Check out all eight episodes of Boo, Bitch with a Netflix subscription before reading this SPOILER-filled interview.
Anyone see that Boo, Bitch twist coming? After Lana Condor’s Erika Vu rises to high school fame and leaves her bestie, Zoe Colletti’s Gia, in the dust, she finds out that it has been Gia all along who was killed in a freak deer-car accident. Oops! We talked to the Boo, Bitch stars about how they made that plot twist work on set and whether it was a secret to other cast members.
What goes down in Boo, Bitch is the kind of disorientating ending that has one second-guessing the last few hours of television and trying to connect how that could be. Now, the new July Netflix release did have some holes in its lore, as we questioned how Erika could be seen by everyone if she was dead, but the show figured out how to pull a trick on us. Zoe Colletti – who turned out to be the actress behind the real ghost of the series – spoke to how the twist was dealt with while filming:
I think one of the hardest things was making sure everyone remembered that nobody could look at me during the scenes while we were filming. They just all had to make sure they were looking at Lana, which I think is incredibly difficult to remember – that you just can’t look at one of the actors that's standing in the scene. So having to remind everyone of that consistently through the shoot was definitely pretty difficult, but I knew pretty early on in the process, I mean obviously before filming, I knew that's what happened, but I think it's somewhat important that everybody knew that that was the twist just 'cause knowing the arc of the show, I think impacts how other people viewed their character and kind of prepared for their own character's storyline as well.
So… apparently if you watch Boo, Bitch again, no character ever looks at Gia. Lana Condor, who previously found popularity on Netflix as the star of the All The Boys trilogy, also spoke to making the twist work in every episode without being a dead giveaway to the audience. In her words:
Because I'm the only one that can talk to her, look at her and see her, I think it was so interesting because I would watch you do little things like opening a door. She would always have to remember that it's her choice that she can't hold anything, you know? Little things like that which the viewer might not think about… Like even just walking into school, like who would walk in first? Me, because I have to open it because she can't do little things like that. It was so interesting.
If you were keenly observing it, you may have noticed it! With the exception of Condor and Tenzing Norgay Trainor’s Gavin, who has medium powers, the rest of the Boo, Bitch cast had to be aware of not looking at Coletti because she was an invisible ghost the whole time who only Erika could see. Condor continued:
I'm curious to see how quickly audiences pick up on whether or not she is. I'm curious to see how fast they pick up on the way that we did it, no one ever looked at her, which I think is very isolated and so lonely. No one ever looked at her, but we had the camera positioned in ways where it's not totally obvious that no one's looking at her. So we'll see. I'm super fascinated. I find that rewatchability with Netflix is like something that's so important. So my hope with the show is that it is going to be re-watchable because of the Zoe flip.
While speaking to the Boo, Bitch stars, CinemaBlend also spoke to them about its homage to Mean Girls, which comes as the movie recently returned to Netflix. The series certainly has a lot of nods to the 2004 comedy and its takes on the high school setting. While Erika becomes obsessed with status when she thinks her time on Earth is over, she learns that none of that actually matters and it was not her unfinished business after all.
Once Erika tells all her classmates about Gia, and how she’s been dead throughout these few weeks, Gia is able to finally pass on, finally being known among her peers. Yeah… things got real real by the end of Boo, Bitch and that twist was surprising! It definitely deserves a rewatch now that the whole season is available streaming on Netflix.
