“I talked to them as much as I could on the phone and in person beforehand, just to make sure that no one was doing anything they didn’t want to do,” Johnson tells us by phone. “Everyone was comfortable and most importantly, everyone was having fun.”
Johnson was intent on making the scene enjoyable for the cast, crew, and audience.
“The fun of romance is the imperfection,” he says. “It’s the making a fool of yourself. It’s the clowning around the laughing, it’s the giggling, it’s the joking around. It’s all that stuff. So what I wanted to make sure in this scene was that they were having fun and that we were finding that comedy and they were letting themselves enjoy it.”
THE TRUTH ABOUT JADA AND RYAN
Another big moment happens when Zsasz holds Jada and Ryan at gunpoint, and threatens to kill Jada if Batwoman fails to appear. While the clock is ticking down, Jada reveals the truth about her past and Ryan’s birth. This doesn’t immediately fix things between them, but it does begin to build trust. And when time runs out, Ryan outs herself as Batwoman when she saves Jada from Zsasz.
Johnson says of costars Javicia Leslie and Robin Givens:
“These black women came in there and they did not play around! They both made me cry at different moments,” he says. “I was worried because—I liked the way that we shot it, but as we were shooting, I got nervous. I was like ‘oh can I get a little too artsy with my wide shots? Should I have gotten a little more coverage?’ But then my editor said that that was her favorite scene to edit because they just bring this powerful thing together.”
