Catholic school has many connotations: rules, uniforms, the occasional ritual sacrifice. At least that’s the version viewers are dropped into with Netflix’s supernatural, sin-filled teen thriller The Body, when a drug-fueled dance team initiation goes horribly wrong. The show, out Nov. 11, is equal parts The Craft and The Crucible, and was shaped by a formidable team of young talent including showrunner Quinn Shephard and producing partners Gina Gammell and Riley Keough.
Gammell and Keough first met at a film screening, when the latter was hot off her role in Mad Max: Fury Road. They formed the production company Felix Culpa in 2017, where one of their first projects was the co-directed War Pony, a tender drama about two Lakota boys living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Since then, they’ve also produced Under the Bridge, a 2024 miniseries for Hulu starring Keough and Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone, also created by Shephard.
Now, The Body is their chance to pay homage to the late-’90s and Y2K teen movies that shaped them, like Jennifer’s Body and Peter Jackson’s surreally sapphic Heavenly Creatures. What’s next on the horizon for the producing pair? Another pivot, with a bonkers ’50s biker alien invasion comedy Alpha Gang starring Léa Seydoux, Cate Blanchett, and Lily-Rose Depp (obviously). Here, Gammell tells all on the wild ride from one set to the next.
Tell me a bit about your transition from commercial production to long form. What’s the project that solidified that transition for you?
I think it started with writing. I worked as a creative director with creative agencies, and then I came up doing music videos and more short-form stuff. In school, I always wrote, and I was very interested in drama and theater. From a very young age, I knew that I wanted to tell stories. I live very much half in reality—or like 30 percent in reality and 70 percent in my imagination.
I like that you started at half and negotiated yourself down.
I’m trying to be real. I’m always in another world. I’m always building worlds and stories and thinking of characters, and I have been since I was very young. When I met Riley [Keough], it felt like I met someone I could share that world with. Riley and I have something very special. It’s not just that our taste is very akin. It’s that sentiment of finishing each other’s sentences, but it goes deeper than that—finishing each other’s ideas, or landing in the same place at the same time without having spoken about something. There was something in our collaboration that gave us both confidence that we could finish something. So it started with writing with Riley, and the transition moved from there.
I want to talk about that shared sensibility the two of you have, but I’m curious about your own work. Can you put words to what you’re always magnetized to, whether it’s textural, visual, or narrative?
Probably just stuff that makes me feel—characters that move me. Even thinking back to War Pony, the character was very much a vessel for someone else’s story, but in that collaboration, all of us blended into each other a little bit. It’s a strange thing to say, because the breadth of story that I’m interested in telling is wide, and that’s why we have a production company. I’m constantly self-generating, but my interests expand beyond what I feel I’m personally capable of in one lifetime.
In my own writing, I’m really interested in humans, in masculinity, in the world or society, and how that manifests in each of us. So we’re inside of the patriarchy, but then you’re also next to a man. How are the two things the same? That’s where I spend a lot of time. I think a lot about love, about connection, about how tragedy and humor exist at the same time, the duality of life.
Those are the thematic throughlines for the characters I write. But the throughline in the work is collaboration: working with people I have fun with and respect, who expand me.
That’s an interesting answer. Where you landed is thought-provoking: How can you create these microcosm moments that tap into a larger, systemic theme? Shifting to The Body, how does that sensibility come to bear on this project?
It’s our second project with Quinn, a very close collaborator of mine. She wrote the first draft of The Body when she was 20 years old and brought it to me at 30. She tried to get it off the ground when she was young, and it went into development and then got dropped. When we finished our last show, we were pretty clear that we should keep working together, and she brought this back up. She had been slowly tweaking it since then, so it wasn’t the exact same draft it was a decade ago.
When you’re a teenager, or close to being a teenager, writing about teenagers, it’s very serious. There’s no distance from it; you’re still inside of it. When she brought it to me and I read it, I was like, Oh, there’s so much fun in here. It was brought as quite a straight drama, and what we found together is that having it a little more at arm’s length allowed an adult perspective to seep into it. We managed to keep the authenticity of the origins, but a lot of the humor and a lot of the tone came out of our collaboration. That was something I was very persuasive and determined about.
I always say this is Quinn’s baby and my stepchild. I don’t think I would have originated this world by myself. But that duality of being human, of being alive, and allowing us to undercut something very dramatic with something funny or absurd in the same breath—that’s very much my sensibility. That’s where Quinn and I find common ground and what we enjoy together.
It’s so interesting that, even though it’s been adjusted over time, this is the product of 10 years. That’s a very different cultural moment. Outside of bringing a more adult perspective and teasing out the humor and the doublespeak, what would you say are the biggest changes that were made? Or did you feel it wasn’t necessary to address the difference between the world now and then?
I think the world is quite intact. Some characters fell out and some characters got added, but the core characters and the core world are very intact. The pilot, the world, and the lead characters were there. It’s how we then expanded it, the tone that we found, and where the story went that changed a lot.
As far as this world goes—the Catholic school, the underworld element, the bad girls of it all—those are narratives we’re all very familiar with and obviously love. They’re kind of evergreen. I’m curious what you felt was missing, or what pocket this project was speaking to.
I’m not overly familiar with teen dramas or YA content, but I know there’s an abundance of it. Of the ones I am familiar with, a lot of the teen or young-people stuff is like, the youth are fucked, you know what I mean? It feels like it’s either geared to young stuff for young, young people, or young stuff for old people exploring how fucked the youth are. That’s not just now; I feel like it’s always been that way.
Our show does not take itself too seriously. We have so much fun and so much joy in making the show, and I think you can feel that watching it. First and foremost, it’s there to be a fun watch and to be entertaining. But it’s not just young people. There’s an adult storyline that coexists in the show. It’s a story about young adults that is not just for young adults. It hits many stratospheres, and the number of people who have already responded to it is something we’re really proud of. It’s exciting.
The other side of that is, it’s a dream to make something that exists in its own tone and in its own world, that doesn’t feel bucketed into one specific thing for one specific audience. It’s teenagers as humans that anyone can relate to, because we’ve all either been there or we are there.
For a reader who hasn’t seen the show yet, can you describe the feel, the tone, the pace of the project?
Campy, silly, horny, and a little gritty.
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