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As the kids would say today, the audacity!
White male privilege, corporate power and the pitfalls of boxing out the wrong people al crowd the court in FX’s Clipped, a fast-paced and often gripping look at a flagrant foul from recent sports history. The six-part limited series sets out to retell—and slightly fictionalize—the real-life scandal surrounding former owner of the L.A. Clippers, Donald Sterling (here played by Ed O’Neill, so far from his affable Modern Family grinchiness). Back in 2014, Sterling was caught on tape unleashing a grotesquely racist rant at his “assistant” and lover V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman) about her association with Black people after she posted a photo with Magic Johnson on social media.
Kelsey McNeal / FX
The scandal led to the NBA’s lifetime ban against Sterling and the events leading up to that tape being made public, the deterioration of Sterling’s marriage to wife Shelly (Jacki Weaver) and his off-court clashes with new coach Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) become fodder for a news cycle for a weeks. Additional reports of discord among the players (including TV versions of Blake Griffin, Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan), Stiviano’s legendary interview with Barbara Walters and an eventual 30 for 30 podcast all made executive-producer Gina Welch’s job that much easier.
“Wherever there was a document, whether it was the tape that V. made of Donald Sterling or a lawsuit or the Barbara Walters interview, we tried to stay as faithful to the document as possible,” she told us during this February sit down with some of her all-star lineup (which you can watch above). In addition to the “hours and hours and hours of research,” she also saw that “there was so much absurdity in this story and so many larger-than-life characters” to dig into when it came to recreating the major players’ excessive wealth and the unbridled ugliness beneath it. “I really wanted to capture the absurdity and the surreality, the naturally occurring surreality of Los Angeles in the way that we staged these scenes to make sure that it felt both substantial and fun.”
For Coleman, the glut of information already out there, paired with Stiviano’s personal backstory, was all she needed to figure out how to play a woman many still underestimate. “Obviously she’s a very free, unapologetic person, but she’s a human being.” notes the actress. “So I led with compassion really. And once I got to learn a little more context about her upbringing, where she was coming from, she actually totally made sense to me. So it wasn’t difficult to get into her psyche at all.”
That said, it wasn’t a clear shot from scripting this story to filming it. In fact, the tricky nature of telling such an unsettling story may have inspired O’Neill to bench any future fact-based projects. “Actually my preference is to work on things where I can laugh a little bit,” he admits. “And so I mean, listen…based on all of the legal hurdles we’ve jumped through, I won’t be doing based on a true story for a long time.”
FX’s Clipped, Series Premiere, Tuesday, June 4, Hulu