A TO Z at TCA: Ben Queen and Cristin Milioti on Achieving ‘Genuine Chemistry’

When a series revolves around a couple in a relationship, one of the most important things to get right is the costars’ chemistry. And while some actors have to work to get things on track, for A TO Z costars Cristin Milioti and Ben Feldman, the sparks were there from the start.

“When they got together in the room to actually do the network test, they had literally met each other an hour before, and it was real electric,” A TO Z  creator Ben Queen told reporters during the show’s Television Critics Association press tour panel. “You could see it. There was real genuine chemistry between these two that I’d been told that this thing existed, and it’s real.”

“I think that chemistry, both as people and as actors, it’s either there or not,” Milioti added. “You can put two people together in a show and put two people together on set and hope for the best and light it in the right way, but I would say that you can tell when it’s there, and it’s from the second you meet someone…I do think that you know the minute that it’s right, both in life and even in front of 20 executives with notepads. It’s either there or it’s not, and it was absolutely there. We had quick rehearsal in an office, and then we went in and it just I don’t know. It’s not tangible. I don’t think it’s something you can manufacture. You can’t.”

And for Queen, he has an extra good reason to want to make sure the central dynamic of Andrew and Zelda works correctly.

“[A TO Z is] based sort of loosely on my experience with my wife,” he explained. “My wife and I, we fell in love when I was, like, 23 years old, and we got to know each other and then realized we were at the same concert a few years earlier, and I remember being in that lobby I was there with somebody I didn’t want to be with, and I remember looking across and seeing this girl there and thinking, ‘I wish I was here with this girl,’ and then when I found out that she was there at that same show, I was like, ‘That obviously was you, right?’ Her take on it was, ‘Yeah, maybe,’ which is pretty much our relationship. We’re very different people, and just when we sit at home and watch TV together, we like to watch relationship comedies, FRIENDS, and things like that.”

But whether the A TO Z characters end up in the same place isn’t something Queen wants to commit to yet.

“The cool thing is when we show this to audiences, they say, ‘I want to tune in more to see if that means they’re going to break up or get married or whatever,’ I love that because that’s real,” Queen said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen with relationships…what we’re trying to do, [is to] make people feel like they’re watching something that can relate to their own lives.”

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A TO Z airs Thursdays at 9:30 PM this fall on NBC.

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