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What do you do when the late-night talk show you write for is at the top? Go ice skating! That’s what the Gordon Ford Show team did on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Actor Austin Basis, who plays Gordon Ford’s head writer, Alvin revealed that knowing how to ice skate for the scene was actually a bonus.

“Actually, when I got the part, they were like, ‘Oh yeah, can you ice skate?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. I mean, I usually don’t fall, but I don’t know if I could do any tricks.’ But, I was lucky enough, I actually did a skating part where I skated on the hockey rink during Beauty and the Beast. And I actually used hockey skates,” Basis told Showbiz Cheat Sheet.

Only 2 ‘Marvelous Mrs.Maisel’ actors could ice skate

So thankfully Basis could do more than manage on skates. “If you grew up in New York going to Rockefeller Center or in my case, Prospect Park or some of the other parks that have rinks, it’s all figure skates,” he recalled. “Whereas in a rink in Canada or a skating rink in upstate New York, the first time I ever wore hockey skates I was at a skating rink in Binghamton. Because they give hockey skates for men and figure skates for women.”

For the ice skating scene, Maisel designers stayed true to details, transforming brand-new ice skates into skates that would have been worn during the era. “And in this case, it was figure skates but they were brand-new figure skates. So, they were very hard and uncomfortable. And they had to paint them to look like the old skates they used to give out at Rockefeller Center. We actually met up at a rehearsal and had a skate test to see who could skate and who couldn’t. And literally, only two of us could skate!” he laughed.

“One of those two was the person that I basically pushed on the Zamboni the whole time on the ice,” Basis exclaimed. “So, at least I got a good workout because it was freezing those couple of nights we shot overnight.”

Why did producers shoot the ice skating scene first?

Basis also shared that The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ice skating scene was the first scene that was filmed. Mainly because the rink was going to close. “That was the first scene we shot. Because they were closing Rockefeller Center or thawing the ice for the season when we were filming in March,” Basis recounted.

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“So there was one or two more weeks of having the ice there. And so they were like, ‘We got to do this first. Then we’ll do episode 2 where you meet all the characters.’ And then, we didn’t know the rest of what happened in episode 3,” he shared. “So we were just shooting the ice scenes and getting to know each other as if we had been in the writers’ room for years and months before that.”

“That was a testament to the casting and the writing because it just all worked out,” he said.

Episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5 are currently streaming on Prime.

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