Spoilers for Only Murders in the Building Season 5, Episode 7 – “Silver Alert” – are ahead! If you aren’t caught up, you can stream the series with a Hulu subscription.
At the moment, one of Hulu’s best shows, Only Murders in the Building, is dropping new episodes every Tuesday on the 2025 TV schedule, and with each week, we get more hilarious and memorable moments from the star-studded cast. However, this week, we got an extra special moment, because Episode 7 of Season 5 featured one of the co-creator's favorite scenes between Steve Martin and Selena Gomez.
A large portion of this episode is based around the billionaires’ game night that Oliver, Mabel and Charles crash. There's a big scene in the episode involving a game of Celebrity, and it’s hilarious because while Logan Lerman’s Jay, Renée Zellweger’s Camila and Christoph Waltz’s Bash kill the game, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez’s characters struggle, big time...at first.
That idea of watching these characters play a simple game delighted co-creator John Hoffman, as he told me during an interview for CinemaBlend:
Oh, I love that so much, too. And it really made me laugh. The opening of the scene, where they really go mano a mano, and the line of Christoph’s, just like ‘The game is Celebrity.’ And I thought, ‘I've played enough games of Celebrity in my life that the idea of Christoph Waltz being excited as Bash to play a round of Celebrity, I was, like, in heaven.’ And then the dance of watching each of them take their turns in that, you know, I've always – I'm not like a crazy game person, but I love it.
Hoffman continued to explain that at parties, when you play games like this, “all the guards drop,” and you get to see a new side of a person. That was certainly true for the billionaires, but it was also true for Mabel and Charles, as the co-creator explained:
All the guards drop, because either people are competitive [or] some people aren't as competitive. Some people don't care about following the rules, and that drives me crazy, or whatever. You know, we're learning things about people's personalities in ways, and all the guards dropped.
We also got to learn a lot of random information this way. The game revealed Vladimir Putin bakes an upside-down pineapple cake for Bash’s Labor Day party, Kim Jong Un won’t “shut up about Crumbl cookies,” and that Camila and Xi Jinping call each other Bunny Face and the reason is “just for us,” among other things. Hoffman got a real kick out of all that, as we got to see “those characters loosening up.”
However, as stated earlier, seeing Martin and Gomez play the game was one of his favorite scenes. And I’d have to agree, seeing them panic over the Broadway category and then using Oliver’s ridiculous stories to get the answers was absolutely hilarious, as Hoffman told me:
And then watching certainly Steve and Selena in one of my favorite scenes they've ever done, playing that game and having to answer for Oliver's questions that he would have gotten in a second. I just loved them in that, it was a blast to watch them loosen up, all of them.
They really were super loose in that scene! I mean, at the end, Steve Martin jumped in celebration, and Selena Gomez threw the cards up. It was also hilarious to see them recall Martin Short’s character’s wild stories and claims – like he invented both the names Adele Dazeem and Idina Menzel.
Honestly, this scene falls up there with Season 5 highlights that include the return of Paul Rudd’s ongoing gag, any scene between Oliver and Loretta, and the few scenes we’ve gotten between Mabel and Jay that have enemies-to-lovers vibes. It was so fun to see Martin and Gomez let loose and get so passionate, and it was even more fun to see them recall all of Oliver’s wild stories.
So, I agree with Hoffman’s assessment of this sequence; I think it’s one of my favorites, too, and you can go back and watch it on Hulu.
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