Earlier this month, Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz addressed the on-set outburst that Jeffrey Tambor had at Jessica Walter while filming the show’s new season—an incident that turned a New York Times interview with the cast into a complete disaster—with Hurwitz explaining that he didn’t realize how awful Tambor’s behavior was at the time because he wasn’t on set when it happened. In fact, Hurwitz said he wasn’t on set for a lot of the new season of Arrested Development, explaining that he fell into a bad habit of delivering scripts late and not being available to the cast. According to David Cross, though, that was an even bigger issue than Hurwitz was letting on.
Speaking with Jim Norton and Sam Roberts on their SiriusXM show this week (via IndieWire), Cross said filming the show this time around “wasn’t an easy shoot” because of how often they were getting unfinished script pages. “You’d get something at night,” he explained, “and it’d be fucking pages and pages of stuff, and then it would change later on that night.” He said they’d get to set in the morning and there’d be even more pages of new stuff that they hadn’t seen before. He said this “added to the tension” on set and that “people weren’t able to do scenes correctly,” suggesting that this frustrating climate is what drove Tambor to be so on edge in the first place.
That being said, Cross hopefully gets that the mess Hurwitz made with the scripts doesn’t justify Tambor’s behavior. Reflecting on that awful New York Times interview, which involves the men of the show climbing over each other to defend Tambor while Walter cried, Cross said on the SiriusXM show that “Nobody gives a shit about your context.” He added, “If there’s a crying woman in the room—or whoever, if there’s somebody crying—nobody cares about your ‘well, buts.’” He also implied that he thinks there’s some possibility Netflix will cancel the show after this PR shitshow, but so far no official announcements have been made.