Twisted Metal's Motor Heads

In case you were wondering, you do not need to have played the video game Twisted Metal, or even know anything about it, to work on its television adaptation. Doubt it? Production designer Victoria Paul and picture car supervisor Ty Guidnoz had zero experience with the PlayStation game before they were hired to help bring it to life.

The ten-episode action comedy, premiering July 27 on Peacock, takes place in a near future in which a virus has wiped out all computers. In the fractured society that emerges from the resulting catastrophe, cities are walled off and self-sufficient, while the large swaths of land between them are anarchic wastelands filled with isolated camps of survivors. Anthony Mackie (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) stars as John Doe, who ferries supplies across the Divided States of America.

The cast is rounded out by Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) as Quiet, who joins John on his journey, and Thomas Haden Church (Divorce) as psychotic highway patrolman Agent Stone.

"I am not a player," Paul says of the source material. "The game permeated the culture enough so that I was familiar. I didn't know any of the details, but I knew it was about vehicular mayhem, which sounded pretty great."

Guidnoz, who grew up playing on the first generation of Atari game consoles, had even less awareness. "I was kind of clueless," he says. "I had to go down the rabbit hole to find out what it was all about." When he saw what was in store, he thought, "This is gonna be really cool."

Creating that world offered fun challenges for both artists, who had worked together on NCIS: New Orleans. For Paul, it was being able to craft both clean, higher-tech locations in the cities beside more apocalyptic looks in the countryside, while also working with Guidnoz and his team to fashion the kinds of outlandish automobiles not seen this side of a Mad Max movie. In a world where a person's vehicle is a big part of survival, tricked-out cars with rocket-powered engines and hidden weapons are the norm.

"We obviously did wonderful renderings of the vehicles," Paul recalls. "Construction-type drawings. I went through a lot of iterations of that with [cocreator and showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith] before we started on a vehicle, so that we were as clear as possible."

That includes the flashiest ride in the show's first three episodes, a repurposed ice cream truck with a giant, sinister-looking clown bobblehead on the roof belonging to the Las Vegas crime boss known as Sweet Tooth (voiced by Will Arnett of Arrested Development and performed by Joe Seanoa, aka wrestler Samoa Joe). That truck was by far the most fun for everyone to make and had quite the effect when the crew got its first look.

"We carved that head," Paul explains, "and we wanted to attach it with a really heavyweight spring. The first time everyone saw it move on set, they all lost their minds because it kind of came over a hill and was going, boinga-boinga-boinga. It was just hilarious."

For a car guy like Guidnoz, this is a dream job because, as he says with a wide smile, "It let us do some things that we thought would be really cool." It's a gig he wouldn't mind keeping for a while. "I tell you what, I would do this show for twenty seasons."

The interviews for this story were completed before the start of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.