‘Suitcases of drugs are not exactly something you’d expect to bring to work,” says Paul Cross, who was the production designer of Supacell, the crime-laced superhero series that launched last year. Cross has had to handle quite a few in his time though, albeit fake. He recently found himself driving around London with a vanload of fake cocaine bricks. “It’s quite an odd feeling,” he says. “Not something you’d do in your day-to-day life.”
From hip teen shows to crime dramas, scenes involving drugs are often pivotal in modern TV series – and ensuring these moments are safe, legal and realistic has become so important to producers that thousands of pounds can be spent on getting it right. For every brick of fake cocaine off-loaded into a fake drug den, someone like Cross has spent weeks crafting the perfect powder texture. For every pill taken by an actor, a huge amount of toil has gone into making sure it’s not harmful.
When it comes to props that actors snort, smoke or swallow, there are industry standards. Cocaine is often replicated with glucose, B12 or vitamin C powder, although the most common substitute is milk or lactose powder. “It mixes with the water in your nose and basically turns into milk,” explains Philipp Barnett, who worked on Sam Levinson’s messy, cool teen drama Euphoria, as well as Griselda, the show about Colombian coke-smugglers.
Legal weed alternatives are frequently used: plants grown without psychoactive chemicals. “It’s like disappointing weed!” Cross says. Anything else smoked is typically nicotine-free herbal cigarettes. Meanwhile, ecstasy and diazepam are sometimes substituted with sweets, but more often with sugar pills bought from pharmacists specialising in placebo drugs made especially for TV – complete with breakdowns of allergy information. “Placebo companies are extremely expensive,” says Cross. “You could easily spend £1,000 and only get the equivalent amount of the real drug you’d find on the street.”
This means that when drugs are needed on a larger scale – such as to fill a trap house with fake MDMA, crack cocaine, cocaine and weed, as he was doing on Supacell – productions have to get creative. They used organic shea butter for crack which, says Cross, “didn’t break the same way but looked authentic from a distance”. For the weed, they wrapped moss in thread, sprayed it with glue, and rolled it in herbs. Meanwhile, 1,000 blocks of cocaine were created by wrapping the foam blocks used for flower-arranging in shrink wrap. The entire process took about a month.
“We had a dedicated area in the art department with about six to eight people focused solely on making and bagging drugs,” Cross says. “We essentially had our own trap house running upstairs. It was like Miami Vice.” How many little plastic baggies did they need? “Thousands.”
For Griselda, Barnett and his team employed Styrofoam bricks dusted with milk powder. “In one scene, Griselda captures some product from the competition and ceremoniously sets it ablaze. We had to ensure it could burn without melting into Styrofoam goo. The biggest surprise came when we shot the scene with a drone: the updraft from the fire combined with the drone’s downdraft created a fire vortex, and we almost set the surrounding palm trees on fire.”
While TV shows don’t have drug coordinators in the same way that they have intimacy coaches, most British crime dramas do consult with advisers – typically former police officers, who ensure drug-related storylines maintain realism. Some shows go further. John Singleton, the director of Snowfall, an 80s-set drug-dealing drama, employed ex-convict Avance “Smokey” Smith, who’d grown up in LA at that time, around “gangs and drugs” and with a parent using crack cocaine, to provide personal insight. Smokey provided input on everything from the clothes and hair of the era to how to make realistic-looking fake crack using the same recipe dealers would use to dupe addicts in LA. “It’s a pill called Pamprin. When you crush it and mix it with vitamin E and baking soda, it makes it clump up.”
Robb Wilson King, Breaking Bad’s production designer, took a similar approach to making sure the crystal meth on the “schoolteacher to drug kingpin” drama was realistic, consulting with both officers from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and dealers he befriended on the streets of Albuquerque, where they were shooting the show.
“By operating this way,” King recalls, “we were able to access neighbourhoods and homes used for cooking meth. We even made friends with some of these people.” The chemical smell of the drug being manufactured lingers in his memory. “It was pretty scary. You’re dealing with a real dangerous thing. If it’s done wrong in your presence, you could suffer. But it’s important to feel it and see it – you can translate that to film.” He learned what tools were needed to create “lo-fi” meth in labs constructed from everyday kitchen equipment that “could blow up at any time”.
They did “mid-range” cooking as well, he adds, and a DEA consultant was on hand to educate the team about how meth is made, consumed and even how their raids are conducted. “They were also likely there to ensure we didn’t spill too many beans in the show, because there were a lot of secrets involved. You don’t want ‘the cooking family’ to know what the DEA is doing.” The fake meth they created was so realistic, says King, it sometimes got stolen from the set.
Fake drugs would also vanish from the set of Skins, the wild, 2007 teen drama, but that was the least of the team’s concerns while filming the show’s notorious party scenes. Amelia Shankland, production designer, recalls that filling the background with young extras who had no prior TV experience could lead to things getting chaotic. “We’d have parties where people brought their own things in. As you can imagine, when you’re working on a project where everyone is supposed to be absolutely caned, not everyone will be acting. Some will actually be caned. Navigating that line can be quite tricky.”
Today, a big issue is convincing actors to consume the fake drugs. “On something like Skins, it was a young group of actors who were probably a lot more tolerant of things,” says Shankland. “Most actors don’t like smoking herbal cigarettes because they can be rough to inhale. I imagine it’s the same with snorting anything.”
Actor Jonah Hill has spoken candidly about his experience of snorting vitamin D as faux cocaine in The Wolf of Wall Street. “If you get that much in your lungs, you get very sick,” he revealed. “It sort of clogs your nose up,” Andrew Rannells said of snorting vitamin B12 in Girls. “I do think there’s a tiny bit of placebo effect. You do have energy – but it’s not the best way to take vitamins!”
As for scenes where actors are smoking weed, Barnett says: “The biggest challenge is making it look authentic – because most actors aren’t smokers. Holding a cigarette becomes something they might need to practise.”
Another difficulty regards brand placement. TV shows will often borrow items like tech, alcohol and clothing from brands to use while filming, under the agreement that they won’t be used in scenes where characters are doing anything that could be damaging to their reputations. Dominic Roberts, who worked on season two of the drug-fuelled investment banker series Industry, said this was a particular challenge on the show. “Where characters are obviously wealthy,” he says, “they’re likely to use top-end phones. Quite frankly, those manufacturers don’t really want to see people snorting cocaine off their phone,” he says. To navigate this, they put phones in cases and replaced premium tech with non-branded alternatives during drug-taking scenes.
Another tricky area involves any drug that features a logo, like ecstasy tablets or drug baggies. “We can’t display graphics or photographs that haven’t been cleared,” Roberts explains, meaning permission had to be sought. This necessitated a lot of detective work: “Who designed this little smiley face, or this unicorn on this pill?”
However, the most important hurdle in showing drugs on TV often lies in authentically capturing the intensity of a drug-fuelled experience. Skins had the advantage of a young, partying cast and crew. So instead, production designers focused on creating the right setting: houses borrowed for parties looked so trashed that when the cast arrived, it felt like they’d been raving for hours. That meant strewing mess everywhere and even throwing things at the walls. Shankland says: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve met the people who own this house.’”
For Euphoria, designers used elaborate staging to take viewers on a high with the characters. “In the first season,” says Barnett, “when Zendaya, in a drug-fuelled state, climbs a set of stairs and goes through a hallway that becomes unstable, the entire set had to be built on a pivot and then moved to recreate that effect.”
When filming wraps up, what happens to all the fake drugs? For Cross, on Supacell, the process was simple: it all got blown up. “There’s a gunfight in the trap house, with puffs of cocaine exploding in the air. We got good value out of it.” On Breaking Bad, meanwhile, the team had created a faux product so authentic-seeming that they were not allowed to hold on to it. “We had to return everything to the DEA,” says King, “so they could destroy it as if it were real. They didn’t want it out there on the streets.”
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