During the filming of Arrested Development’s new season, Jeffrey Tambor had some sort of furious outburst on set that was directed at his on-screen wife Jessica Walter, an incident that the cast largely brushed under the rug until it rose back to the surface during a New York Times interview. In that chat, the show’s male leads—specifically Jason Bateman, David Cross, and Tony Hale—did their best to dismiss the incident as nothing particularly dramatic, even as Walter cried and noted that it something that had never happened to her before in her 60-year acting career. Bateman later apologized, admitting that he had unintentionally trashed Walter in his attempt to defend Tambor, and now Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz is issuing an apology of his own.
Speaking with Deadline, Hurwitz says that he didn’t realize at the time “how deeply upsetting” the incident was for Walter, saying he had only “heard about it” and seen some of it in the footage taken on set that day. The whole thing didn’t seem very “momentous” to him because of that, so even though Walter had told him she was upset about it, he figured everything was fine because she “didn’t let on that it was still upsetting and present for her” when she got back on set. Hurwitz says he didn’t realize he was wrong until he read that New York Times interview, telling Deadline, “There was more to it than I realized, and it’s not my place to opine about what I believe was the weight of it.” He also added that he “misinterpreted” what had happened and misunderstood Walter’s “pain about it,” saying that he feels bad for letting his cast down and not making “a greater effort to know the pain that [the incident] caused.”
Interestingly, the fact that Hurwitz wasn’t on set for the Tambor incident seems like it was also part of a larger problem this season, with him telling Deadline that the cast had to stage an “intervention” for him when he started delivering scripts late and wasn’t available during filming. He says the cast was “getting script changes without context” for scenes they didn’t have time to prepare for, which he thinks was “even more aggravating for them than they let on.” Despite all of this, though, Hurwitz says the whole cast is still very close and that the premiere of the show’s new season in May was a “special night.”