Michelle Pfeiffer Details The Madison Set Without Bathrooms or Food
Michelle Pfeiffer said the madison was filmed under conditions that felt more like a field camp than a TV set, with no bathroom, no food nearby, and no trailers in sight. She described the setup while discussing Tyler Sheridan’s Paramount+ series on the LA Times podcast “In Conversation: The Madison.”
Montana and Texas terrain
Pfeiffer said she was shooting scenes in open terrain in Montana and Texas when the lack of basic accommodations became impossible to miss. “You may as well be in a tent because, you know, there is no bathroom,” she said, adding, “There was really no place for us to sit.”
She also said, “There was no bathroom nearby. There was no food. And in the winter, it was cold. It was like, 'Could we have a heater?' And in the summer, it was like, 'Could I get an umbrella because the sun's really intense?' It took us about halfway through to figure all of that out.” That puts the production’s first stretch in a very specific category: a remote shoot that had to solve basic logistics after cameras were already rolling.
Why no trailers
Pfeiffer said the absence of trailers came down to the way the production was shooting. “We didn't really have a trailers there because they were shooting 360 [degrees]. So, they couldn't have a bunch of trailers around,” she said. She also said, “Even the outhouse is not real. So there's no AC, there's no plumbing, there isn't anything.”
The setup forced the cast to work around the terrain instead of the other way around, and Pfeiffer said the production was still building toward workable accommodations partway through filming. That is the practical takeaway for anyone tracking Sheridan’s output: this was not a polished backlot operation, but a location-heavy shoot that asked performers to absorb the conditions with very little infrastructure around them.
Pfeiffer and Sheridan’s gamble
The rough setup sits alongside another unusual piece of the project: Pfeiffer said taking it on was a “big leap of faith” because Sheridan did not have a script for the series and wanted to cast first, write later. She said she wanted to know who Stacy was before committing, and asked Helen Mirren to speak with her about her experience before signing on.
Pfeiffer also said the madison gave her the chance to share the screen again with Kurt Russell after their brief scenes in “Tequila Sunrise.” The larger business question now is whether Sheridan’s cast-first approach and remote production style can keep drawing talent into a series that started without a completed script and asked its performers to work through the cold, the heat, and the lack of even a chair.
