Apple TV Plus’ Silo needed to build the world’s most perfect set of stairs
If you ask Silo star Rebecca Ferguson how many stairs she walked up during production — well, it’s too many.
“30,000 a day? I don’t know,” she laughs. “The team — the amount of stairs everyone’s climbed is just bonkers. We’re in good shape!”
For another show, and another set, this would be seen as an exaggeration. But on Apple TV Plus’ Silo, the adaptation of the Silo book series by Hugh Howey, the central staircase and its thousands of stairs is more than just “one of the main characters really.” They’re the things that define the life and look of the entire world.
The series takes place in (where else?) an underground silo, where some 10,000 humans live, generations after the Earth became uninhabitable. There are hundreds of levels to the silo, and transportation between the floors is done entirely on foot. That’s one thing when you’re just going down a few floors a day, and something else entirely when you have to traverse dozens of floors, or even the entire thing top to bottom. Traveling the whole thing can be a days-long pilgrimage, which also makes it a very rare feat; it’s enough to silo (ayyyyy) whole parts of the community from each other, and perfect for conspiracy to fester.
In the show’s universe, the design of the silo is very particular (and, predictably, a mystery left by the enigmatic “founders” that will be untangled over the run of Silo). But these first few episodes had to sell a very specific reorienting for the audience of the realities of a world that consists entirely of one vertical building, and one showrunner Graham Yost wanted to get exactly right.
“It was incredibly arduous to build,” Yost says, crediting production designer Gavin Bocquet with coming up with the design of the silo, the
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