Harvey Guillén made you a podcast just in time for Valentine’s Day. Yes, you! The Set Up is a scripted romantic comedy audio series that you can listen to anywhere. Yes, anywhere!
Here’s the set up of The Set Up: Guillén plays Juan, a lonely and anxious museum curator in New York City who falls for Fernando (Christian Navarro), a calm antidote to Juan’s fastidious needs… who turns out to be a conman in pursuit of Juan’s favorite painting. The first of ten episodes released Wednesday.
“We’ve all been in relationships that maybe weren’t the best choice or the healthiest,” Guillén — known for playing Guillermo de la Cruz in What We Do in the Shadows, and more recently on screen in Companion — tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Sometimes we’re just blinded by the want, the need for love.”
The Set Up grabbed him because of the script, penned by I.V. Marie and Phillippe Bowgen — “the characters, the twists, the turns!” — but the most intriguing question was, of course: How do you bring it all to life through just a voice?
“Some of the hardest jobs I’ve done are the ones that aren’t in front of the camera,” Guillén says. “You have to convey so much. You don’t get to rely on your features and your face and your movement.”
In the first episode, Juan describes his favorite painting, a seaside scene by fictional 17th century impressionist Margaret Delano. “It’s almost like I can actually hear the waves roaring against the shoreline,” he gushes to his coworker, with the sounds of beaches drifting in like a dream sequence. “I can feel the ocean spray against my face. And now…now…I’m walking! Walking along the beach. The world is full of almost intoxicating promise, unfamiliar faces and possibilities waiting for me in every corner.”
Sure, the audience can’t see the painting — but Guillén’s performance is all we need to know what it looks like.
Guillén and Navarro recorded The Set Up as if it was an on-camera show, meaning the pair was in the room together for their shared scenes. “Sometimes you do voiceover and it’s [just] you, the engineer and the director,” Guillén says. “This was fun because everyone was watching live as this happened, and everyone had input as it was being created.”
Also in the first episode, for example, Juan’s quick delivery and shaky, nervous voice is balanced by Fernando’s slower and heavier and vocal tones. Guillén bristles at the idea of “having to do a scene where you have to be intimate or in love with someone and they’re not in the room.” Being alongside Navarro “allowed us to pause in those moments, where it felt natural, and to fall in love through a microphone.”
But how do you do that? Is love really that blind?? “You can elongate a word, you can make a pause be a little but shorter or longer,” Guillén says. “It’s its own formula, its own art.”
And then, there’s you! Your imagination becomes a character in The Set Up, Guillén says. “We provide the voice to satisfy the environment that [the characters] are in and the storyline,” he says, and you can come up with the rest: “the color of [Juan and Fernando’s] clothes, how the painting looks in the museum. All of it lives in your imagination, we’re just providing the bones.”
Guillén uses his own imagination to conjure images of a fan listening to the podcast unfold while “stuck in traffic on the freeway,” but the possibilities are endless: Let yourself be carried away in his quirky love story while at the kitchen sink, under the covers, on the toilet, during a walk, at the grocery store, folding laundry, scrubbing the baseboards, waiting in line at the post office, changing a lightbulb, at the dentist. The list goes on and on.
This accessibility is key right now. “I think the month of January was the longest year of my life,” Guillén says. He’s referring to the firehouse of legal and cultural attacks begun by Trump’s second term on Jan. 20, which includes, among many other issues, withholding of trans healthcare and sweeping immigration raids.
The Set Up centers Juan’s queer and latino identity, but Guillén wants everyone to lean in (yes, you!). “I’m always intrigued with love stories or comedies in other languages,” he says. “It’s a different story, it’s being told from a different culture.” Juan and his abuela, for example, speak to each other in Spanglish when they appear in scenes together. “It’s not like a Google translated version of a latino story,” Guillén says. “This is real words, real people talking.”
Guillén knows the news is sad and scary. What happens now, he says, is this: “You take a breath and you say, this is bad, this is really bad, but how do I organize? How do I help? You have to really take that breath and that breath is sometimes entertainment. That breath can be sometimes turning on your favorite podcast. That breath can be going to the movies. That breath can be watching your favorite reality TV show for 30 minutes.”
He continues, “That break is needed. History has shown that whenever we’re held against the wall, everyone has always needed entertainment. Everyone has always escaped.” And when the episode is over: “Come back and fight full throttle.”
The Set Up is available on all podcast platforms, and will release new episodes weekly on Wednesdays.
