I was going into prep for Paradise, and as I was walking into the production office, there’s a little alcove,” Culpepper recalled. “I heard them saying my name, and I walked in — I don’t know what my face looked like — but they were like, ‘It’s all good. It’s all good. You were nominated for an Emmy.’

Culpepper said that her first reaction was disbelief. “I’m like, ‘That’s AI,'” she said. “And they’re like, ‘No, it’s not.’ And I burst into tears and was like, ‘I have to call my husband.'”

The follow-up call didn’t go much smoother. “I called my husband, and I said, ‘I got nominated for an Emmy.’ And he’s like, ‘What?’ He made me say it five times! I was thinking, why doesn’t he believe me? Later on I found out — he told me, ‘You were crying so hard, I thought someone had died.'”

Culpepper said the honor means something bigger than her own career. “As a woman director, as a person of color directing, you always want to continue to open the door for people to come through,” she said. “When you get this, you’re like, ‘Okay, great, let’s open that door a little wider so we can have more of us come through.'”

For the Season 2 finale of Hulu’s Paradise, the end of the world had to feel massive without losing sight of the people caught inside it. In “Exodus,” director Hanelle Culpepper and visual effects supervisor John Weckworth brought down the carefully constructed world of Paradise, while deliberately echoing the visual language of the series’ pilot.