MAGNUM P.I. Post-Mortem: Perdita Weeks Breaks Down the Bonkers Motorcycle Chase

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Wednesday, December 13 episode of MAGNUM P.I.]

When director-actress Perdita Weeks initially described directing “Extracurricular Activities,” she shared it was like “shooting two completely different movies.”

Now, she acknowledges to Give Me My Remote in the video below, “in fact, it was like three.”

“There was the motorbike thing, the chase sequence with the car and the motorbike, that was its own thing that we had totally separate meetings for,” she shares. “It was the biggest deal…It was going to be the hardest thing to get [done]. It was Saturdays and Chinatown and blocking off roads. It was on another level of logistically difficult.”

“Then, this campus university stuff, the spy and professor situation—that was kind of my thriller movie,” Weeks continues of the show’s main mystery, as her Higgins and Magnum (Jay Hernandez) were hired to find out if a professor had crossed a line with a student. “And then I have my buddy movie [as the guys went on a father-son camping trip]. It was just great. I didn’t need to prep so much for that because that was all character work. That’s on the guys, you know? That’s their acting chops coming in spades.”

And while juggling that many tones may have been intimidating to some, Weeks relished the opportunity. “That’s why it was such a great experience,” she says. “It was just so varied. And so all-encompassing.”

As for that pivotal motorbike chase—as Magnum and Higgins tried to outrace a spy before she reached the Chinese consulate, where they would lose all access to the woman—the sequence took Higgins on a wild ride..albeit not Weeks herself.

“Well, to be completely honest, I don’t have a motorbike license,” she says with a laugh. “So I was not allowed to operate it. I really wanted to. I was like, ‘Shall I get my motorbike license? Should I just learn?’ And they were like, ‘I mean…you could. But if you crash…’ It’s an insurance thing. I’m not Tom Cruise, as much as I like to think I am. And so I was very reliant on the stunt people.”

But allowing the stunt team to take center stage had its own perks for Weeks as a director. “It means I could be watching [the filming] and I could actually be directing it,” she says. “It’s a bit frustrating [doing both]…it’s tricky to go between the two because you want to just be doing the puppet strings as opposed to being the puppet.”

“It was…logistically just very tricky in terms of literally just where do you put the humans, where do you put the kit when we’re outside and you’re filming 360 and where is the catering?” she recalls of the far-reaching sequence. “And dealing with the general public and trying to keep them out of the shot or hey do we just use them? And it was very hot, which just makes everything harder—the climate is not forgiving when you’re trying to film stuff like this in Hawaii as you can imagine. But at the end of the day, we got it.”

Now that the episode is over, what was Weeks’ favorite sequence to direct? She shares her answer below.

MAGNUM P.I., Wednesdays, 9/8c, NBC

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