‘Pluribus’ Set Decorator On Its Perfectly Intimate Details

AppleTV’s Pluribus set decorator Ashley M Marsh’s creations helped give us those little details about all the characters’ lives. We’re talking Carol’s home decor and its perfectly suited Georgia O’Keeffe elements to the minimalist but lived-in feeling of Manousos’s office. All of those intimate and apt touches took Marsh time and dedication. Then, there is the excitement of doing a house for no particular character. Plus, there’s the beauty of getting to do whatever you want because you like it!

The Contending: So, when designing Carol’s house, what did you go through to try to make it feel like her and her wife’s  space? The whiteboard was a beautiful touch that I knew many people appreciated.

Ashley M Marsh: We go through a lot in terms of designing for a character. I go back and forth with myself and the production designer and then with Vince and the team. We really wanted her house to be warm and cozy and inviting, but we also wanted it to feel eclectic and not just straight out of Home Goods. They were a loving couple. They spent time together going through and finding everything that they loved, piece by piece. So, we wanted that to reflect in the multitude of styles that she has throughout. Then in terms of the whiteboard, that was a fully designed piece with Denise Pizzini, the production designer, and their team. They built it piece by piece. I think they hand-painted the wood. It was just stunning.

Carol’s office was one of my favorite sets.  It just had a lot more layers than the rest of the house, because that’s where she would spend most of her time, and it had a lot of really beautiful mid-century pieces that just felt very personal for her. And what was really great is I got to collaborate with Rhea (Seehorn) about how we want her books to be and what kind of books are in there. She has  a lot of research material but also different kinds of novels and literature mixed in with maybe some of her other books of her competitors that we put on the floor.  So she sees what other people are doing but she really prides herself on being a real novelist and writer.

The Contending: Then you get that beautiful moment where she takes the Georgia O’Keeffe and puts it on her wall and it fits in so beautifully with what she already has.

Ashley M Marsh: Yeah, that little sitting room is also one of my favorites. The beauty of our show is that we pretty much have outlines for every episode, so we know what’s coming. So, right off the bat, we knew that we needed that Georgia O’Keeffe painting to match with what was already in that room. We got to work with the O’Keeffe Museum, and get, as perfect as it gets, a replica of that painting, and it’s exactly how it is at the O’Keeffe Museum. We used the same framer, the same materials, everything, so it’s as real as it can get.

The Contending: Manousos’s space is a huge contrast to Carol’s. What went into deciding what was going to go into his small space?

Ashley M Marsh: We did a lot of research on what kind of things would be inside just an office that someone spends a lot of time in. Color-wise, we wanted it to be a stark difference from Carol’s. Because, ideologically, they are quite similar to a point, but  we wanted to make sure that they do start out in different places but end up in the same place eventually. We knew that he had to have his ham radio and that he probably spent a lot of time there, just on a day-to-day basis. While he didn’t live there, he worked there all day long, and we just wanted to show that he was comfortable there. He could watch TV, he would normally have a place for a snack, but that was tapped out by the time we met him.

Then once you go back to his house, you can kind of understand why he made his office this space for himself. His house is off the beaten path, and we don’t know if he lived with his parents but we know he has a bad relationship with his mother so maybe that felt like a lonely place for him. Maybe his office was more of a sanctuary, so it kind of mirrored Carol.

The Contending: When creating the James Bond moment in the Las Vegas hotel room, what was the inspiration for all the different set work?

Ashley M Marsh: I mean, honestly, we had such a great canvas to play with. The Westgate Hotel had a lot of what we needed and all we did was change the drapes and add a lot of tacky lights and art. We did bring in the poker table and, while you can’t really see it, we had a Westgate felt made so it matches everything. We brought in the table and the chairs, and that really beautiful bar, and all the barware. So, that’s how we really added to that space to take it up a notch to the Bond theme. Just added 1950s gold and tried to amp up what was readily available there.

The Contending: When Manousos gets to Albuquerque, he starts living in one of houses in Carol’s neighborhood. How did you decide what that house’s interior would be like?

Ashley M Marsh: It was actually a  fun set to do for us, because it’s not based on a real character that we know of, it’s just someone’s house. So me and Denise Pizzini got to just decide what we thought would be fun and pretty and cool. We got to be playful in a way that we don’t normally, because there was no root material to go off of. What we did specifically add I don’t remember but It was just a fun set that we got to do.

The Contending: You’ve worked with Vince Gilligan before on Better Call Saul and El Camino. How did that experience help with the work on Pluribus?

Ashley M Marsh: I definitely think having a working relationship for all those years just makes the work more fun. And it kind of makes it easier, too. Not to say that we have a shorthand; we have a long conversation about everything.  But we do have a sense of understanding and being able to really communicate because we know each other really well. That’s not a luxury we always get in this industry. A lot of times you work on a project and you only know someone for three months, six months, eight months, and being able to have that rapport is just incredible. It’s super helpful.

The Contending: The Joined recreate for Carol her favorite old diner as part of their charm offensive of her. We get a general idea about when Carol’s supposed to have visited it so some details make sense, but how did you decide on the vibe for that place?

Ashley M Marsh: I think they just wanted to have something that felt really timeless. You know, when you close your eyes and you think of a diner, you’re like, oh, yeah, that feels good. That location was the first Denny’s ever built in Albuquerque. If you go back and look at it, all those Denny’s have rock surfaces on the inside, and  that location has been through a lot of transitions. So we went back and we put new lighting in, they changed the ceilings, we added new booths. It was quite an overhaul, because it had been closed for several years. So, it was really fun.

The Contending: It sounded like with the Vegas set you didn’t have to do as much, but I was curious about some of Diabaté’s other hotel rooms. You had paintings of him all about. What went into creating those scenes?

Ashley M Marsh: That was definitely a detail that came from Vince and our producers, Jenn Carroll and Trina E. Siopy, but they had this wild hair for his character and they were like, let’s do a photo shoot of him. Let’s just get some absurd furniture, collaborate with costumes, and let’s just take him into the direction that he’s living the life of all lives. And so then we did. We had a full day of photo shoots with him, where he got to play around and do all those fun things. and then had them printed, and we took them over to the sets.

The bathroom was actually not at the hotel. That was at a different house, and fun little I don’t know if it’s an Easter egg or just a nugget of information, we shot that bathroom at the same house as we shot Saul’s house in season 6 of Better Call Saul. They  remembered that there were a lot of really interesting places in that house, and when they needed the bathroom, they were like, oh, we’ll just shoot  over there. So, that was pretty cool.

The Contending: Well, is there another set or idea that jumped out to you that you want our readers to know about?

Ashley M Marsh: I always like to talk about the hardest sets that maybe don’t always feel the most complicated, and there are three of those. The first one being the warehouse of body parts. That is all real. We had thousands of body parts that the foam sculptors were making, then painted, then wrapped by us, and then we filled all the shelves. That was days and days and days and days of work, because there was no VFX on that. That was all practical, and it took a really long time. It doesn’t seem like a huge space, but it is when you realize that it has twenty-foot ceilings.

The next one is Sprouts. That was a real Sprouts we used and was something that we had to do over two nights. One night we emptied it, and one night we put it back. We were really lucky, because we did have the guidance of some Sprouts team members with us, which was a really cool collaboration, because a lot of times we don’t get that kind of support from a company that we are working with. So we had their team leaders there to help us be like, no, this goes here, this goes here, and so it went really smoothly for us. And that was just really a fun thing, because you never get to just empty a place out.

Then, thirdly, when Zosia takes off in the C-130, and goes over the debris field that is not CGI, or kind of visual effects. That was a real plane that we had trucked in from a plane graveyard, and we had  giant equipment to make the plane look like it had crashed there.  We added additional seats and luggage that was thrown about and bodies with sheets on top of them. So that was one of the more interesting scenes that I’ve ever gotten to do. It was like, hey, let’s just  get a broken plane and mess stuff up over here. We also had that airfield closed down for three days, because it was an active  airfield, and we had to rent it out, and they had to do the traffic around us.  It was just interesting.