Screenwriter and director Jonas Pate has a lot of experience discovering upcoming talent, and that’s clear in his latest show, ‘The Runarounds.‘ Pate (along with his brother, Josh) hit success in the past through different films, and more recently, the streaming smash hit, ‘Outer Banks’. Its with the latter that he was able to employ some of the cast to put a call-out for teen musicians to audition for the chance to form their own musical group—and the result brought in Axel Ellis, Will Lipton, Zende Murdock, Jesse Goliher and Jeremy Yun.
The Runarounds premiered on an episode of Pate’s OBX set show, but now, its time for the group to be showcased on their own, with an eight-episode first season, set in Wilmington. To chat more about the evolution of the show, the group and the idea, creator Jonas Pate sat down with Metro to dive into Prime Video‘s latest fictional series.
You’ve said that this show was inspired by your time seeing different bands play at colleges in the ’90s. So was this something you’ve always had in the back of your head?
Yes—there’s been decades of gestation, just kind of rattling around back there. It’s a tough pitch; I was always worried that I wouldn’t be able to get it going. It’s the trials and tribulations of a high school rock band… in the way that a lot of Hollywood thinks: What are the life and death stakes? What drives the story? That’s one of the reasons we shot the pilot on spec because we were like, I think I have to show you— because if I just try to tell you in a pitch meeting, you’re going to pass.
If it was always on your mind, what made 2022 the right time to go for it?
I knew because of the fame of the cast of ‘Outer Banks’, that I had a way to find these musicians. Whereas before, I knew I just wanted to find real kids in real high school rock bands. Once the show ‘Outer Banks’ became a success, I could get Chase Stokes and Madeline Cline to put out a call on their social media to say: Hey, if you have a high school rock band, there might be one on ‘Outer Banks,’ so send us a video of your band. They did that and then we got thousands of submissions. It gave me a chance to get access to these kids and it was an easy way to round them up, basically.
What were you looking for while auditioning? And since they are musicians first, how did you get the bandmembers ready to step into acting roles?
When we were looking through all the tapes, I don’t think I had an idea of what I thought it needed to be… I just looked for something where I thought, oh my God, that kid is talented. They were all 16, 17—they were young. So I was really looking for people that I thought were crazy, musically talented. And then I met them and luckily one of those guys, Will Lipton, was an actor. So that was lucky.
Once we started, we had ’em all down and we knew that they were going to be the band. So we would just interview them in therapy sessions: We were literally like, who’s your mom? Who’s your dad? Where’d you grow up? Were you rich? Were you poor? Do they believe in you as a musician or do they not? And so we would just write to that. We tried to make the characters as close to their actual personalities as we could.
You shoot a lot in North Carolina, but this show doesn’t take place in a fictional town like you’ve done before. What personality traits of Wilmington did you want to make sure came across on screen for ‘The Runarounds’?
It’s just a sweet little town. It’s still only 100,000 people. It has this really nice quality of life, I love it. I lived in LA for 25 years and when my kids got to high school I was like, oh, let’s simplify this a little bit. And it just made me love it. Weirdly, it’s got this tradition of well-known YA shows that have been shot there — ‘Dawson’s Creek’, ‘One Tree Hill’, ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty.’ So that was an accident of fate. So I thought, well, why don’t we show Wilmington as Wilmington? It’s already been this pretend backdrop for all these shows. Why don’t we just pretend it is what it is?
A lot of the crew that worked on this show, you’ve worked with on others. What does keeping the same group around you bring to the experience on set?
It’s a family. And by saying that, it’s not just a metaphorical family—literally half the crew is related. You better not talk sh*t about anyone because you’re probably talking to their cousin. I lived in LA and the crews are just more transactional, they kind of come and go. It’s a big city. But because we all know each other [here], I’m gonna see the dolly grip in the grocery store, you know what I mean? So when we wanted to do this on spec, everybody jumps in and helps one another. When everybody wants to shoot a short film or do their own little thing, everyone just kind of rallies.
What’s been the best part about getting to see the cast grow as a real band?
At first, they were brought together in this sort of artificial way. But they were so young and enough time has passed between the show launching that they’ve been on tour and played a bunch of dates. They played the Troubadour, they played a festival—all the things that a real band goes through of riding in the van and staying in crappy motels. They’ve done all that. So now when we shoot it, they’re drawing on that real experience. That’s been really fun to see that emerge. They would make it as a band without a show, so it’s been fun to watch.
What do you hope people get from watching ‘The Runarounds?’
The whole spirit of the show is to be willing to take a chance on what you really want to do. I feel like a lot of people just become practical in default. And I think if you don’t have kind of pathological optimism, nothing interesting is going to happen to you. So to just to be willing to go for it. And if you fail, so what? Chances are you are going to fail… but then you don’t have that regret.
‘The Runarounds‘ will premiere on Prime Video on Sept. 1.
