Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski Still Can’t Believe They Got to Make ‘Scott Pilgrim’ ‘Dumber and Weirder’
Proma Khosla
On June 6, the 2024 IndieWire Honors ceremony will celebrate 13 creators and stars responsible for some of the most stellar work of the TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, the event is a new edition of previous IndieWire Honors ceremonies, this time focused entirely on television. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles celebration.
Like the best ideas, “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” started with two friends getting dinner.
Series creator and original “Scott Pilgrim” scribe Bryan Lee O’Malley was out with BenDavid Grabinski, feeling stuck about a potential “Scott Pilgrim” adaptation for Netflix. O’Malley told IndieWire that the universe of the film, games, and graphic novels felt “very sludgy in my brain,” that he was at a loss for how to refresh it in the 2020s.
Then Grabinski offered — after some sake — “What if you killed Scott Pilgrim in the first episode?”
Six months after the series premiered, O’Malley and Grabinski are receiving the Spark Award for animation at this year’s TV-centered IndieWire Honors. They have known each other for years, but not through “Scott Pilgrim.” In fact, as series star Mary Elizabeth Winstead told IndieWire, Grabinski was a huge fan before they met, and the friendship grew out of his introduction to the tight-knit cast and crew of the film. The series was in development with O’Malley, film director Edgar Wright, and Jared LeBoff as executive producers.
“I didn’t go into the dinner with ideas of a ‘Scott Pilgrim’ show, our dinner had nothing to do with ‘Scott Pilgrim,’” Grabinski told IndieWire in a Zoom interview with O’Malley. “I was just a friend giving him advice and giving him ideas when he was afraid of doing the same story. We were talking about how much we like Ramona, we like the supporting characters, and I just blurted out, ‘Well if you kill Scott at the end of the pilot… then Ramona can become the lead, and we can start doing these other things.’
“And he got super excited about it… We were just talking to each other and just came up with a bunch of ideas, and then they ended up being exactly what the show was. By the end of the conversation, we had a concept.”
The concept quickly snowballed, paving the way for Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Matthew (Satya Bhabha), Knives (Ellen Wong), and many more to shine in Scott’s place. Without the eponymous hero in the picture, new questions emerged. What was the evil exes’ plan if they won? How does winning the fight with Scott boost Matthew’s confidence? Who dates Ramona — does anyone?
Grabinski recalls laying down foundational ideas of the series during that conversation. “In the span of about 15 or 20 seconds, I said, ‘What if Scott seemingly dies at the end of the pilot, but at the end of the show, you find out the older version of himself actually took himself out of the equation so he wouldn’t fight the exes, and then what if there’s a movie within the show about Scott Pilgrim starring Lucas Lee [Chris Evans],’” he said. “Those are the things that I said that immediately made Brian be like, ‘Oh, I think that’s a show.’”
After that, the rug was officially pulled out from the Scott Pilgrim universe, leaving a gloriously blank canvas. The eight episodes that debuted in November 2023 include those dinner ideas plus a backstory for Gideon (Jason Schwartzman), a meta mockumentary, not one but two time-travel MacGuffins, epic battles, and a Broadway musical.
“I pictured the fan standing up off the couch at the end of the first episode,” O’Malley said. “And never being able to sit back down.” (I took this comment personally.)
As the series took off, O’Malley and Grabinski held on tight to that vision of the audience, but it was never just one person. Sometimes it was the longtime “Scott Pilgrim” fan, sometimes the uninitiated viewer, sometimes the creators themselves — the ultimate litmus test of who could enjoy the material while being so close to the story. It was a balancing act, set in a multiverse. “We were threading six needles at once,” O’Malley said.
Grabinski said they were able to reach “our own difficult Bullseye” in part because of the trust from Netflix rather than an onslaught of notes and concerns about “how far-fetched this was.” In the “so many fucking conversations” that they had about story, many twists stemmed from the question: “What’s the most interesting thing that can happen?”
“The concept that we were doing in the way we wanted to execute it was not the easiest thing to do, but it was the only thing that was interesting to us,” Grabinski said. “In some ways, this was an easier decision, to throw everything out and … not have to worry about every single person measuring it against the books and the movie.”
Though he was consistently involved in the 2010 film “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” O’Malley said director Edgar Wright was always “the central driving force.” Grabinski credits Wright for empowering and respecting O’Malley, who became that driving force for “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”
“We have the dinner and then Brian went to Edgar and Universal and Netflix and said, ‘Hey, this is exactly what I want to do, and I want it to be this guy,’” Grabinski said. “So it’s a good chain of events for me.”
Along with spotlighting women and minorities in the ensemble cast, “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” also provided O’Malley with the opportunity to work with Science Saru, a Japanese animation studio led by a Korean woman, founder and CEO Eunyoung Choi. When O’Malley told Choi that he wasn’t doing the books, that he didn’t like repeating himself, she agreed completely.
“We were on the same wavelength,” O’Malley recalled. “We’re all about aiming high and creating something that felt like cinema, like art. They’re so good at their craft and they can do things that no one else can do, and we were just so lucky to have them.”
Of course, the looming question over a “Scott Pilgrim” reboot — or any reboot, but this one especially — was if and how it would reunite one of the most potent ensemble casts of the 21st century. As the lore goes, Wright emailed all the actors on a chain — O’Malley and Grabinski said they weren’t going to do it if even a single person said no — and then the producers watched in awe as, one by one, they said yes.
O’Malley described it as a “sports movie moment,” which Grabinski still seems to have trouble believing.
“I never thought that they would do it and I still can’t believe that they did,” he said. “I remember at one point Jared LeBoff saying, ‘I think they’re going to do it,’ and I thought, ‘Why do you think that? Why would anyone ever think that?’”
Then there was the guest cast: Wright’s longtime collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in cameos, Finn Wolfhard as young Scott, Will Forte as old (and even older) Scott, Bowen Yang, Kal Penn, Weird Al Yankovic, Stephen Root as the nanobots (“a major coup,” Grabinski calls it) and more. “This is amazing,” O’Malley recalls thinking as they kept asking for and booking coveted talent. “People want to be a part of Scott Pilgrim.”
Because of the fresh slate and time travel loopholes, “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” is as much about its 20something protagonists as the now 30-, 40-, and 50-something artists behind it. Winstead found it immensely meaningful to return to Ramona with all that in mind.
“I was so blown away by how Bryan and BenDavid were able to simultaneously capture these young guys that they were in 2009 or 2010 and at the same time bring all this wisdom and heartache and regret and hope that comes with getting older, infusing these characters and the world of Scott Pilgrim with that,” she told IndieWire in a dedication for O’Malley and Grabinski’s award.
“When the Scott Pilgrim movie came out, it changed my life in a weird meta way that I can’t really explain,” O’Malley said. “Except that I made a show about it so that everyone can feel the same way I felt.”
Looking back at the series now and how it connects to the novels, the film, and the overall experience, O’Malley said he feels a sense of “narrative cohesion” over the franchise that defined his career. When he first approached “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” that world was fading into the rearview for him, but not for fans. Now, that whole community has something new to cherish, along with a new generation of fans who may have found “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” first. In gaming terms, it’s a second life — one that has absolutely been lived to the fullest.
“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” is now streaming on Netflix.
