

If angels and demons walk among us, as they do in Good Omens, how are we to tell them apart from us mere mortals? The longer they live on Earth, the more human they can appear, which is usually a good giveaway. The thing is, “more human,” doesn’t necessarily mean “more fashionable,” as the Amazon series’ costume designer explains.

Aziraphale doesn’t care quite as much about fashion as his archangel boss, Gabriel. In the original script, author Neil Gaiman noted that Aziraphale is a “kind-looking gentleman whose sartorial style runs to bow-ties. He thinks a little tartan is nifty, and would use the word ‘nifty’ with pride.”

With that being her primary direction, costume designer Claire Anderson tells SYFY WIRE that she decided Aziraphale would have a more traditional look and would wear clothes that look like he’s worn them for hundreds of years. She decided on Victorian-era clothing, and added gold threads to his bow-tie — a look that actor Michael Sheen approves of.

“I wanted him to look like a comfortable sofa,” Sheen says. “He likes quality and craftsmanship, so he’s elegant, but he’s also a bit threadbare.”

Gabriel, however, would never tolerate looking a bit rundown. As played by Jon Hamm, the archangel wears bespoke suits and coats when he pops down to Earth (thanks to a Zegna tailor on Bond Street), and cashmere is his primary fabric, even for his running clothes. “Cashmere just floats around you,” Anderson says. “It sits where it touches. It’s delicious to wear. It feels sensational. And it just drips off of him.”

“The celestial heavenly creatures were festooned with the best of everything,” Hamm explains, “but they don’t get any joy out of it.”

“Gabriel thinks of his luxury clothes as more disposable, and would just wear it for a season and be done with it,” Anderson noted. “That’s not very angelic, is it?”

Gabriel’s clothes have a lilac color scheme – silvery pearl-gray and blue-gray – to give him a bit of iridescence and match his otherworldly eyes. “To make Jon Hamm the most beautiful man in the world, what more can they do?” Anderson says. “He’s already tall and handsome and he looks great in everything. So it’s tiny, but we gave him Elizabeth Taylor eyes.”

Not Elizabeth Taylor-like eyes, but her actual eyes. “Gabriel went and stole Liz Taylor’s eyes and put them in his head,” Hamm says. “He thought, 'Those are beautiful and unique and perfect, so I’ll take those.’”

The effect is done, of course, with colored contacts, as are the various reptilian eyes of our respective demons. Hastur and Ligur, who don’t come to Earth as often, aren’t as skilled at hiding their true selves, and don’t seem to realize what they look like they’ve just emerged up through the ground.

“I love the demons,” Anderson says. “When I did my first drawings of them, I thought about the fires of Hell, and thought they should have burned feet and shoes that could be boiled and greased and given scorch marks. The bottoms of their coats are scorched. Their clothing is blackened and shredded at the hems. Everything is muddy and broken down and distressed.”

Hastur, Ligur, and other Dukes of Hell wear what they died in, but Crowley (played by David Tennant) has been on Earth the longest and has had 6,000 years to acquire a good wardrobe. Like Gabriel, Crowley also appreciates human style, but only so it can make him look like the coolest guy in the room.

“He’s sort of like Christian Bale in American Psycho,” Tennant says. “He’s kind of what yuppies were 30 years ago, so whatever version of that exists now. What currency does that give you? Crowley thinks he’s really cool, and he wants to adapt his coolness to the time period, and so he’s very profligate with his looks, his version of what’s on trend.”

Unlike Gabriel, Crowley is not too tailored — his clothes have an undone quality about them, although with sharp lines, to feel more modern. He’s rather like a snake who sheds his skin, constantly updating his wardrobe (even if he remains a bit behind), wearing a few things that are a bit too tight so they’re wrapped around him, and shirts that tumble open. And most of his look — from the serpentine eyes well-hidden by sunglasses, the serpent tattoo sideburn, a belt with a snakehead with gleaming eyes to the snakeskin shoes with red soles — harkens back to his origins as a snake with a red underbelly.

“He has slicks of red around his collars, and red embroidery in his fabrics,” Anderson says.

Filling it with books was as large of a task as building it, and the whole undertaking was created only (mild spoiler alert!) to be burned down in the end.

Thankfully, to source around 7,000 throwaway books from across Europe, Ralph had a set decorator he could count on—his wife, Bronwyn Franklin. “She is sort of the unsung hero,” he says. “To find books that we could burn that weren’t necessarily damaging some fantastic literal tome, we had to really find a whole lot of books we could disguise and make look like antique books. She found some other beautiful items for the shop, like the antique cash register. My God did she get some beautiful things. And then we set fire to things. Controlled fire, but still fire.”

Two of the show’s concept artists (of which Ralph and Franklin’s son was one; another son was a standby prop builder) spent three weeks making the used books look like they belonged in an angel’s bookshop. Then, the space was outfitted with gas burners and flame bars to create the fire. “We had to build a special fire retardant material so that we could build certain things so they couldn’t blister, and then we could quickly do them up again for a second burn,” says Ralph. “But generally speaking, things do catch fire. We had the fire brigade there putting things out. We also had to blow the front windows out with air and water hoses so that Crowley gets hit and pushed across—it’s just a big, big effect. It was fantastic.”

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is used the most, particularly in the first episode, with the demon Crowley (David Tennant) arriving at his meeting to discuss the coming of the Anti-Christ as Freddie Mercury sings that “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me.” Snatches of the song can also be heard as Crowley receives his orders on where to deliver the infant Anti-Christ and his arrival at the hospital. The song shows up again at the end of episode 5 and the start of episode 6 (though different clips are used) when Crowley dramatically arrives at the USAF base where the end of the world starts, at the wheel of his burning Bentley.

Episode 2 plays “Bicycle Race” in the background of Crowley’s car, as he gives a lift to bicycle-riding witch Anathema Device, after the two collide with one another. Episode 5 opens with Crowley racing through the streets of London to “You’re My Best Friend,” as he tries to reach the book shop run by his best friend, the angel Aziraphale. When Crowley discovers the shop is on fire and concludes that someone has killed Aziraphale, he emerges from the flames to Queen’s gospel-inspired hit “Somebody To Love,” having finally come to grips with his feelings for the angel.

EPISODE 1

By the time Gaiman and director Douglas Mackinnon had finished cutting together Episode 1, it was about 75 minutes long, “which meant that we needed to lose 20 minutes,” Gaiman said. “And that 20 minutes was really hard to lose, because it was 20 minutes of beautiful material.”

Among those cut minutes was an extended scene of Crowley disabling the London mobile phone system, as he later reports to the demons in the graveyard during his evil deeds-of-the-day rundown.

“We built a huge set in South Africa for the BT Tower,” production manager Michael Ralph said. Crowley enters the lobby and tells the security guard he’s been sent from Rataway Pest Control to do a preliminary inspection. He’s taken up to the top floor, which is infested with hundreds of rats — rats summoned to do the demon’s bidding. (The rats were animated.) Crowley walks over to the computer room and tips tea from a thermos into the network controller, which makes the lights flicker and go out. Mission accomplished!

The scene then included people on the city streets experiencing the interruption in their mobile service at the worst possible moments (when they need to close a deal, arrange a pickup, or stave off a breakup), and Crowley walks away smiling. “We shot the whole thing, including helicopter arrivals to the BT Tower,” Ralph said. “There was a massive amount of work involved there,” cinematographer Gavin Finney agreed.

“What we wound up doing as our solution to bringing Episode 1 into focus was throwing out anything that was not directly part of the story,” Gaiman said. “We wound up with something that’s incredibly fast-moving and feels very full, but also runs just a hair over 50 minutes.”

EPISODE 3

The most elaborate sequence — a 30-minute cold open — is not based on anything from the book per se. “It’s an exploration of the characters that [are] in the book in its heart,” Mackinnon said, “but it needed to be externalized. It needed to be shown.”

The trick was that it was rather expensive to cover about 6,000 years of history, with different looks and locations, and the production had to get creative to keep it viable. The spot in South Africa used for Noah’s ark in Mesopotamia in 3004 B.C. is the same location used for the crucifixion in Golgotha in 33 A.D. — just from a different angle. The crucifixes, Ralph noted, were the hardest part; he had to make them oversized so they would have an impact on camera, and he used a river of red cloth on the ground to suggest an abstract river of blood. Ancient Rome in 41 A.D. was built in the same studio later used to double for a dungeon during the French Revolution in 1793.

A location scout for the camp for the kids’ playground gave the production the idea of where to stage Arthurian Britain in 537 A.D. — a valley in Surrey where a castle turret was visible. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be fantastic in the mist?’” Ralph said. “We didn’t need to build anything. We only needed to add the fog.”

“A ridiculous amount of fog,” Finney agreed. “We were just riffing on ideas from Excalibur and Monty Python there.”

The next period of history, Shakespearean London in 1601, brought a bit of luck — Good Omens got to be the first fictional production to shoot inside the Globe Theatre. The catch was that they could only shoot for five hours, which wasn’t enough time to manage a shoot with 500 extras in period costume. The solution? Turn a full Globe Theatre into an empty one, and make Shakespeare’s play a flop. (“It’s funnier,” Gaiman said.)

Revolutionary France brought its own set of difficulties. Ralph researched how to make a working guillotine, and had the perfect spot to set it up – at the University of Cape Town, which was filled with architecture reminiscent of 1793 France. “I was going to build a platform and have hot water washing the blood down and steam coming up,” the production designer said. “But we ran out of time to do it before the university opened.” They came up with the solution to hear the guillotine outside a dungeon cell (built in the studio) instead.