“Franchise” might not be about a wholesome, well-functioning film set, but it required appearance of a functional set. The show has a rich cast of beleaguered heroes – Daniel Brühl’s artful and restless director, Himesh PatelFirst AD, too exhausted to give up, Lolly Adefope’s third AD, tasked yet face, Jessica Hynes’ script supervisor and producer Aya Cash with the studio’s ax (or, if you prefer, its full-powered staff) aimed squarely towards her neck. But the huge sets that made up the fictional superhero epic, “Tecto: The Eye of the Storm,” also had to be filled with fictional crew members.

This is where second assistant director Adam Foster and his team stepped in, and in just four weeks they assembled a background cast full of fake costume, hair and makeup, rigging, chauffeur and craft services teams. Foster has built a “Tecto” background crew of about 75 actors — about two-thirds of whom will be around the “Tecto” sets at any given time — all equipped with radios, phones and fake cords so they can look either busy. or inactive, as required by the morale on the set.

It’s a sign of how successful Foster and his team have been that there’s been a bit of bleed-through between the background “team” and the actual “team.”Franchise” crew. “We had many occasions where the extras got confused because the real crew members would go to the extras to ask for help,” Foster told IndieWire. “I think on the first day of shooting, when we were shooting some of the basic unit scenes, a character was approached about a power outage in one of the trailers and if they could come in and fix it.”

The character in question, of course, had to beg to do something other than acting, but Foster said the momentary confusion was a funny experience every time it happened while making the film. The HBO series.

Foster credits third AD Callum Dawson with helping to sort out the background players so that it was obvious at a glance which department they would belong to on the ‘Tecto’ set. But the work was more specific than simply stereotyping bigger and older boys as plugs and weaker kids as PAs.

“Most jobs, when they start casting, they do a lot of research on the era or period (for the project). But about that, everything we knew was right there in front of us. So we had fun with the cast because we were finding characters in the crowd that we knew had faces that looked or looked like people we actually knew,” Foster said. “There’s a lot of hidden jokes for us, my team and the costume and hair and makeup, (because) there are people (in the background) who are based on people we know.”

There were also some instances where using the actual “Franchise” crew in specific sequences made sense. While sometimes the craft people were extras with barista training, for the lunch sequences when more cooking was required, Foster would bring in real ramen and Turkish food trucks to prepare his food in front of the camera.

“They were real because they were going to use woks and everything,” Foster said. “Then we used another SFX crew with woks and stuff, so there were real people and crew members and then we also had the extract. It was essentially three layers of people mixed together.”

Authenticity guided Foster and his crew in the cast and crowd management for “The Franchise,” but some of the most fun was bringing that theme to the more absurd challenges on the “Tecto” set. For example, the writers came up with the idea of ​​having a pigeon infestation on one of the scenes and tasked Foster the day before shooting to find someone who could read like a pigeon, armed with a laser pointer ( extremely humane!) drive away the birds.

“I remember those conversations for The Pigeon Man, like, ‘Would this person wear a hi-vis jacket?’ Would it be in some kind of equipment? Our department, hair, makeup, costume, we all had to work pretty quickly to do it,” Foster said. “But we knew (what to do) because we have that established experience; we have that world before us. So it was the best job, story and environment to recreate quickly, because I was a part of it.”

New episodes of “The Franchise” premiere on HBO Sundays at 10 p.m. ET through the season finale on November 24.