INTERVIEW: Descending into the underworld for new season of Adult Swim’s ‘Your Pretty Face’

TALKING TO THE CREATORS

Adult Swim is set to premiere season three of Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, a workplace comedy set in an office culture of demons, on Sunday, Oct. 23 at 11:30 p.m. The humor of the show, created by Dave Willis and Casper Kelly, is absurd, out there and oddball.

The series features Henry Zebrowski, an actor best known for his work on A to Z and Heroes: Reborn. His character is Gary, a nice demon trying to stay out of the crosshairs of his brutal boss, Satan, played by Matt Servitto, of The Sopranos.

Underneath the laughs and furrowed brows is a running commentary on bureaucracy, the 9-to-5 workload and how friends and colleagues communicate.

“Yeah, I think we like the juxtaposition,” Kelly said recently in a phone interview. “We like the combination of a crazy premise, but then we play a lot of it real. The relationships are kind of real, and they play it kind of naturally — and the combination of real-life annoyances with big over-the-top annoyances like you’re being forced to eat your own arms or something.”

Kelly added: “Dave has a quote I really like where he says he can make episodes like a baklava. He can just make them denser and denser and denser. … [The show] would be too much for a half hour, definitely an hour. You don’t want to eat a whole tray of baklava, but it’s awesome a little dense baklava for 11 minutes.”

Kelly and Willis began their career making short shows, so the 11-minute episodes of Your Pretty Face fit nicely with their resume. They are alumni of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Squidbillies, two famous Adult Swim mainstays that helped cement the comedy block’s reputation.

“I think too we started our career making these short shows where it was the shortest thing on TV, and now with the Internet, a quarter hour is like the longest thing you would ever watch on the Internet,” Willis said. “I think attention spans have wavered. Granted in a half hour you can do B stories, and there’s certainly an art to doing a really good comedic half hour. But the way we do it, you end up having to be ruthless because you still have to tell a story, but you kill stuff all the time to get it down to 11 minutes and 15 seconds, which is what it is.”

Willis added: “Ideally we’re just trying to make something really funny. If something is narratively satisfying it certainly touches that part of your brain and that part of your soul. I don’t know. When’s the last time you ever watched a sitcom and said, ‘Man, that was narratively satisfying’? You want it to just be really funny and really fast, and then it’s over.”

As far as the new season goes, the creative team didn’t mind spoiling some of the details. “I could give you a bunch of spoilers, and I could assure you they would not spoil the watching for you,” Willis said with a laugh. “They’re not spoilers. In fact, I call them fresheners. They would actually heighten the experience for you if you know what’s happening.”

Adult Swim, and Your Pretty Face in particular, have always been good at getting celebrities to play along with the fun, and Willis and Kelly’s show has seen its fair share of comedians entering their warped world. The new episodes promise a guest spot from Saved by the Bell’s Dustin Diamond, for example, but sometimes it takes a little arm-twisting to gather the cast.

“We lie about how bad the makeup is going to be for starters,” Kelly said about their strategy.

“We lean heavily on the fact that we’ve been nominated for one Emmy,” Willis said in reference to an acting nod for 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer. Other actors who have appeared include Eddie Pepitone, Hunter Womack, Craig Rowin, Dana Snyder, Billy Magnussen, Jeff Hiller and Patton Oswalt.

“It’s comedians that we admire,” Willis added.

The special effects of Your Pretty Face are achieved through a green screen and lots of red makeup. “So, yeah, it’s green screen, and it’s kind of difficult to figure out the geometry of that,” Willis said. “I’m sure the actors that play demons would tell you that the makeup is no picnic. I mean their call times are usually an hour earlier, and I mean they have to take it off. They say that their hotel rooms are just filled with red-stained towels, and the maids just think they’re just serial killers that are just murdering people in their rooms. Or you’ll go out to dinner with them after a shoot, and they’ve still got their eyeliner on. Matt Servitto, who plays Satan, has got to wear very hot, very restrictive yak-hair pants and high heels, which mess with his back. There’s definitely a lot to it.”

However, Kelly said that over the course of the series’ three-year history, they have got production down to a science. They have assembled a team that makes the shooting process as easy as possible. “We are doing more than we should be able to do on this budget,” Kelly said. “We love our graphics people, and makeup people and props. They make it as easy as possible.”

There were a few people who suggested that Your Pretty Face be an animated series, which would have fit into the wheelhouse for both Willis and Kelly, but the creators believe the final result would be far less special.

“I feel like we’re making a live-action cartoon,” Willis said. “I think Chris and I were excited about working in live action, but I think also it just made it more interesting. This is a trope you’ve seen a lot of, the New Yorker cartoon or the Far Side cartoon where the guy’s in hell. But there’s not a show on TV that looks like this. I think if it would have been a cartoon, it just wouldn’t be as special.”

Willis added: “I think Chris and I are both trying to make something that maybe speaks to our sense of humor, and there are certainly cartoony elements. But I think there are mundane elements from both of us having worked in an office for a long period of time, mainly Turner Broadcasting, and we’re trying to funnel that in there.”

FROM SCORSESE TO HEROES: REBORN TO GARY

Henry Zebrowski, who stars as Gary in the Adult Swim comedy, calls the series a “dream show.” It’s the culmination of several years in sketch comedy, movies and TV shows.

“It’s the dream show that all actors and comedians talk about being on where you have a really easy-going relationship with the creators,” he said. “Dave and Casper create incredible environments, and they’re building a universe. And then we get to then have the freedom to add our ideas to it.”

Zebrowski is known for several roles in the movie and comedy worlds, but Gary is quickly moving to the top of his resume. “It was just kind of like fate because at the time I didn’t have a lot going on career-wise when I got the job,” he said. “It was one of my first big breaks, and it wasn’t until I got to the callbacks with Dave and Chris that we really clicked at the callback it felt like. We were making each other laugh before the auditions were happening, before we even started into the scene, and then they were immediately OK with the improv-ing. So it just naturally fell together.”

Zebrowski called Willis and Kelly his “natural collaborators,” and the trust they have in one another makes the show work from a comedic perspective. “I can really take a lot of risks, and that hopefully will break through to even better content,” the actor said.

Zebrowski has several career highlights, including acting in an episode of Girls, a stint on I Love the 2000s, a prominent role in the TV series A to Z and roles in Bad Grandpa, Netflix’s The Characters and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Oh, yeah, he also acted for Martin Scorsese in The Wolf of Wall Street as “Sea Otter.”

“That was one of the wildest and most incredible experiences I’ve ever had as an actor and as a person,” Zebrowski said. “As a person it was really insane to be at that level, especially when I didn’t have as much going on, and I’m surrounded by these movie stars and legends. Then you kind of see, … it’s just like us, the same working environment. They have to trust in you, and you have to trust in them. And Scorsese put a lot of trust into us.”

He added: “We got to improv with him. It was like writing sketch, but it was Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Martin Scorsese. The comfort allowed it to be something awesome. You walked into the scenario. Leo was so cool with all of us. It took the strange factor of being dropped into something so huge out of it and allowed you to really just work.”

For fanboys and fangirls, Zebrowski also earned his genre credibility with an important role in the Heroes reboot, Heroes: Reborn on NBC. His character of Quentin Frady was pivotal for the reimagined storyline. “That was also just really, really cool to be a part of the legacy like that,” he said. “I feel like we did our best, and it was just a fun show to be a part of. It’s just really, really cool to be in a sci-fi show. … I’m a huge sci-fi nerd, and it was exactly what I wanted.”

The projects don’t stop coming either. He is starring in a new horror film called Cut Shoot Kill and shot a couple episodes of Crashing on HBO. “It’s a dream come true,” Zebrowski said. “It’s just one of those things that I have always wanted to happen, and now it’s about making sure I continue going in that direction. I want to be in legit projects that are something special to the genre world.”

The actor will continue in the horror genre — both real and imagined — on his podcast, The Last Podcast on the Left, which he produces with Ben Kissel and Marcus Parks. Each week they cover a different unsettling subject, everything from aliens to Bigfoot to true crime, but the dark humor on the top-rated comedy series is not for everyone. A future episode will cover the Jack the Ripper case, for example.

“I was also a very scared and tense kid, and I was always taught the idea of if you want to be not scared of something, you need to get yourself involved in it,” Zebrowski said. “You need to learn as much about it as humanly possible so that you can take ownership of something that’s really scary.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell airs Sundays at 11:30 p.m. on Adult Swim Click here for more information.