Sarah Hay as Claire in Lightbox TV show Flesh and Bone.
Sarah Hay as Claire in Lightbox TV show Flesh and Bone.
Chris Schulz goes behind the scenes on a show about the nasty side of ballet.
A ballet dancer sits slumped in her practice room, picking at a blackened toenail on her swollen foot. It's a gruesome sight - and it's about to get worse.
Slowly, she peels off the nail, and blood oozes out. Instead of stemming the flow, she sweeps it up with her finger, wipes it across her lips, then leans sideways and kisses the mirror beside her.
Amazingly, that sick scene from Flesh & Bone doesn't come close to describing how depraved Lightbox's new show gets over its eight episodes, which premiere on the streaming service on Monday.
"The first two episodes are the lightest and it wanders off into the darkness after that," warns showrunner and executive producer Moira Walley-Beckett, a seasoned Breaking Bad contributor who won an Emmy for writing that show's best episode, Ozymandias.
Like the 2010 film Black Swan, Flesh & Bone promises to take an unflinching, no-holds-barred look at the characters working within the world of ballet.
There's Paul Grayson, the unhinged artistic director for the fictional American Ballet Company played with delicious venom by Ben Daniels.
Grayson has grisly sex in his office while taking business calls, waves hopeful dancers away from auditions with a disgusted look and a flick of the wrist, and kicks them out of the company for minor indiscretions like an annoying cellphone tone.
Then there's the show's lead, Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay), who has run away from home to chase her ballerina dream. She hides her sickening foot injury from the company, spies on her flatmate and a male companion, and nearly prostitutes herself out during a drugged haze.
Flesh & Bone is vicious, gripping viewing and absolutely true to life, swears the star.
"Everything they portray during filming has happened to me," says Hay, a trained dancer with a minor role on Black Swan to her name before landing the role of Claire.
Struggling with her career in America, Hay was dancing with the Dresden Semperoper Ballett in Germany when asked to audition for Flesh & Bone by Walley-Beckett, who was determined to use real dancers - not actors and body doubles - for her show.
Sarah Hay as Claire, a ballet dancer with a troubled past, from the Lightbox TV series Flesh and Bone.
Hay wasn't sure about taking on the role, and her reasoning is examined in some of Flesh & Bone's key scenes that show locker room sniping between the ultra-competitive dancers all vying for top billing.
"I went to Germany to find my place. When I was approached for the role I didn't think I was going to get it," she says. "It was exciting but also nerve-wracking because you can lose your status in the dance world very quickly. You're very easily replaced." Hay said yes, and the day after filming wrapped on Flesh & Bone's four-month shoot she flew back to Germany to continue with her role at Dresden.
Her nervous attitude about leaving dance behind is one Hay's co-star Sascha Radetsky can identify with.
Radetsky, who plays the company's male lead, Ross, has seen many ballet careers burn out quickly.
"Your career is so short so you have to make the most of every moment," says Radetsky. "If you get injured you may lose your momentum. There's a lot of hiding injuries or pushing through injuries. That absolutely reflects reality." Radetsky's own injury list, from a 30-plus career - more than 20 of which were spent dancing for the American Ballet Theatre - sounds worse than a battered pro footballer nearing retirement.
"I've had five surgeries on my knees and ankles, two herniated discs, arthritis in my joints, labral tears in my hips, pinched nerves, stretched nerves, cracked ribs, the list goes on and on. We're jumping all the time, we're lifting women, it's high impact." That kind of dedication is exactly what Walley-Beckett wanted to capture on her show.
"I didn't want to fake it," she says. "I didn't want to have body doubles, I didn't want to have actors who weren't at that level. I wanted dancers. And I wanted to put the camera on them and watch them sweat, suffer and soar."
Ben Daniels plays Paul Grayson, an artistic director.
Because of the strain on dancers, producers had a custom-built ballet studio with a sprung floor built. That reportedly forced the show over budget, meaning a second season of Flesh & Bone has already been ruled out by network Starz.
Radetsky, who recently quit the American Ballet Theatre and is hoping to move into acting full time, says Flesh & Bone's 14-hour days were much harder than an average day working on a ballet production.
"The repetition was challenging for sure, just doing takes over and over, and spread over so many hours. With a normal show you warm up, get ready, go out at a certain time, leave it all out on stage, then it's over. This you have to maintain a certain level of energy throughout the entire day. There's a lot of room for error."
Hay agrees: "I was exhausted. There's no downtime. Moira would give us the episodes right before we'd shoot them. Having to learn those lines so quickly and having to dance on the weekend to keep yourself in shape was quite a difficult experience."
It's worth it, judging by Flesh & Bone's first two episodes. Yes, it's uncomfortable viewing but, like Breaking Bad, the fraught tension, constant unease and creepy characters make it a show you don't need to like ballet to fall in love with.
Josh Helman, the man who plays Claire's brother Byan and may emerge as the show's dodgiest character thanks to a horrific scene at the end of episode one, admits Flesh & Bone asks a lot of its viewers.
"This show is one of the most exciting shows I've ever done," says the Australian actor with starring roles on X-Men: Days of Future Past and Mad Max: Fury Road to his name.
"It's exciting and daunting and scary and wonderful. The relationship between Bryan and Claire is not something you will have ever seen before.
"I feel like it will blow minds, quite seriously."
What: American ballet drama Flesh & Bone Where: Lightbox When: From Monday
