Interview: Crafting The White House as a Vivid Character in “The Residence”

In Netflix’s The Residence, a comedic whodunit set at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House itself emerges as a captivating character, brimming with secrets and intrigue. Created by Paul William Davies and executive produced by Shonda Rhimes, the series follows eccentric detective Cordelia Cupp, played by Uzo Aduba, as she investigates a murder during a chaotic state dinner, navigating 132 rooms and 157 suspects.

Production designer François Audouy, known for his meticulous work transforms the White House into a labyrinthine stage, crafting an unprecedented recreation across seven soundstages at Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles. Audouy’s team, with their attention to detail – from custom chandeliers to secret passageways – breathes life into the mansion, making it a dynamic presence that rivals the stellar cast, including Giancarlo Esposito and Randall Park.

Star Uzo Aduba was utterly captivated by Audouy’s creation, describing the set as “so grand, so breathtaking, it felt alive.” Her awe, expressed during her entertaining and insightful TV Topics podcast episode, underscores the immersive world Audouy built, where every room tells a story and every detail hides a clue. Audouy’s vision not only elevates the mystery but also invites viewers to explore the White House’s hidden corners, from the state floor’s opulence to the basement’s gritty labyrinth. Here is my interview with François Audouy, where he shares the challenges and triumphs of bringing this iconic residence to life.

Listen to or read our full conversation below.

STEVEN PRUSAKOWSKI: Well, thanks for doing this today.

François Audouy: My pleasure.

STEVEN PRUSAKOWSKI: Enjoyed the series and enjoyed your work in it. I was really amazed by what we see and then learning that it was all sets built from scratch is what I’ve heard. So I’d love to hear more about that.

François Audouy: Yeah, it’s a very unique production in that the whole thing is pretty much on stage. We had almost all of Rally Studios at our disposal, which is a studio across the street from Paramount in Hollywood, in the heart of Hollywood. And we had something like, I think, eight stages. And each stage had a different floor of the executive mansion. We recreated pretty much the entire executive mansion of the White House. Basement, ground floor, state floor, second floor, and the third floor, plus the South Portico out of the parking lot, plus the South Lawn and the fictitious orangery sort of garden shed building that we put out there. So it’s a massive project.

SP: And because of the scale of it, how early did you get involved and how did you get involved?

François Audouy: Well, I just got a call. I got a call from Paul Davies, who’s the showrunner, and he sent me the first two episodes that he had written. And I was immediately struck by the scope that he had written, which was really interesting to me because the White House is a character in this murder mystery as much as any of the other characters. It really is a character. And the audience gets to know the house profoundly in a way I think that we’ve never seen before. From not only the front of house, like state floor and the second floor residence, we’ve sort of all seen that before, but this show takes us behind the scenes, into the basement, into the nooks and crannies and the staff elevators and staff stairways and tunnels and hallways and areas that we’ve never been introduced to in a film or television series. The thing that really struck me too with his script, which was really terrific and engaging, is that he described in the script these cutaway or dollhouse shot moments. And he described them in a way that he’s like, look, I don’t know how we’re going to figure this out yet, but it’ll be something for the production designer to figure out later. But we pull out into some sort of cutaway thing, and I’m not sure how this works. But he literally wrote this as a challenge in the script that I thought was a wonderful thing to help imagine. And we ended up designing the White House so that the walls could disappear like a dollhouse, and all the big sets rather, that we built on stage could puzzle piece together and all fit together plausibly and logically. So everything was designed to fit together in the master plan, which I think made it even more interesting and challenging.

SP: Were you given access to the White House before doing this for research purposes? Or how did you research?

François Audouy: Well, to answer your first question, I probably had five months of prep or something, if I remember correctly, maybe six months. But we didn’t have time really to go to Washington, D.C. because it was, that may sound like a lot of time, but we were, we had so much to do. And so our first set was the third floor set that we had to do, followed by the state floor. And the state floor was almost a one-to-one recreation of the actual state floor, almost the same size, built across two stages. We actually took two stages and opened the wall up in between to make this massive, massive, massive volume. So we started with research and I assembled everything that I could find from the National Archives, which has quite a lot of information there. They have some of McKim, Mead and White’s original plans. They were the architectural firm that came in and redid the White House in the Truman administration. So there’s plans, but then they really, I think for security reasons, they hold back some of the information. So the plans of the state floor and the second floor exist, but not the third floor, not the basement. And so we had, we bought like every book and magazine about the White House. We found, we looked at drawings that had been done by other films and television shows in the past. And we assembled like a database of thousands and thousands of images to cull from, photos from the White House press photography, photographer over the years and across the administrations and everything. And just, it really started with research, lots and lots and lots of research. And then for the exterior, there’s actually some really, really good 3D models that exist that have been done based on the blueprints from McKim, Mead and White that are very, very accurate. But no, nothing close to accurate exists for the interior. We had to recreate that. Now, having said that, with production design, it’s not just for, in terms of like doing a TV show like this, it’s not just about like copying the White House exactly because it has to fit into the volumes of the stages. You can’t just copy paste and then done. It has to be massaged to fit, to fit into the spaces and also to lean into the story that’s written for those scenes so that you’re, you’re enlarging or leaning into the rooms that you’re really going to see and maybe taking, squeezing in some of the back rooms and things that are going to be in the background.

SP: Were all the rooms you had to create in the script or did you get to choose some that you wanted to include as well?

François Audouy: No, Paul Davies, he was very fastidious about what he wanted to see, which was basically everything, actually, for the most part. There were parts of, I mean, we recreated every room on the state floor, even, even the mezzanine floor, which is the room above. There’s a mezzanine above the butler’s pantry that includes the pastry kitchen that we created with a spiral staircase going up. He had written about half, he’d written about half of the second floor, about two thirds of the third floor, about half of the ground floor and about half of the basement, so thankfully he didn’t write stuff into every single room into the White House, but it felt that way. It did feel that way, that it was like that we were all over the place. But I don’t think there’s any studio in the world that would be able to fit the entire White House, every single room to scale. That’s six stories, right? Including underground? Yeah, yeah, there’s actually two basement floors and then four floors above that.

SP: Insane. It doesn’t look that big, but then when you’re in the show, you realize how this is a much bigger space than you realize watching it on TV all the time.

François Audouy: Well, what I learned about the White House is that the original drawings, the original design of the White House was a much smaller building and it was deemed to be too small to just not be grand enough. So the architect just literally just increased the scale. So when you’re in the White House walking through it, I was there 15 years ago for a visit. It just feels like you’re dwarfed by this amazing, this, this house, everything is over scale. The doors and windows are over scale and it makes you feel small. It really is daunting and awesome to be in there.

SP: Is there during the research stage where there’s some really interesting things that you learned about the White House?

François Audouy: Oh my God, so many interesting things. So many interesting things. Like, the chief usher’s office is on a mezzanine floor above, right off of the foyer. When you walk in up some stairs, it’s an off limits room. There’s hardly any, I don’t think there are any photos online of this room, but the chief usher has a little mail slot, viewing sort of slot, kind of like a mail slot that looks down over the front door. And before closed circuit television, the chief usher would look through his little peek peephole to see who was coming in and out of that White House. And that, that was something that we found through research that Paul wrote into the script and I thought was really clever. Also, I didn’t know anything about the secret stairs that go between the second and third floors that the, the, the first family uses. They have special stairs that they can, that are just for them that they use to go up and, up and down between those two private floors. I didn’t know that, that they have another set of stairs that are the, the, the staff staircase that goes all the way through the White House from the ground floor, all the way to the top. I mean, I didn’t know there were so many stairs in general, there’s stairs all over the place. And that was interesting to me. I also didn’t know that, that there are like four different departments that are in charge of the windows because they have the original windows to the house, and then they have the bulletproof glass on every window, which you need the Secret Service to allow you to clean? And then there’s the, there, there’s a lot of formalities and things involved in the White House that was really interesting to learn. A lot of the windows on the outside of the house are actually fake windows. I didn’t know that. So when you look at the White House from the outside, some of those windows are just walls when you go inside and they don’t penetrate through the house. For example, some of the windows in the East Room are, are, they have the windows on the outside, but then they’re, they’re just fake. They’re fake windows and they’re just walls when you go inside. So there’s, I mean, the house has got so many secrets that I found fascinating. And it was like a Russian nesting doll. The deeper you go, the more secrets the house reveals to you.

SP: That is fascinating stuff. I was really curious because yeah, it’s got so much history to it and yet so little access. We see certain rooms all the time, but we don’t really see how the sausage is made, what, where, what’s put together. Like I just recently had heard there’s a ballroom and I was like, wait, in the White House? I didn’t realize that. Kind of squeezed in to what I thought was a smaller space.

François Audouy: Yeah. I mean, what happened was in 1949, the Truman, Harry Truman decided to do a big renovation and he actually gutted the entire interior of the White House. So leaving only the outside walls. So the inside of the house is like a modern office building in the meaning that it’s been constructed with steel, steel beams and steel members. And it’s like really, really strong. It’s built like a skyscraper inside there. But there’s, it, there’s, in the basement, that’s interesting. There’s a bowling alley down there, but I didn’t know this. There’s a second bowling alley actually under the West wing. So there’s two bowling alleys in the White House. Most people think there are only one.

SP: That’s incredible. I, does anyone still bowl? How often are they used?

François Audouy: I think it changes based on the frivolities and tastes of each administration. I just heard yesterday actually that the Trump, the current Trump administration, Trump’s turned one of the rooms into the game room. He’s turned into a virtual golf, golf range, a golf simulator. It’s the game rooms turned into a simulator. So they’re constantly making adjustments like that. During the Clinton administration, the music room was a place just for him to practice the sax. It just depends. It’s always, it’s a living, breathing house that changes every time a president’s elected in order to make it work spatially for the viewer, which he did a great job at.

SP: How did you pull that off? Like, were there challenges associated with that?

François Audouy: Oh my God. Well, it’s the most, this is just spatially the most complicated and challenging project I’ve ever been involved in, because like I said, it would be sort of easy just to do a white house show. And with nice craftsmanship, that’s one layer of complexity. I mean, we had painters and sculptors and full-time drapers who, and we’d build chandeliers and build giant five feet lantern sconces. That’s one challenge. But what made it, what really upped the ante was we had to create 60 rooms and they all had to be interconnected. They all had to fit together like this giant puzzle I was telling you about, because of these shots where you go up through the ceiling and you go through walls and then through walls and then up. And then, there’s this massive shot in the first episode where you go through the front door, up the presidential staircase, which we built up to the second floor through the second floor, up the staff staircase into the third floor out and then out the window and everything had to be connected. There’s, and then we wanted to do as much of that for real as possible. The majority of the rooms that you fly through, they’re all built for real and they’re not, and so we would actually shoot them and then suture the shots together. So as to make it feel like it’s all one shot, but they’re all real rooms that all have to be figured out. And then what that meant too, is that we had to create a holistic color story and design so that the colors, which were heightened for our show, all had to work together in harmony in a harmonious way. So it required, I think it required so many different departments singing from the set deck to construction to greens department for all of the plants and the, figuring out the Magnolia tree. There’s a 200 year old Magnolia trees that were planted by Andrew Jackson outside the white house that were very important for us to recreate to visual effects, to costumes. We all had to collaborate closely together. And then what that collaboration really caused us to be very inspired by what we were all doing. And it was really fun to be at rally all working shoulder to shoulder in the same space, because that proximity meant that we were really inspired and we could be really, we could see what everybody was doing. And then that would lift us up, I think, to, to keep us going over the marathon that was the show.

SP: So how much detail can you get into some of like the finer details that are in there and maybe some that people wouldn’t notice, but were important to you to include?

François Audouy: Well, what was very unusual about the show is that both Netflix and Shondaland were incredibly supportive and encouraging to recreate as much detail as humanly possible. And I mean, normally what happens on a show and I’ve worked on some pretty big productions is that you dream the world and then the studio and the production kind of gets you in a box. With this, because the white house as a character was so important to the fidelity of the show overall, we were encouraged to just, to go big and really make everything as at a level of craftsmanship, but that was as good as possible. So what does that mean? That means that like in the state floor, we recreated all of the moldings, all of the doors, all of the fireplaces, all of the windows, the drapery, the chandeliers with all of the nuance and detail, all the carpets, the carpets were handmade in Atlanta. I mean, the state floor is like was a showpiece. It was unbelievable. 20,000, almost 21,000 square feet. We created the Tennessee marble floors. We had a custom sculpted fireplace that took two sculptors like a month to build in the state dining room. We did, we created 200 custom pieces of white house China that was so, and even like this in the central hallway of the state floor, there’s a bust of Lafayette above the presidential elevator. We recreated that, all of the freezes above the doors. I mean, it’s just like, there’s not one compromise. I mean, I can’t even think of any compromise that we, that we were forced to do with any of these sets, which, so it’s really, I don’t think an experience like this will ever come. We’ll ever happen again in my career. It was like, it was, and because we didn’t want to compromise it, it, I mean, it really, that was part of the challenge as well is because we wanted, everybody wanted this to be as good as possible. We had, my construction coordinator told me, he rang me up, rang me up one day and said, we’ve got 10 miles of molding. We had a room in the art department that was just extra molding. I mean, it was just extraordinary, extraordinary. And what I was, what I’m incredibly proud of is that this was sort of a once in a decade showcase for the craftsmanship that this town still has to offer. And it’s actually, it makes me emotional just thinking about it because we don’t have the opportunity to do these sort of craftsmen artisanal grand shows at a, as much as we used to back in the heyday, so to be able to do this in Hollywood was really special. It was really, really special to be able to ring the bell and just go for it and do something like this and sort of, and so it created an enormous sense of pride, pride from the set designers and the art directors and the set deck department, and just everybody really became very, very passionate about the work and proud of it.

SP: Well, the passion shows up on screen. It’s insane what you guys have accomplished and learning the actual scale of it, and it’s so big and then it goes down to the finest detail and creating the floors and the fireplaces and all that makes it even more impressive instead of like the digital backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera, that they use nowadays. Was it documented at all? Like some, would it be possible to be a feature out of it about the production of it coming out anytime soon?

François Audouy: There’s two excellent, excellent features that are on the Shondaland website and the other on the Tudum website site. They’re very, very, very well done.

SP: Thank you. And was there a room that you wanted to include in the production, but didn’t have the budget or space to, or?

François Audouy: Well, we never went to the West Wing or the East Wing, but I guess that’s for the sequel. It was decided early on just to focus on the main house. There’s, there are other, these other wings have got secrets of their own. And so that’s for another time and another place and more learning to be had in the future. But yeah, for the executive mansion, I’m pretty sure we hit all of the, oh, well, I didn’t get to do the bowling alley. That was the one thing I wish we had done is the bowling alley. It would have been fun, but there was no place in the story for that.

SP: If you did create it, would it be functional?

François Audouy: Of course, everything else is in the show. Why would we cut corners there? It’d be a nice thing to squeeze in a little recreation.

SP: So any Easter eggs, is there anything in there that you can share that you fit in, either as an inside gag or part of the story that might that fans after watching can appreciate more.

François Audouy: We folded in birds into the decor quite a bit because Cordelia Cupp, who’s our main character in the detective in the piece is obsessed with birds. So we put quite a few birds into the, into the architecture and into the rooms. And in fact, there’s another article, I think on the Shondaland website about all of the Easter egg, all the bird Easter eggs, which are all over the place. And some of them, like the bird wallpaper that we decided to put into the white, the president’s bedroom that ended up Paul ended up writing that into the episode with Cordelia being distracted by these birds and knowing exactly what bird was in the wallpaper of the presidential bedroom. He had access to an incredible bird advisor, so he could send photos of bird wallpaper and get an email back a long email response of like, this is the such and such and such native to Brazil, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then that nuance and detail would get folded into the show. I think that, I mean, the show is kind of about Easter eggs. It’s about all these little details that Cordelia Cupp notices. So there’s so many little, those things that are normally hidden on a regular production became store becomes story points and maybe like clues to the mystery. So it was, the show was really about adding these little tiny details, but the little tiny details sometimes would reveal a greater story. That was what was interesting to me.

SP: I’m not going to give it away, but in the finale, there’s a big moment when she exposes a wall that may have something behind it. Is that something that’s actually based on fact? Is that something that exists or is that something created for the story?

François Audouy: Well, the fact is, is that there are these little connective tunnels between the treaty room between the tree room, the yellow oval room and the president’s for the family room, I think, or something. I can’t remember. There are these little tunnels and they have been plastered over in the past. So that there, that is something that has happened. When the, those little tunnels become not required for, or in the way. So that was something that Paul latched onto as a potential great reveal that I thought was great. And there’s similar tunnels that go between the second floor that the oval, well, the old room is mirrored between the second floor down to the state floor and the ground floor. They all have oval rooms. There’s three oval rooms and those rooms are kind of mirrored all the way down and they all have connected little tunnels between them, sort of pass-throughs. And, I mean, that’s one thing that I would love to do one day if I ever go to the White House again is to ask to see just have a tour about the nooks and crannies and passageways and secret stairs. That was the most fun to imagine and to recreate.

SP: Now you mentioned a potential sequel, where are the rooms now? Are they, do they still exist or how does, what happens after you put all this heart and passion and creativity out there?

François Audouy: I think that they’re all have been recycled and destroyed unfortunately. Which is heartbreaking because we were, the, these sets were up for a very long time. They’re up for a year because we had to go down because of COVID. And then we went down for a little bit because of the work stoppages and things. And so they’re up, we got to really become quite fond of them, but yeah. But having said that, I hope that Paul writes something that is a, perhaps in another locale next time that we can just to keep, because the part of the new setting is always something a new challenge to dive into and to learn more about, right. It’s a whole new opportunity for like a degree in a new subject matter.

SP: Well, it’s very impressive work. Not only was it a great setting and interesting in its own, but it made a great setting for a really interesting mystery, which I enjoyed. And I’m looking forward to seeing if the next one happens and what rooms we’ll see and where will it take us and who will die and all the other fun things associated with it. So thank you for your time today and for your work. I appreciate it so much.

François Audouy: Can’t wait to read your article. Thank you.

SP: Have a great day.

François Audouy: Take care.

The Residence is streaming now on Netflix, where viewers can immerse themselves in the intricate world of the White House as brought to life by François Audouy and his team. For a deeper look at Audouy’s remarkable work, check out the behind-the-scenes features on the Shondaland website and Netflix’s Tudum, which showcase the craftsmanship and dedication that made the Executive Mansion a character all its own.