Perhaps it should be no surprise that, in a town full of colleges with acting programs, it wouldn’t be too hard for a big-budget series to swoop in and hire a passel of actors/acting professors to play college faculty members in “The Chair,” streaming Friday on Netflix after filming in Pittsburgh earlier this year.

But local actor/adjunct University of Pittsburgh acting professor Ken Bolden said it was news to the crew of “The Chair” that actors seated around a conference table playing “pretty snarky, old, white, male” English department faculty members were, in fact, largely professors themselves.

Bolden said the series’ director, Daniel Gray Longino (“PEN15,” “Kroll Show,” “Portlandia”), gave a short speech before the first faculty meeting scene, saying he wanted it to have the feeling of guys – and they are largely men – who worked together for decades and are entrenched in teaching.

“We were laughing a little among ourselves because, as actors, we have known each other for decades and worked together and many of us have teaching experience,” Bolden said, adding that then word got around about the local actors’ backgrounds in academia. “At one point (Sandra Oh) turned to me very excited, ‘We just found out you guys are all professors, everybody is so excited about this.’ ”

Oh recalled that day of filming.

“They all knew each other,” she said Monday in a phone interview from London, where she’s filming the final season of “Killing Eve.”

“When I’m sitting there and we’re going through the scene, the actors are playing dynamics. … And it feels like beautiful synchronicity, like those beautiful moments you can’t plan where we need to feel the dynamic of a department of professors, and we actually had one,” she said.

Sophia Macy, who enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University in 2020 and is the daughter of actors William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, plays the daughter of scandal- plagued professor Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass, “Transparent”).

“She was in one of their acting classes,” said Amanda Peet said, “The Chair” co-creator, writer and executive producer, referring to a class taught by Carnegie Mellon University voice/speech professor Don Wadsworth, who plays a faculty member in “The Chair.” “It was so incestuous, but it was also really fun that they were real professors. They sounded so real and seemed at home (in the faculty meeting scenes).”

Oh stars in “The Chair” as Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman chair of the English department at Pembroke University, which Peet said she imagines is set in a small New England town. Chatham University and Washington & Jefferson College play Pembroke.

Other local locations used include a parking lot at Pittsburgh International Airport, Alpine Bowling Lanes in Washington, Sewickley’s shopping district and private residences in Washington, Fox Chapel, Sewickley, Squirrel Hill and Highland Park.

Beautiful campuses

Peet said Pennsylvania film tax credits brought the production to scout Pittsburgh, and once she saw the beauty of the college campuses, she was sold on the location. (She also has a family tie: Her grandmother, Margot Sherman Peet, graduated from the University of Michigan before working in journalism in Pittsburgh prior to moving to New York and shifting into the advertising business.)

Once Ji-Yoon becomes Pembroke’s English department chair, she faces a controversy involving Bill, who may also be her romantic match.

Peet said the germ of the idea for what became “The Chair” began when she and Duplass, who have worked together previously, came up with an idea for a story about a widower whose daughter goes away to college before he starts dating his supervisor.

“I really was interested in writing a workplace romantic comedy,” said Peet, an actress (“Brockmire,” “Dirty John”) making her first foray into writing and executive producing a series. “I wanted to set it in a place in which the vestiges of white, male elitism are still hanging on, where intergenerational tension is a constant issue. It seemed like it would be ripe for comedy.”

Peet said her teenage daughter with husband David Benioff (“Game of Thrones”), also an executive producer on “The Chair,” constantly signals how uncool she thinks Peet is.

“There was a particular moment where she said that I wasn’t sufficiently feminist,” Peet recalled, “that I was on the wrong side of history because I was being judgmental about scantily clad TikTokers.

“I’m an actress turning 50, so I was very interested in the idea of confronting your own irrelevance,” Peet added.

As for the show’s title, Peet said she only learned earlier this month that the series shares a title with the 2014 filmed-in-Pittsburgh, Starz movie-making competition show.

Bolden praised Peet as “very encouraging, very positive” in her interactions with the actors in “under five” roles, those with fewer than five lines of dialogue.

“A lot of times ‘under fives’ aren’t given much attention. She was so supportive and wonderful,” Bolden said. “And I can’t say enough good things about Sandra Oh. She is such a leader and so friendly and open.”

Although the actors playing professors — which also included former Chatham acting professor Mark Philip Stevenson, Carnegie Mellon University adjunct acting professor Randy Kovitz and Point Park Professor Emeritus John Shepard — had character names, their names were not in the script. Bolden played professor Plum, a nod to the character in the board game Clue.

“No jokes were made about it (in the first season),” Bolden said. “If there’s a season two and they bring me back, I hope I’ll get to develop that more.”

Although Netflix bills “The Chair” as a “limited series,” it’s unclear how limited the streaming service envisions it.

“There are things floating around in my head, but I don’t want to jinx anything,” Peet said of a possible second season. “It could continue. But right now we’re just concentrating on getting this one out.”

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