Nicole Fosse Pulls Back the Curtain on Her Parents and Previews ‘Fosse/Verdon’

In advance of the season premiere of FX’s new limited series, Fosse/Verdon, producer and creative consultant Nicole Fosse recently held a conference call with reporters, discussing her childhood, reflecting on her parents’ legacy, and sharing insight into the process of bringing their story to the small screen.

Bob Fosse’s influence is omnipresent in arts and entertainment today; we see it in how modern day music videos and movie musical numbers are filmed, the choreography gracing many stages, and how musicals are constructed.

“My father really changed the framework for Broadway. Pieces like Hamilton or In the Heights or Rent can happen because of my father’s work…the framework is different. Musicals are different because of the way he constructed musicals,” Fosse asserted.

His body of work, which includes Cabaret, Chicago, and Sweet Charity, is considered iconic and easily recognizable but too often, the significant influence of wife, muse, and frequent collaborator Gwen Verdon on his work is disregarded or diminished. However, that ends with Fosse/Verdon, which will shine the spotlight on them both.

That was not always the case, however. Originally, the series, heavily based on Sam Wasson’s definitive Fosse biography, was supposed to be focused only on Bob. 

“[Tommy Kail and Steven Levenson] came up to talk to me and spend a long weekend to sort of do a think-tank brainstorm session over the course of a couple of days. We did that and I have personal archival material that I brought to them for them to look at and on the way back, their drive back from Vermont back to New York City, they realized that they wanted to do Fosse and Verdon, that they were equal components,” Fosse shared.

It’s clear that the focus on her mother is important to Fosse.

When reflecting on the show, she shared, “I think it brings a lot of light onto my mother, which is long overdue. She was in the shadow of my father for a long time because she was not the director, not the choreographer, although she contributed behind the scenes an incredible amount, so I’m very happy that she’s really being brought forth into the public eye.”

Despite having a front row seat so to speak to her parents’ lives, the process of creating the show appears to have helped Fosse understand her parents in new ways.

“I’m much more aware of how distraught my father could be internally. Being raised with him as my father, that was normal to me, the obsession with work, the crazy hours, and when I watch it on screen or read it in a script, I really see how, what’s the right word, how enveloped he was by show business to the point where he didn’t really develop a lot of another life…everything was show business to him,” she explained.

“And my mother is really wonderful to see her sense of fun and her sense of joy and the way she dressed and fixed her hair and laughed at situations. She found humor in situations that to others may not have humor in them, and so I think that that facet has been really wonderful to watch unfold.”

Furthermore, since there were not as many sources of information on her mother as there were for her father, over the course of crafting the show, Nicole Fosse became a primary source of information on her mother as well as Fosse and Verdon’s family life.

The writers would consistently come to Nicole Fosse for insight into Gwen’s life as it ran parallel to Bob’s. “They would ask me, ‘what’s [Gwen] doing while this is going on?’ and I would tell them and then I started really as an adult, understand much more about her participation,” Fosse confessed.

Fosse and Verdon shared a unique bond. Of her parents, Nicole Fosse said, “They did have a lot of complementary qualities. My mother was always bringing the joy and the fun, and I think my father really — that was very nurturing to him in a sense. He had a lot of fun and mischief in him as well but I think he could lose sight of that sometimes.”

Fosse and Verdon’s connection was powerful.

“I think they just, I don’t know what that thing is when you meet somebody and they knew they could trust each other even when their marriage was no longer really a marriage, they still had another, it was no longer a romantic marriage, they still had a romance together, and they had a lifelong relationship with each other, and I don’t really know how that happens but they had a lot of trust with each other and a lot of loyalty and if you exclude the bedroom part, they were loyal to each other their entire lives really. They spoke every day, twice a day on the telephone,” Fosse said.

As you can imagine, finding the right people to portray Fosse and Verdon was essential. The alchemy had to be just right to capture their connection and their distinct ways of moving.

Fosse has high praise for the performances of Michelle Williams and Sam Rockwell, on whom much of the success of the series depends. “They’re just so fantastic, they’re so thoughtful, they’re so nuanced and detailed and they’re so curious about finding truth that may be buried deep within something, within the language,” she gushed.

“They both really cared a lot about all the details, from how you wear a hat, to the kind of shoes you have on, or the clothing, or the type of teacup, because they felt that this all informed them as to who their characters’ sensibilities were and it helped them to create authenticity from a genuine place rather than an imitation of Bob and Gwen. I have so much respect for both of them as actors.”

Fosse revealed about Williams and Rockwell’s processes: “Sam would be in his trailer in the middle of filming watching on a huge screen my father doing a television interview and he would have my father’s voice in an iPod in his ear all the time and he had a dialect coach who would come on the set with him.”

“There were times where I saw him do a scene and it felt to me like I was watching my father because he understood the spectrum of behavior that my father could be in, you know, like joy…he was always finding different levels and different ways within the spectrum that he was learning and discovering to be the truth and the same goes for Michelle.”

Nicole Fosse’s praise for the cast and crew of Fosse/Verdon is effusive.

When discussing Williams, Rockwell, and the extensive — and impressive — list of creatives that were part of the process, including Hamilton team Tommy Kail, Lin Manuel Miranda, Alex Lacamoire, and Andy Blankenbuehler, Dear Evan Hansen veteran Steven Levenson, and costume designer Melissa Toth, Nicole asserted, “everybody on board this project was determined to tell an authentic story, an emotionally authentic story and make it beautiful even when it was difficult.”

Overall, duality seems to be a running theme for the series.

First, there’s the dual focus on Fosse and Verdon, but there’s also a sense that the show tries to balance showing the glamour and grandeur of Fosse, Verdon, and the world surrounding them with the dysfunction and difficulty that were part of their lives in equal measure. 

“I think one thing that this series is really exploring is how there can be something so fabulous coexisting with equal weight to something that is also devastating,” Fosse noted.

Though in some ways the show is a period piece, with events ranging from the 1940s through the 1980s, and centers on two people heavily steeped in show business, Fosse believes the story will speak to and be relevant to a modern audience.

“I do believe that the way it is written, directed, and the characterizations portrayed, I think it’s a very human story and we all feel the same feelings. My parents just happened to live in an orange crushed velvet living room with sequins but the feelings are all the same,” she remarked.

“I think that Sam and Michelle as well as Tommy and the other directors and Steven and the other writers have done such an incredible job of telling the humanity and showing the humanity within these people so I think for a 2019 audience, historically, I think it could be very interesting for people, younger generations, to see where so much influence has come from. I think it gives, if you’re using my mother as a role model, it gives women the permission to be kooky and wonderful and individual and unique and loyal and independent all at the same time.”

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Fosse/Verdon premieres Tuesday, April 9th at 10/9c on FX.

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