The Apple TV+ show, which is available to watch on the streaming platform now, follows girls Sam (YaYa Gosselin) and Jade (Maya Cech) who discover a gold coin that opens a hidden world in their seaside town of Surfside, which also leads them to discover several supernatural mysteries that they need to solve.
‘Surfside Girls’ Boss on Adventure and ‘Production Chaos’
Chan came on board when the series was “later in development” but it was the friendship between Sam and Jade that made her want to be part of the project.
“What I thought was interesting was that they’re at this sort of crossroads of their friendship, remembering what it was like to be a 13-year-old girl I just remember thinking there’s some friends that you’ve had forever but then you start to realize ‘maybe we’re too different’ and I just love that character dynamic and exploring them,” Chan said.
Surfside Girls is based on Kim Dwinell’s graphic novels of the same name, and though the author did not have a hands-on role with the show, for Chan it was important to keep her involved in some way.
She explained: “We kept her updated and I think the studio sent her scripts and cuts to watch, and if she weighed in on anything they would pass on notes to me.
“I don’t surf so I did reach out to her for a lot of surfing questions, ‘what kind of board would you use if you’re trying to do this?’ and […] she was amazing.”
Making the show wasn’t an easy experience, though, because it was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the locations in which they shot the show did lead to some “production chaos.”
Reflecting on the challenges of making the series, Chan said: “When you’re working with a young cast, and again we were very lucky because all of our actors were fantastic, but you sort of have certain hours that you have to shoot at, certain hours that you can have to shoot your day, and so that was tough because Sam and Jade are pretty much in every scene.
“So just the logistics of production was—luckily they were both fantastic and knew their lines and came in prepared—but that was definitely a challenge.”
Chan went on: “We built our boardwalk, which is pretty prominent in our show, we built it in this backlot of a studio out in Simi Valley here in California, and it’s about as far away from the beach as you can get. But, you know, we brought in sand and then the difficulties of that was because it’s outside we can control it but it gets really windy there, so we had 60 miles per hour winds, and it was a lot of production chaos.
“And then, on top of that, we were still in sort of the height of COVID when we were shooting this so it was a lot of work around there. So definitely the challenges of this show, because I think is was so ambitious, made for some obstacles.”
On Finding the Perfect Sam and Jade
Chan shared that the show’s team wanted to make a show that had a “big, fun, adventurous Goonies-type mystery” for the whole family to enjoy, and to do that they needed to find the right actors to play Sam and Jade.
What was important to the showrunner was ensuring they had a diverse cast: “We knew we wanted Jade to be Asian-American, specifically Chinese-American, because that’s my cultural background, and then Sam is Mexican-American, so we were writing towards that specificity.
“Our group of writers in our room was very diverse in that we represented all those backgrounds, and so we cast a wide net, but we really wanted to keep it within those two, sort of cultural backgrounds.”
Chan remarked that the moment Cech auditioned she knew the actor was “our Jade” but it was harder to find the right Sam.
“We auditioned a bunch of actors and Yaya came in, and I remember, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen her’ and she did a Netflix movie called ‘We Can Be Heroes’ […] I remember in that movie she has this very almost dry delivery of lines that I really liked, and it wasn’t what we initially envisioned Sam,” she said of Gosselin.
“[We wanted her] to be a little bit more chaotic and crazy outgoing, but I think when Yaya came in she just brought this sweet, almost awkward, shy vulnerability to this character who is very imaginative and believes in the supernatural, and aliens, and all this stuff.”
Chan describes Sam and Jade as being an “odd couple” pairing, like Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) in The X Files, because of the different ways they approach the mysteries in Surfside, one focused on science and the other on the supernatural, but that was part of the fun.
“It’s definitely not like we were reinventing the wheel, but I think what we wanted to apply was that they’re kids and leaning into the idea that you don’t have to be the one thing you know and that you should be able to try to see something from someone else’s point of view,” the showrunner said.
Surfside Girls is available to watch on Apple TV+ now.
