NOTE: This Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies interview has been edited for clarity.
One of the most notable benefits of expanding the Grease universe into television medium is that the long-form storytelling leaves room for more character exploration across the ensemble.
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies is an upcoming Paramount+ prequel series set four years before the events of Grease (1978). Romantic subplots and individual character arcs are set in motion at varying speeds of development. This makes the show’s world feel more immersive.
Maxwell Whittington-Cooper portrays Wally, a popular football player, and Nicholas McDonough portrays Gil, one of the members of the T-Birds.
LadyJenevia: Maxwell, I’m glad that you’re joining the hall of fame of iconic Maxwells [in the Grease universe] since the leading man of Grease 2 is Maxwell Caulfield.
Maxwell: There we go!
LadyJenevia: Hazel calls your character Wally out for his propensity for conformity and his questionable choice in friends. Was that moment ultimately what draws him to her and if so, why?
Maxwell: Oh, excellent question! I definitely think that moment draws Wally to Hazel. I think it opens his eyes to the vast possibilities and array of way that he can go about navigating Rydell. I think he was brought up and has experienced one way of doing things and that’s being a goody-two-shoes and doing everything by the book and being twice as good so that he doesn’t get in trouble, so that he doesn’t get hit twice as hard when things go awry. I think as the story progresses, he starts to figure out, ‘How do I want to show up at Rydell? How can I do that on my own terms?’ and Hazel inspires that in him.
LadyJenevia: I’m rooting for those two. I’ve only seen the first five episodes so I don’t know if you two get together at the end of the season but that’s what I’m hoping for.
Maxwell: Tune in! Good to hear that.
LadyJenevia: Nicholas, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Gil in episode one but then we got to the other episodes and I saw how much he was into Olivia. I thought, ‘Well, he has great taste so we can work with that!’
Nicholas: Yes!
LadyJenevia: What work did you do as an actor to flesh him out as a character so that you know who he is and you know how to play him even if we as the audience haven’t gotten to know him as much in the first five episodes?
Nicholas: Throughout this season, he kind of unfolds as all the characters do and we get to see a lot more different sides of him. In the beginning, it’s a lot of what he thinks he needs to be. He needs to be cool, he needs to be unfazed always, and reckless, and ‘stick it to the man’. That’s the whole point of the show is everyone just gets to discover themselves, where they really belong, and they don’t actually have to conform to the way that things are or the way they have been. That was my thought process for this season and in terms of getting there, mostly it was just letting my weird out and feeling free to be silly and weird. That’s what T-Birds are. Our job is to cause trouble.
LadyJenevia: The show has the fabulous Jamal Sims working on it.
Nicholas: Yeah!
LadyJenevia: Can you share a bit about the experience of working with him and getting to bring his choreography to life?
Nicholas: Oh, it’s a dream. I highly recommend it!
Maxwell: Jamal is a superstar. He really just imbues every move with so much soul and he puts so much thought into each musical number, and he was really patient. I am not a trained dancer and we were surrounded by so many classically trained dancers in our ensemble. Jamal and the entire ensemble were so patient and giving in teaching us the dance moves.
Nicholas: They took so much time and made sure everyone felt comfortable no matter what their background was or experience level was.
Maxwell: Exactly.
Nicholas: They taught us all the choreo and said, ‘This is the shape of it, these are the bones, this is the structure, and then within that, once we have it, then I want your characters individually to each shine. This is the move; how would Gil do the move? This is the move; how would Potato, how would Wally do this move?’ which are really different. Wally and Gil would not do a time-step the same.
Maxwell: Exactly.
Nicholas: Nor do we.
Maxwell: In real life, right?
Both: [laugh]
Grease: Rise of The Pink Ladies premieres on April 6 exclusively on Paramount+