The core of the Peacock comedy Girls5eva, created by Meredith Scardino, is female friendship — specifically told through the lens of what happens when the members of a '90s girls group reunite in the present to try to recapture some of the fame they once had. Thus, it made perfect sense that for a recent press day celebrating the series, stars Busy Phillips and Paula Pell were paired together for interviews.

Phillips and Pell came to the show from two very different places: Phillips recently began mixing acting with hosting her own talk show, tragically canceled in 2019 — meanwhile, Pell had been recently expanding her long career as a writer into onscreen work, including a key role in the ensemble of the Amy Poehler film Wine Country and working as a series regular on NBC/Peacock's A.P. Bio.

What united them for Girls5eva was executive producer Tina Fey, as they explain to Collider in the interview below. That is, before the topic of Documentary Now came up, specifically the Season 3 episode "Co-Op," which featured Pell (as well as Girls5eva co-star Renée Elise Goldsberry) as cast members of a failed Broadway show modeled on Stephen Sondheim's Company. "Co-Op" is a modern comedy classic — something that Phillips and I appear to agree on, as you'll see.

Collider: When I told my coworkers I was doing this and mentioned that you two would be paired together, one of them suggested I just ask Busy to ask Paula all the questions, because you have all this experience now as a talk show host.

BUSY PHILLIPS: I do. I actually did interview Paula on my show. She came on for Wine Country. I'll just pull up the questions. Don't worry about it.

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Image via Peacock

They'll just all be about Wine Country, which I'm sure Peacock will be totally okay with. For now, when you guys got involved with Girls5eva, what was the pitch to you? How did they, how did they describe what the show would be?

PHILLIPS: We had a similar experience, I think in that Paula and I were both reached out to by Tina Fey directly. And when I talked to Tina on the phone, she said, "Look, we're doing this show, Meredith Scardino is writing it. You know she's wonderful, you know who she is. And it's about a girl group from the '90s that get sampled by a current artist and they attempt to kind of make a comeback in their '40s, and there is this part of Summer — we always kind of thought of you for this part, but COVID and you lived in LA, but you're in New York right now. Do you want to just stay and do this show?

I sort of zoned out. It was like a dream, to be able to do the flashbacks and be in the '90s girl group and to sing with Sara Bareilles and Renée and Paula — I'm such a huge fan of Paula Pell. Yeah. It seemed too good to be true. And then it continued to exceed my expectations at every turn.

PAULA PELL: That's the perfect way to say it, because I think coming into it, we already were so happy that we get to do this and we knew we'd have fun, but then there was this extra level of intimacy and friendship that almost immediately sprouted with us, where we were just had a shorthand very quickly and felt this very braided-in, loving feeling for each other. And it's kind of like times where you bond with one person out of a group and then everyone else is watching that. And they're, all right, go get a room. Like I think everyone else was like, go get a friendship room because the four of us just could not be more in love with each other, in a platonic way.

PHILLIPS: You're so cute. This is the difference between you and me — I feel everyone loved watching us love each other.

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PELL: No, I think they absolutely did. I always feel if I have that kind of bonding with a specific person on a set that other people are kind of, all right, you know, they're like, all right. With us, I do feel it brought a lot of joy because the whole show is about that — it was a good engine under it. And then by the end, we had real emotion when we did the finale and we were singing that song and coming together in the final, fantastic song that Sarah wrote. We were all tearing up and it felt so authentic and needed in this crazy year. It was really beautiful.

PHILLIPS: Yeah, I mean, I just think certainly the worst year on record of my life, one of the hardest years that any of us have had to go through for a myriad of reasons for everyone... So to be given this gift of a job, and the content within the job, what it was, and what it was saying was so inline with things that I've been feeling for years — the last several years, certainly, and how it highlights women at this age — I just felt every day that I was at work, I felt so grateful and lucky to be there. And also just in awe of all of the talent around me, from top to bottom.

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Image via Peacock

Watching the show, I oftentimes would forget that it was shot during the pandemic. Especially given that you were able to have some crowd seats, which on its own is something that I think we took for granted in the before times.

PELL: Yeah. And some of that is movie magic and some of it is actual people, but when it was actual people, it was very controlled in terms of the size of the room, when we shot in the King's Theater, it was gigantic. So we could have more people down in the front, different spaces, but it was a time where, especially that area in the fall and winter, in New York, it's just felt still very precarious. And I have to say, all the COVID crew that was in our production really did such a beautiful job, because we didn't constantly feel fear because we had rules and we all stuck to them. And so you felt everyone had each other in a really good way.

PHILLIPS: We were very fortunate. I have so many friends working on all kinds of different productions. And I think we were the only show that I knew that did not get shut down one time during COVID

That's a badge of honor, right there.

PHILLIPS: It really is.

PELL: I'm so grateful for it because we would, when you're shooting during COVID and you love something like this so much, you're like, if this gets suddenly shut down and we only get to do four episodes of this, and we don't get to even play through the story to the end... Because we knew kind of what the story was going to, for the first season, so we just were like, "we got to get there, we got to get there." So when we finally got there, it was very joyful.

Something I definitely need to ask Paula about is how your experience doing Co-op translated into doing this

PELL: Oh God, I mean, doing Co-op with Renee, you know, we did that. We learned that when you're doing a television show and you do music, you have to do so many other things that you're not going to have the time you normally have if you were just doing a musical, where there would just be massive amounts of time of rehearsals and everything. You're having to do all the other stuff too and all the other scenes. And so when we did Co-op, Renee and I, and the rest of that team, we did it in Portland on a weekend for three days and got there and had all these songs that were Sondheim-ish and were so wordy and so difficult and beautifully written. Amazing, amazing. But it was, I remember Renee and I being like "Are we going to have a teleprompter?" We were both really concerned about how in the hell are we going to shoot this? And we worked so hard for so intensely.

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Image via Peacock

And then when we got to the end, we just kind of felt, wait, is this not real? Are we not taking this on the road? We're not taking Co-op up on Broadway. And I felt like that with Girls5eva, we were like, when are we going on tour?

PHILLIPS: Yeah, I was like, is anyone pitching a mall tour to people? We should do a mall tour. And everyone's like, COVID's still happening Busy. Yeah. So, no, we're not doing that.

Wait, Paula, I do have a question for you about Co-Op myself. Sorry Liz.

No, it's okay. I asked for this.

PHILLIPS: I love Co-Op so much. Did they actually save your song till the end?

PELL: What do you mean? Like when you shot it?

PHILLIPS: Like [in the episode] you're waiting to do your thing, right?

PELL: Right. I haven't seen it since it came out, but in the real documentary that they were parodying [the 1970 film "Original Cast Album: Company"], Elaine Stritch kept doing this crazy marathon overnight, trying to record the cast album for Company. And she couldn't get her song right in her mind because she was such a perfectionist. They didn't like how she was doing it. And it gets very tense between all of them.

And then they say, go home in the documentary. They say, go home, come back. And then you see her come and just [sing] "The Ladies Who Lunch" in the most glorious take. She just nails it and it's so satisfying to watch. And so that was totally based on that. But when we shot it, I think it was out of sequence. Man, I mean, I love Elaine Stritch, so, so much and sort of peripherally worked with her on 30 Rock, and so I never wanted to imitate her, I just wanted to have kind of a little of her spirit in me doing that character.

PHILLIPS: Wonderful.

Girls5eva Season 1 is streaming now on Peacock.

KEEP READING: 'Girls5eva' Star Renée Elise Goldsberry on Why She's Confident the Peacock Comedy Will Get a Season 2