‘The Shards’ Star Igby Rigney on His Bret Easton Ellis Take, the Cast Going “on a Real Bender” to Shoot That Wild Party and Their Active Group Chat

Igby Rigney was a big Ryan Murphy fan when the audition came to him for the lead role in The Shards . The process took a couple of months and, after landing the pivotal part, he dove head first into the book by Bret Easton Ellis on which the FX adaptation is based.

Rigney still hasn’t met Ellis, who co-wrote the first two episodes with Murphy and then took a step back in what has been described as a “godfather-y approach” with the nine-episode adaptation that Murphy and Ellis plan to turn into a multi-year series . But Rigney has heard that Ellis is enjoying his take on Bret, the 17-year-old protagonist and narrator who is a fictionalized version of Ellis in his autofiction classic. Related Stories Critics' Conversation Critics Pick Summer TV's Beauties and Bores THR Spotlight Pop Singer Hayes Warner Never Acted Professionally in Her Life. Ryan Murphy Cast Her in 'The Shards' Anyway

“Obviously, the book has a very specific ending, but we’re deviating from the source material a little bit in bringing it to the screen, so I’m not sure how any of that is going to play out,” Rigney tells The Hollywood Reporter of Murphy adding in new storylines and characters to extend the show into three or four seasons. But by the end of season one, “people are going to be very split between the characters of Bret and Robert,” Rigney says. “We do get to a point of picking sides.”

The most recently released fourth episode, “Robert’s Party,” brought Bret and Robert, the latter who is played by Homer Gere, to their most antagonistic point yet. Over the course of a debaucherous party thrown at the Hollywood Hills mansion belonging to Kaia Gerber’s character Susan Reynolds’ father, a handful of the main characters were involved in a near-attack by a local cult leader, and Robert ends up needing to be resuscitated after hurling himself into the pool to cap off an erratic-turned-violent dance number that Rigney says Gere rehearsed “at least 100 times.”

“There is definitely a pre-dance Homer and post-dance Homer — like his whole personality has changed since doing that in front [of everyone],” says Rigney, whose Bret was the one who sent Robert drinking — and then dancing — after telling the new kid in town that he heard the rumor that Robert may or may not have killed his mother.

Below, Rigney shares his casting story as he dives into his approach to playing Bret, details what it’s like to play in the world of The Shards on a recreated 1981 Los Angeles set where he’s chain-smoking chamomile cigarettes (“I would not recommend anybody picking up that particular habit,” he says) and talks about the future of the adaptation.

Ryan Murphy told THR they saw 500 actors for The Shards . How familiar were you with Bret Easton Ellis and his book The Shards when you went out for the part of Bret, and what was your audition process like?

I wasn’t familiar with Bret beyond American Psycho , to be honest. I hadn’t read any of his stuff. I was familiar with Ryan, so when I got that audition in my inbox, I was freaking out.