An Interview with Ian McCulloch, Showrunner/Executive Producer of ‘Teacup’

TEACUP -- “LA Screening” -- Pictured: Ian McCulloch, Showrunner / Executive Producer at CityWalk Hollywood on October 9, 2024 -- (Photo by: Randy Shropshire/Peacock)

Ian McCulloch is an accomplished writer and producer that has worked on such shows as Chicago Fire and Yellowstone. Currently he serves as the Showrunner/Executive Producer of the new Peacock series, Teacup, and we had the honor of sitting down with Ian to discuss his new show.
 
John Betancourt: I would love to start by getting to know what inspired you to create this absolutely chilling series.
 
Ian McCulloch: Well, James Wan and his company Atomic Monster came to me with the book, and I read the book, and they said, “How would you feel about adapting it?” And I said, “I'd love to, but what I'd like to do is I'd like to turn it on its head. I like to take everything that’s big, make it small. Like to take lots of characters and make it very few characters.” And I wanted to do something where, where we really dug deep into the horror of isolation and not knowing who to trust. And that's what excited me about it, the core ideas from the book, and taking those and really running with them.
 
John Betancourt: I do want to dive deep into a lot of the creation process today, because I was very impressed with that isolation, because you definitely have some George Romero, Night of the Living Dead vibes there that I love. But what stunned me was just the sheer sense of dread that just hangs over every single episode, that only obviously gets worse as the series progresses. But I'm curious what inspired the decision to go so hard on the terror aspect of it, because horror sometimes pulls back. You did not.
 
Ian McCulloch: Yeah, what I wanted to do was, you know, save our moments. And then when horrific things happen, they're more affecting and effective when you've held back for a little while. And then, so it's not just jump scare after jump scare after you close the refrigerator door, there's somebody behind it, etc, etc. It's much more effective when you lead up to it with what you were talking about, that sense of tension and dread, raises, raises, raises, and then it has to break, it has to give, and then you can build it up again. And the idea was to save those moments so that you're winding your way through a story, and you come upon them, and they feel unexpected, which, you know, we've all seen so many movies and TV series and read so many books and comics that we're used to these things, and it's very it's challenging to surprise an audience. So the big thing was, how do I make it something that's surprising and not just very, very familiar.
 
John Betancourt: That leads me right to my next question, because I do want to know -- you mentioned the fact that obviously you took something grandiose and scaled it down to something intimate. And obviously there’s the challenge of making sure that a modern horror audience will find terror. What were those challenges then, in assembling such an ambitious horror feature?
 
Ian McCulloch: I think the challenge was the characters and living as those characters. As you write something, you have to kind of be every character as they go through their journey. And it's being on the ground level with those people, how do they react? What do they do? And it's not just what would I do in this situation, it's what would that character do? And as you go along, the challenge is to get to know those characters and to embody them enough as you're writing it that it becomes second nature, and you don't have to think about what their reaction will be, and that's… it's challenging, because it takes, you're kind of casting a spell on yourself, and that takes some work and some time and some effort.
 
John Betancourt: I'm curious what underlying messages you hope audiences take away when they've walked away from this utterly scary series?
 
Ian McCulloch: Well, the first thing I want is, I want it to be escapism. You know, I want it to be horror, but I don't want it to be so horrific that you don't want to watch it. I want people to be able to put their lives aside and for a half an hour, or if they get to watch a few episodes, they can just live in that world. So escapism first and foremost, but the some of the themes, I would say the most important theme in it is control and lack of control, and what it's like to lose control, and how do you react to that, whether it's control of where you can go, control of where your loved ones are, what they're doing, control over who you can trust. The list goes on, as you'll see in the series, but control was definitely something that was always coming back up in conversations and on set and in production.
 
John Betancourt: The last question that I have for you today, what are you most proud of when it comes to what you've assembled here?
 
Ian McCulloch: That's a really hard question. I mean, it changes every day, like right now today, I'm most proud of the publicity people and the marketing people, because they are going above and beyond and doing such a great job. During production, it was the actors, the directors, the cinematographers. In post-production, the editors. I mean, there's just, it's a rare thing when you can tell people are all really excited about doing what they're doing, and it's not just a job or another paycheck. And the fact that so many people felt inspired by this story, this process, with everyone else involved, that's, you know, it's hard. It's like someone was saying, Who's your favorite character? And I'm like, they're all my favorite characters. You know what I mean?
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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