‘Sweet Tooth’ Creator Jim Mickle Reflects On Drama’s Final Season On Netflix: “Gus’ Superpower Is Hope & Finding The Best In Humanity”

Lynette Rice
·10-min read

SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details from the third and final season of Sweet Tooth on Netflix.

Gus’ journey has finally come to an end on Sweet Tooth, Netflix’s adaptation of the DC comic book series of the same name by Jeff Lemire.

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Created by Jim Mickle, Sweet Tooth follows the adventures of Gus (Christian Convery) — part deer, part boy — who leaves his home in the forest to find the outside world ravaged by a cataclysmic event. He joins a ragtag family of humans and animal-children hybrids like himself in search of answers about this new world and the mystery behind his hybrid origins.

Here, Mickle — who also served as the showrunner on the Team Downey/DC Entertainment/Warner Bros. TV series — talks about wrapping up the high-concept series and which hybrid he’s probably going to miss the most.

DEADLINE I have to imagine you’re going to miss these kids, especially Christian Convery who played Gus, aka Sweet Tooth.

MICKLE Yes. Absolutely. That was one of our mantras. When in doubt, you can just cut to a close-up of his face and it’ll make everything work.

DEADLINE You dealt with the same problems that Stranger Things did, right? That it was a race against time before the kids grew up?

MICKLE It was always hovering, yes. It was hovering back at the beginning when we cast Christian. I think we raised a lot of eyebrows when we were looking to cast young, but Carmen Cuba, who is our casting director and who also cast Stranger Things, was well out in front by saying ‘look, this is a long investment.’ Christian was about as young as we could really cast at that point. After season one, Netflix kind of spoke up and said, ‘it feels like you have an ending at the end of season three,’ which I did. It was why we could take on this massive commitment and basically do seasons two and three back to back, by cutting out the waiting period in between. It made making it incredibly hard, but it was really worth it and we just lucked out. Christian is a full-on teenager now, as is Naledi Murray who plays Wendy.

DEADLINE So that answers the ending question. Both you and Netflix decided early on when it would end.

MICKLE Yeah, I mean it was always part of the pitch. The comic book ends very similarly to how the show ends, and it always felt like it was the natural ending for the show.

DEADLINE So the comic books do, for the most part, offer a beginning, middle and end?

MICKLE They do. I think it was maybe 40 issues and they had probably four big arcs. It wraps up really beautifully. We brought in new characters that we created and suddenly our story arcs started taking on their own weight in a really beautiful way, so we sort of diverged from some of the core elements early on and by the middle we strayed even more. What was nice, even though we’ve been telling an overlapping story, is that it was quite cool to be able to land at a similar point but in a very different way.

DEADLINE Did you get the sense that your show appealed to a larger population than the comic books or the comic books were always meant for a families? 

MICKLE No, I think the comics were much more melancholy and kind of weird. Jeff has this really beautiful kind of sadness to the way that he writes and tells stories. And I think when I started adapting it in 2016, it was a dark period in the world. It was a dark period for me, personally. And I kind of felt like, I don’t know if I want to live in this world for however long this show would go. I don’t know that I’d want to live in this world that is so melancholy. I think what I really latched onto in the comic book was how Gus in the comics had this hopefulness and innocence to him, which at times is almost comical because of the world that he’s in. It’s so brutal in the comics. I latched onto that a little bit, like what if I tell it through his point of view, what if it was almost like a Kimmy Schmidt version? What if he’s the one who’s seeing all this stuff? That was the impetus and that just kept growing. It’s funny, some people will say, ‘oh, you lightened it up to make it more approachable for television.’ But it really wasn’t that strategic. It was really more of having come from so many post-apocalyptic stories, especially in the early 2010s. I feel like I’ve seen post-apocalyptic stories before. What’s a new version of this that could feel fresh through Gus’s eyes?

I remember right before we released it, I could finally step back and go, ‘this is a really weird show. There’s weird characters, it’s weird concept steps combined together. I feel like this might just be weird for people.’ What was so awesome was that first week it came out and people really fell in love with it and fell in love with him. It taught me a lot about how far you can go in stories these days.

DEADLINE If you could magically turn back time, would you have launched this show during the pandemic? 

MICKLE I think it did help us in season one, and I remember that being another thing too. We started shooting the pilot before the pandemic in 2019. There were all these decisions we were making, like should background actors be wearing masks in the hospital. And then we were up to our third episode when the pandemic really hit in 2020. I was like, man, this couldn’t be the worst timing for us. But there was this period where we came out in 2021 where the world felt like it had moved on. The world finally was ready to turn the corner. That was almost like the catalytic event when the show opened.

DEADLINE Is there anything about seasons one and two that you would’ve done differently?

MICKLE No, I feel like in season one there was a moment where it felt like every day the news headlines that came out were some sort of version of what we had talked about the day before in the writer’s room. At a certain point I think we had to sort of stop and go,’ are we going to try to chase headlines? Are we going to try to chase science?’ I think we were smart to say, let’s stay the course and tell our story. We’re never going to be able to get ahead of it, so let’s tell our story. We’re telling a dystopian storybook fairytale here. So I’m glad we made that decision and I think that has worked well. I’ll be interested to see years if from now, we will look back and there will be things that feel dated or out of sync with reality. But for the most part, I’m glad that we told the story that we did.

DEADLINE Alright, so onto the finale. How much did you ruminate over the look of the antler tree? Was it an antler tree in the comic books? 

MICKLE No, no. That was our mythology. The mythology in the comics is quite beautiful, but it’s very lyrical and very amorphous in a way that it was always like, how do we make this concrete in a way that’s going to work for the story and we can put this on the screen? What’s going to be a symbol for how it comes together? It was really our production designer, Nick Bassett, and the production team. They were working on that while we were in season two. They were already and sculpting it. It was probably months of trying to figure out exactly how big and what the view was going to be. And we didn’t want it to be CG. We wanted that to be a real build.

DEADLINE You had this really profound line, human is the disease, the sick is the cure. Where did that come from? That was awesome. 

MICKLE Yeah, it is. Thank you. That’s our writers Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt. I remember getting the first draft of that script and just going, oh man. You’re always spending time in writing trying to boil down complicated ideas into really bite-sized wording. And it was one of those moments of, how did you guys nail that? I even asked them who had that, and I don’t think even they remembered who had that.

DEADLINE Did they also do Gus’ speech about humans in the last episode?

MICKLE No, that was me. It felt a little bit like an opportunity to say things I wanted to say throughout the series, but just didn’t quite have a spot. By the time you get to season three, it’s an interesting relationship you have with the audience because they know that you’re not going to kill Gus. So there’s a jeopardy that you sort of missed out on. One of the things that really clicked in season three was his life was not at stake, but his innocence was. And that’s something that we write to from a storytelling point of view. Even as you watch those kids grow up in real life, you sort of hope that they’re going to maintain that innocence and pureness. So that was something that we really made season three about. His superpower is really hope and finding the best in humanity.

DEADLINE Those people who play Rosie’s wolf boys. They must have been so happy to stand up at the end of each day.

MICKLE One of them was Amie Donald, who plays the doll in Megan. She lives in New Zealand. She played hybrids for us in season one. She was just so good with movement. And every time we had a hybrid who was not Gus, we would call Amie. In season two, we ended up casting her as the monkey girl because she’s also a gymnast. Then in season three, we always knew that the wolf boys were going to be an element from the comic that we wanted to pull in, but it was like, how are we going to pull that off in a very practical way? We tried a lot of kids that could walk on all fours, which sounds so much easier than it actually is. The core strength that it requires is insane. I would try to do it for just a little bit and I was like, all right, that’s it for the day. One of the other crazy things was the way we wanted their back legs to bend the way that dogs do. So they wore these [special shoes] that pushed their ankles to resemble a dog’s hind legs. When we called cut, all these adults would come in and pick them up and put ’em on their back, piggyback style, so the kids could preserve the bottom of their feet. There were many times on set where you’d just be like, this is the weirdest job in the world.

DEADLINE We have to talk about the car chase in the snow. Where and how was that done?

MICKLE Yeah, that was kind of new. I knew that I was going to be directing that one so I wanted to really find a way to have fun with this. The biggest challenge to season three was how we shot in the summertime in New Zealand. There’s no snow, no arctic canyon. We ended up using miniature photography. I have a model of the beast sitting here next to me that’s remote controlled. That was incredibly detailed. It took months to build that and the other vehicles, and we would use that for wide shots and for the crash. Then we actually used little miniature sets with the snow. It was really a mashup of on stage with smoke and mirrors and handcrafted sort of trickery.

DEADLINE So how much did you interact with your narrator, James Brolin ,during the life of the show?

MICKLE We did the pilot with him in person. We told him at some point that when we come to the end, he’s going to have to come down to New Zealand. And I’m sure he was thinking, ‘that’s never going to happen.’ And then he did all of his recordings remotely through Covid. When we were a couple weeks away from shooting the finale, I thought, ‘is he really going to get on a plane and come to New Zealand and get fit for ears and all this stuff?’ It was a really special day on set.

DEADLINE Now that it’s over, can you name your favorite hybrid from the show?

MICKLE That’s funny. That baby puppy in the pilot still has my heart. And when you touched it, it felt like a baby. I just remember that day on set, the entire crew just sort went like, ‘whoa, we’re doing this. This is cool.’ It was this Jim Henson kind of magic coming into life. But then, of course, Gus will always be the favorite.

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