The Miniature Wife probably isn’t what a marriage therapist would recommend to solve any marital crisis — but the Peacock drama does cleverly use a science experiment gone awry to explore the health of the marriage between Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen’s characters. For showrunners Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner, the metaphor — Macfadyen’s scientist accidentally shrinks his novelist wife down to 6 inches tall — provided rich storytelling opportunities, which were only enhanced by their talented actors, even though the technical requirements meant they were rarely onscreen together. “They made every single scene better than we thought it could ever be,” says Turner.
Gold Derby: This is based on a short story — or pardon the pun — a tiny little story. What made you want to adapt into a TV show?
Jennifer Ames: Upon reading the short story, what jumped off the page was it just felt like The Incredible Shrinking Woman meets The War of the Roses, which seemed like so much fun, coupled with the fact that it was an interesting way to get your arms around the power dynamic in a relationship. Something familiar but unfamiliar. Now, the short story was written only from the husband’s point of view. So that’s what really got us thinking. This could be interesting for me personally, being that I do have two husbands — I have my real husband and then, of course, my work husband, Steve. So I think that was really all coming together.
The inspiration for it reminded us of those great studio comedies from the ‘80s and ‘90s, like Big or Home Alone or Romancing the Stone or The Money Pit. We referenced Big and Groundhog Day a lot because it’s got that one buy in. And if we can just earn that, if you really believe to a certain extent that he can miniaturize his wife to 6 inches tall, then we’re in and we can tell just the marriage story.
Steve Turner: And that really comes back to the metaphor, then it becomes real. You feel small in a relationship and then she’s 6 inches tall. So it couldn’t be more fun to play that out in real life. It becomes a little bit of a wish fulfillment fantasy kind of thing.
And then you’ve got these great actors — Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen. What did they bring to their roles?
Turner: Oh, my God — they’re just like the dream options. We got both of them and we’re just so lucky to have them on the show. They made every single scene better than we thought it could ever be. And it was a challenging shoot. Elizabeth was literally on a green screen by herself with eyeballs 50 feet in the air. She’s doing these emotional scenes to a pair of eyeballs. And then he’s on the floor. I mean, the guy just won two Emmys, and we’ve got him crawling around on a rug talking to a doll. And then we took the doll away from him to do the scene. So it was even more crazy for him to do it. So we just got two of the most talented people at the top of their game, and just couldn’t be more thrilled with what happened.
Ames: I just describe it as magic because it’s also like, is this thing going to work? And it feels like because they can so seamlessly go from comedy to drama to physical comedy on top of it. We just got really lucky.
That leads into my next question. How did you get the right tone? Because it’s satire, it’s sci-fi, it’s drama. There’s a lot going on here. How did you balance all of those tones?
Turner: That was the challenge, right? Obviously, we got [director] Greg Mottola, who this is his bailiwick, this dramedy kind of space that he’s really good at. And Matthew and Elizabeth are a big, huge part of that. They’re so talented at both that they could find it in a scene like where to go a little bit bigger, where to go smaller, or where to be a little more emotional, where to play the comedy of it. It was an evolving kind of thing where we all kind of found it together.
Ames: What he said. [Laughs.]
What were some of the themes you wanted to explore, because obviously this becomes a metaphor for the state of their marriage. How heavy-handed did you want to be?
Ames: We really were excited about the heavy-handedness because when we were talking about the why now of it all, we finally had it nailed. Why now? How come this hasn’t ever been done before? The metaphor becoming real felt spot on. But I do think the other thing that we wanted to get underneath was just, again, the power dynamics in a relationship was a real theme. I think not only is this show about that, and yes, look, she’s 6 inches tall. She’s upset about that and rightfully so. But more than that, at some point it becomes more than, I’m 6 inches tall. They have a daughter. So we decided it would be an interesting way to explore just a relationship in general.
Turner: To add to that, it really comes down to marriage itself is the science of give and take, and this was a perfect example of that. Right from the beginning, she’s 6 inches tall, and the first thing you need to do is figure out how to talk to each other and communicate and really listen, and then you’ve got to work together to fix it. How could that not be the formula for every relationship of any kind? That’s the formula for success.
Ames: Communication and compromise.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced? Obviously, there’s the technical challenge of filming all of this. How did you work all of that out?
Turner: We had a lot of science, and I was in charge of science on the show. His formula makes people a ratio of 12 to 1 smaller. Elizabeth is a little over 5-foot-6. And so she was a little under 6 inches tall. So that became the big math problem — how far away is the camera, what the focal length should be — a lot of crazy stuff like that. But we try to keep all of that away from Elizabeth and Matthew and just let them live in the scene. I feel like that was the big challenge, was to take the technical stuff out of the way and just let them live in the emotions of the moment.
Ames: I would say the biggest challenge was Matthew and Elizabeth, these two great actors being it never really being in scenes together unless they were both regular-sized. And a lot of that came down to a lot of pressure on the script and the writing, first and foremost, without the inability to necessarily improv and go from there. And then, like Steve mentioned earlier, I think Elizabeth being alone in green screen, just looking at those eyeballs high up there. We tried as much as we could to give her big props to play with. And the question that I keep coming back to, which is, is it going to work? Are we going to be able to play the comedy, the drama, all of the emotion, and the physicality with them acting with only their imagination?
What about the emotional challenges of the storytelling? Whose side are we supposed to be on? They’re both kind of, let’s be honest, awful.
Turner: I think it was good for us. What we were going for is, depending on the argument they’re having, I think they’re both right. And they’re both wrong. And that, I think, is where the fun is because you can kind of read for one and then be like, oh, he’s totally wrong. She’s probably right. And then the next episode you’re like, wait a minute, he’s totally right.
Ames: You’re changing sides.
Is there a moment when you knew that you’d nailed that?
Ames: I will say the thing that made me realize that this just might work was when we saw Elizabeth’s chemistry read with Sophia, who plays her daughter. It was a very emotional scene between the two of them where she reveals to her daughter that she’s 6 inches tall and the chemistry read was over zoom. Elizabeth made herself so teeny tiny in the frame, and Sophia made herself so big. And they have this reveal and this emotional scene, and it ends with what we call the nose hug. It was so moving. They really just nailed it.
Steve Turner: For me, it was just seeing the first episode of being able to see those scenes where they have to spend so much time apart, actually seeing them in a scene together. The chemistry between the two of them is just bananas. It was on and off the set, too. You just felt like these two were married to each other. It was just fun to watch.
What do you think audiences are responding to the most about it?
Ames: People are really responding to the end. They really go at it, it gets dark, in the spirit of Home Alone and the traps around the house at 6 inches tall that she leaves for him, stabbing him in the eye, creating a moat in the bedroom so that she can’t get across it so he can get some sleep, him releasing a very hungry cat into the house and allowing fate to decide whether or not she may survive that.
I think landing the plane, having them have to work together in that way and leaving with some hope at the end of it was good because we really put them through it. There was a lot of debate. So I’m glad that we ended it where we did.
Turner: I felt the same thing. I think it’s about the optimism that that even these two who seem awful, they even can find some space to be together.
Ames: And that’s part of why even we wanted to tell the story is it felt with these two kind of awful people truly their foundation is built on genuine love, that perhaps what they really needed was a bigger emotional reset to come back together again. We like to think that maybe miniaturization could be better than couples’ therapy. You do get to play out that fantasy, that wish fulfillment that, look, I’m angry at you. I’m going to dangle you over the toilet and I might flush. That is a real possibility on this show.
This article and video are presented by Peacock.
