In Amazon MGM and Blumhouse Television’s House of Spoils, Ariana DeBose stars as an ambitious chef setting out to achieve her dream: opening her own restaurant. But as she settles into the venue on a remote estate, builds her menu, trains her staff, and tries to please her investors, she becomes increasingly haunted by a mysterious presence that could sabotage her entire business—as if she wasn’t under enough pressure already.
The psychological thriller is written and directed by Blow the Man Down filmmakers Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, who were inspired after reading a number of chef biographies and memoirs, like those by Gabrielle Hamilton (Blood, Bones & Butter) and Iliana Regan. “We found that we really connected with the chef’s journey as leaders and finding their voice,” Krudy tells ELLE.com. They wanted to “explore this torment and growth of becoming a leader and trying to find your voice, which is essentially what we think this movie is about.”
It also helped that the directing duo had already spent years waitressing and working in New York restaurants. “[Those] years were really formative for us....We really have a lot of love and respect and cherish those experiences because they come in handy on set a lot,” Krudy adds.
When it came to casting the role of Chef—that’s what the protagonist is called, her name is never revealed—they “needed a beast,” Krudy says, i.e. someone who was down for the emotionally, and at times physically, demanding role. “This was a challenging shoot,” Savage Cole adds. “It was like she’s in every scene. It’s dirty, it’s nasty. Some of these sets, we literally had her crawling in dirt over and over again one night and there was a lot we asked of her.”
But as a result, DeBose ended up becoming “another author of this character.” The Oscar winner “brought her own personality, her swagger and the way she presents herself, the way she holds herself and the ferocity that she brought to this performance,” Savage Cole continues. “We were really attracted to somebody who we felt like we could believe had ambition and believed in themselves. So we felt very lucky that Ariana wanted to do this movie.”
“When I read the script, I was fascinated by the idea of a character with no name. Chef, defined by her work—how many women, everybody really, can relate to that idea at one point in their lives?” DeBose tells ELLE.com via email. “I love risk-taking characters willing to put it all on the line for their dreams and ambitions.”
She continues, “I love food, it brings people together. As a spiritual person, the idea of reciprocity in the culinary business is interesting to me. I met with Danielle and Bridget; I thought their film Blow the Man Down was awesome and that it would be fun to play in the artistic sandbox with them.”
To prepare for the shoot, DeBose watched plenty of documentaries (including Chef’s Table) and researched female chefs. She also got herself into a professional kitchen. “I trained in New York City for about a week with chef Ayesha Nurdjaja of Shukette (which is an amazing spot, by the way). It was terrifying, but I had a blast! She gave me a good jumpstart! Dang, can she run a kitchen!” Then, while filming, she continued training with kitchen consultant Kristóf Szász. It paid off—DeBose shows off some impressive knife skills in the film.
“I actually got to eat one of the many sirloins I made in one of the scenes, and it was quite good, if I do say so myself,” she adds. “A HOT skillet, butter, rosemary, and garlic is a game changer.”
Savage Cole and Krudy trained as well. They spent time in the kitchen of Red Paper Clip, a West Village restaurant, to meet chefs and expand their culinary knowledge. When it came to building the dishes on-screen, that credit goes to Zoe Hegedus, a Hungarian chef and food designer who worked on the film. “She designed all the menus and took a lot of ownership in bringing the creative story to life through the food,” Krudy says. Though Chef’s restaurant is set in upstate New York, filming took place around Budapest, Hungary. Production designer Alexandra Schaller helped give the estate a fairy tale-like but also eerie, aged feel, building the garden and kitchen where most scenes take place.
Rounding out the cast, Euphoria alum Barbie Ferreira stars as Lucia, another chef on staff, and Succession’s Arian Moayed stars as Andreas, Chef’s business partner. Savage Cole and Krudy were big fans of Moayed as Stewy on the hit HBO drama, and loved that he could bring a comedic flavor to the role while giving it a lot of heart. Plus, as the part-owner of Pebble Bar and an insider of the “Broadway restaurant scene,” as Savage Cole calls it, Moayed really knew this character. “We loved that he loved [Andreas] and wasn’t just trying to make it a comedic butt of a joke,” Savage Cole says.
Ferreira had a personal connection to the role, too—her mom and aunt are chefs. “She just had a lot of familiarity with a no-nonsense boss who was cooking with a lot of love, and she was bringing that too, and she just got it,” Krudy says. They “completely fell in love” with the actress. Savage Cole recalls, “We met with her at a cafe in Echo Park, and she went to the bathroom and we were like, ‘Oh my God, we have to cast her.’”
While House of Spoils has plenty of scares, it also carries poignant commentary about being a woman in the workplace, especially in a leadership position. How do you carry the weight of the responsibility—and how do you navigate the way you’re perceived in this role? How would a man be treated differently if he were in the same space? Krudy points out “the classic example being, a woman in a leadership role is a bitch.”
“We really wanted to ask questions with this movie like, what does strong leadership look like?” she adds. “It’s a question Bridget and I are constantly engaging with, and we felt like this was a way to dramatize what it feels like to be ‘strong leadership,’ definitely in quotations, and what is it to enact it and experience it both on the inside and the outside.” That experience doesn’t only apply to chefs or filmmakers; it could also reflect “being a parent, or being a leader in your office, or just stepping up into any role,” Savage Cole adds. “There’s actually a torment there too, of responsibility and how that can haunt you.”
The pair wanted to introduce a new model or archetype for being a leader, considering “we’ve all internalized some real toxic workplace energy from the past,” Savage Cole says. “We want Chef to go on this journey where she’s not afraid of modes of leadership that are based on nurturing—intuitive, collaborative things that aren’t necessarily how we’ve defined a strong leader in the past for being a chef, being a boss. So we wanted to use this as a way to explore new paradigms.”
Krudy says that “to be inside the patriarchy is to live in its own haunted house, making its own sort of hall of mirrors for you as you navigate your way through as a leader.” With House of Spoils, the directing pair “wanted to offer a true tale,” one that they could have looked up to and “would’ve appreciated when we were younger.”
House of Spoils is out on Prime Video on October 3.
