Up in the Santa Clarita mountains, as Viet Thanh Nguyen toured the set of The Sympathizer’s fourth episode, “Give Us Some Good Lines,” he found himself feeling the way he had when he wrote the novel on which the series is based. This standalone installment of the HBO adaptation, set in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, focused on the making of The Hamlet, a fictional gritty film modeled after ’70s classics like Apocalypse Now. “It’s a funny, satirical section of the novel, but the tragedy comes in because all the stuff that Hollywood is making in the movie actually references real tragedy,” the author says.

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He saw an entire decimated village recreated, the production design emphasizing downed helicopters and bloody casualties. “I had to take a second look before I realized they were mannequins lying in the pond, in the rice paddies,” Nguyen says. “There were body parts that had been manufactured lying around as well. Again, that was a little funny and disconcerting—all at the same time.”

It’s a stark visual representation of what The Sympathizer accomplishes as a whole, upending the Western lens of the war in a darkly comic way. The show follows The Captain (Hoa Xuande), a Vietnamese refugee who’s landed in Los Angeles and is playing the role of double agent—ostensibly working under a South Vietnamese general, but secretly reporting back to the communist regime in Hanoi—and observes his incredulity at all versions of the American perspective. In Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Captain eventually goes to the Philippines to work as a Vietnamese consultant on production for The Hamlet, where he notices how the very people the film supposedly intends to honor are being marginalized. (The series version relocates the production to just outside of LA.)

“I grew up watching most of the major movies that Hollywood made about the Vietnam War—in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, 2000s—and they impacted me mostly negatively,” Nguyen says. “I realized that many of them were good-to-great works of art, but works of art in which the Vietnamese of all kinds were erased or effaced or silenced or violated.” He calls this section of The Sympathizer his “revenge”—one as scathingly comic as it is painfully sad.

The Captain manages to secretly embed pro-communist messaging into The Hamlet’s dialogue, since nobody on set, least of all the director (known as “The Auteur,” played by Robert Downey Jr. in one of several roles), speaks Vietnamese. We can laugh at that playful deception. But when The Captain is horrifically injured on set near the episode’s end? Not so much.

“It’s funny. We had Vietnamese consultants—cultural consultants, dialogue consultants, language consultants—on our [show], and I’m combining all of those different roles into this one role that I had to replicate on this faux set,” says Xuande, who is Vietnamese Australian. “You feel like every time the media or Hollywood turns their attention to a part of the conflict, only one perspective is ever seen or drawn upon.”

That’s what leads to The Sympathizer’s dark final-act turn in its portrait of The Hamlet. “By the time you reach the end of the novel, hopefully it’s clear to the reader that everything that happens in the filmmaking segment foreshadows what happens at the end [of The Sympathizer],” Nguyen says. “The Hollywood segment is actually pivotal in terms of connecting the first half to the second half—and the second half of the novel and the second half of the TV series get a lot more tragic.”

The making of The Hamlet marks a crucial midpoint in The Sympathizer. It made sense to Nguyen that the show would place that action squarely in the middle of its seven-part run, and play as a kind of standalone episode. The idea was first discussed with coshowrunner Don McKellar, and would mark a fresh start overall for the series. Though McKellar’s writing partner, Park Chan-wook, had directed the show’s first three episodes, Oscar-nominated Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (City of God) came in for episode four, putting his own stamp on the material.

“It makes fun of how Americans see themselves as the center of the world, and how sometimes arrogant they are. Me being a foreigner, I see that. That’s nothing really new,” Meirelles says. “It was only making fun of something that I always see.”

This shift in focus introduces The Captain, and by extension the audience, to a new world and cast of characters. There’s Downey’s Auteur, whom Nguyen had initially envisioned as a satire of Francis Ford Coppola. “All of that was drawn from the available material on the making of Apocalypse Now and on Francis Ford Coppola’s biographies,” he says. Meirelles, in turn, looked at production photos from that Oscar-winning movie for inspiration. “The difference between me shooting this episode and Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now is that I had only 13 days to shoot,” he cracks.

Then came Downey. The Oscar-winning actor found great reference points in his own upbringing: His father is filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. “He knew all these directors. They would go to his house when he was a kid,” Meirelles says. “Who am I to tell him how American directors from the ’70s were?” Downey found a natural collaborator in Meirelles, given the director’s improvisation-heavy style. “I like to shoot more like a documentary—I play the whole scene from top to the end, and I position cameras so the actor can do whatever they want,” Meirelles says. “Robert loves to just start and he doesn’t know where he’s going to go.”

We’re also introduced to two actors on the set: an intense American method star played by David Duchovny, and a Korean American actor slotted into a stereotype-heavy role, portrayed by John Cho. The latter’s casting was intently meta. “For a good part of our generation, John was that Korean American star that we saw in every television show that necessitated an Asian male character,” Xuande says. Nguyen made sure to visit the set on a day Cho was there, since he’d hoped Cho would play this part. He caught the actor doing a scene where he’s half-naked and being tortured, representative of the character’s dilemma in the book.

Duchovny’s role, known as “The Thespian,” carried obvious shades of Marlon Brando. We never see him break character as he hurls brutally racist and sexist insults, in line with his role of a dehumanized American soldier. “The amazing thing about Brando was he came off like he didn’t care, but he cared so much. I wanted to get at the kind of gamesmanship that I’ve heard he did on set in order to get real reactions out of people, even if it was just putting his lines on somebody’s forehead,” Duchovny says. Nguyen also had actors like Harvey Keitel and Martin Sheen in mind while writing the book. Meirelles found inspiration elsewhere: The idea of the character living in a tent was drawn from a story he’d heard about Daniel Day-Lewis.

Meirelles wanted the Thespian to go as wild as Duchovny would allow. “I just thought, I’ve got to keep it within some kind of realistic frame,” Duchovny says. “Fernando would say, ‘Crazier, crazier, crazier.’ I’d go, ‘Okay!’ He’d say, ‘That didn’t sound crazy.’ I said, ‘Felt crazy, but let’s keep going.’” Duchovny found it an interesting acting challenge, but this was hardly the way he’d prefer to work as an actor: “To do it for months at a time, that’s a whole other kind of living. Would I do that? I guess I’d try. But I’m not sure that that leads to my best work.”

One particularly harrowing scene sees The Thespian determined to act out a rape as scripted, before it’s broken up at the last possible moment. The scene was meticulously blocked out with an intimacy coordinator—as, one can safely assume, would not have been the case on a ’70s movie set. “It was very step by step: ‘Is this okay? Is this okay?’” Duchovny says. “It was very cool that way, and I hope it was cool for everybody.”

The Sympathizer is a show made by outsiders to the US, from the Canadian McKellar to Brazilian Meirelles to many Vietnamese cast and crew members. It’s that reality, that shared understanding, that made Nguyen feel comfortable with the tone of the adaptation’s satire, and its feel for the heartbreak that travels hand in hand with its dark comedy. But the author hopes viewers can enjoy the ride as well.

“Tropic Thunder is one of the movies I’m seeing being referenced, and the opening 15 minutes where they are satirizing Hollywood Vietnam War movies—that’s a masterful piece of filmmaking,” the author says with a grin. “That was also in my mind as I was writing the satire of this.”