Homecoming Trivia | 40 facts about the series

«Homecoming» is an American psychological thriller television series based on the Gimlet Media podcast of the same name.

Let’s find out more about the series!

1. Homecoming is an American psychological thriller television series.
2. It is based on the Gimlet Media podcast of the same name.
3. It was created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg.
4. The series premiered November 2, 2018, on Amazon Prime Video.
5. Horowitz and Bloomberg also serve as writers and executive producers alongside Sam Esmail, Chad Hamilton, Julia Roberts, Alex Blumberg, Matt Lieber, and Chris Giliberti.
6. Esmail also directed every episode of the first season.
7. In «Homecoming» stars Roberts, Bobby Cannavale, Stephan James, Shea Whigham, Alex Karpovsky, and Sissy Spacek.
8. The series was given an initial series order for two seasons.
9. The second season deviates from the podcast and features a new story and characters.
10. The second season was directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez and stars Janelle Monáe, Chris Cooper and Joan Cusack with Stephan James and Hong Chau returning from the first season.
11. The second season premiered on May 22, 2020.
12. From the very outset, director Sam Esmail had been insistent on using original segments from a variety of his favorite original scores for his series.
13. After exhaustively researching the complex prospect of licensing and copyright considerations, Esmail was eventually able to acquire clearance to go ahead with what had never been done before: score a TV series with digitized samples of original feature film music compositions.
14. Bringing in a trained pelican cost the studio roughly $50,000
15. “Geist”, the name of the fictional company behind the Homecoming program, is the german word for ghost as well as for mind or intellect.
16. Based on the Gimlet Media podcast drama of the same name.
17. In Season 1 Episode 2, Pineapple, the scene where Shrier (Jeremy Allen White) shoves pineapple into Javen’s (Sam Marra) face was shot so many times that the wardrobe department ran out of clean shirts for Sam Marra to wear for each new take. Filming had to be temporarily halted while the shirts were washed and dried.
18. The series uses two different aspect ratios, a typical-of-TV 16:9 ratio for the 2018 timeline and a vertically cropped 1:1 (square) ratio for the 2022 scenes.
19. The word THOAT means exit in Vietnamese.
20. Most of the music featured in the series is actually music from previous motion pictures.
21. Julia Roberts was pleasantly surprised to find that, for her first ever TV series, her First Assistant Director Peter Kohn had also worked with her years earlier on The Pelican Brief (1993).
22. The location used for filming the interior of the Geist corporation was filmed in Toyota’s headquarters building in California. The same location was also used for the Netflix series Space Force.
23. Dermont Mulroney and Julia Roberts previously co-starred together in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and August: Osage County (2013).
24. Audrey Temple is portrayed by both Amy Sedaris in the podcast and Hong Chau in the TV series. Both the actresses have appeared in Bojack Horseman as Princess Carolyn and Pickles respectively.
25. Ennio Morricone’s music from John Carpenter’s The Thing is used, to suspenseful effect, in episode 7.
26. Stephan James is the only actor to appear in every single episode
27. The language Gloria and Walter speak in Season One is Haitian patois.
28. Dermont Mulroney previously starred alongside Emmy Rossum in Shameless. Rossum is married to the show’s writer/director Sam Esmail.
29. Bobby Cannavale and Shea Whigham appeared together on Boardwalk Empire.
30. Jeremy Allen White is currently acting alongside Rossum on Shameless as her brother Lip Gallagher.
31. The voice recorder that is used by Julia Roberts’ character, Heidi Bergman, to record sessions with her clients is an Olympus DS-7000 digital voice recorder.
32. It can be seen on the table in Episode 1.1 at 0:19:05, while she is speaking with Stephan James’ character, Walter Cruz.
33. Sissy Spacek also appeared with Julia Roberts’ brother, Eric Roberts, in “Raggedy Man.”
34. During the present day scenes, the aspect ratio is more narrow to represent Heidi’s limited memory of the Homecoming program.
35. Later in the season when her memory is triggered by the bird, you can see the frame widening as she starts to see the whole picture.
36. Filming was slated to begin in Los Angeles in April 2018.
37. Principal photography actually began in February 2018 at the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles where the production became the first project to shoot in Universal’s newly constructed production facilities.
38. Exteriors of the Homecoming facility, as well as interiors of the facility lobby and Geist headquarters, were filmed at the former corporate headquarters of Toyota in Torrance, California.
39. On Rotten Tomatoes it received an overall score of 79%, and an overall score of 75 on Metacritic.
40. On July 20, 2018, the first teaser trailer for the series debuted at San Diego Comic-Con and was subsequently released online. A promotional poster for the series was also released.