The Show That Won’t Eat Eyeballs

Yellowjackets is, among other things, a series about a girls’ soccer team that survives a plane crash by resorting to cannibalism. We’ve seen some vile examples of this so far — particularly the consumption of the late Jackie Taylor (Ella Purnell) in season two — but as explained during this year’s Vulture Festival panel with members of the Yellowjackets writing team, there are limitations to how nasty they’re willing to get.

“Here’s a bunch of professionals standing around, like, ‘Hmm, should we eat out Jackie’s eyeballs?’” recalled showrunner and co–executive producer Jonathan Lisco, who wrote season-two episode “Edible Complex,” of filming the feast over Jackie’s body. “And the various actors were wondering who was gonna throw up first.” (Producers ultimately decided that showing Jackie’s teammates ingesting her eyes would be too much.)

In an hourlong conversation, Lisco, along with co-creator and co–executive producer Ashley Lyle and Ameni Rozsa, another executive producer and writer, broke down the reasons for killing off Natalie at the end of season two, discussed how they navigate fan feedback, and lightly teased what’s ahead in season three. “Without spoiling anything, everybody got to be super-creative, including our gross, gory special-effects people,” Rozsa offered.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how gross will season three be?

“If 10 is eyeballs,” Lyle said, “I’d say we’re at, like, a 9.5.”

When I last interviewed you, Ashley, you said you and Bart had an idea for the ending of the show. How early in the process did you know it?
Ashley Lyle: It wasn’t the first thing — we didn’t go, “Here’s where we start and here’s where we end” — but as we were developing the premise, it started to become clear. The more you talk about each of these characters and their arc, the more clear it becomes where they’re heading. We wanted to make sure we did know where we were going, because this is the kind of premise where, if you don’t, you can get quite lost in the sauce.

With most TV shows, it has to be about the journey and not just the destination. I tend to be more forgiving of shows where I’m not sure they stuck the landing but have great storytelling in the interim, because it is a fun ride. At the same time, you do want to stick the landing — that’s probably the hardest thing any show or film can do. But you have to make sure you have a place you know you’re working toward. Every story point along the way has to build toward that.

Jonathan and Ameni, do you know what the ending is?
Jonathan Lisco: Of course. We have a very intimate process in the writers’ room, a very intense process. We’re all very close, also very honest with one another — sometimes brutally so. But that’s the kind of room you want. You want to surround yourself with professionals who will tell you the truth and also pitch their best ideas, but equally feel comfortable enough to pitch what they consider to be their “bad” ideas, because out of the crucible of all of those conversations often comes an even better idea. So yes, we’re all clued in on the many, many strands of Yellowjackets and working very hard to tie them together.

Ameni Rozsa: Part of the fun is that the story is teaching you about itself as you unwrap it, even as a writer. Just because we have a destination in mind doesn’t mean we aren’t going on exciting and unexpected detours and discovering things that the actors are performing. It is sort of a fun, improvisational exercise.

J.L.: That’s really a good point. TV is a medium that’s a feedback loop. You get the dailies in, you get the episodes coming in, and then you see a palette come to life and you think, “Oh, I want to write more toward that.” You do pivot with some regularity.

Can you each think of an example where you were watching something come in and you were like, “Oh, maybe we should learn harder into this?”
J.L.: The character of Jeff, Shauna’s husband, was initially thought of as an accessory to her story line. But then we cast Warren Kole, and as he continued to work, and as we became more and more enamored of what he was doing and the humanity and complexity and humor he was bringing to the role, we thought, Holy shit, he’s a real character in this show and we can start writing story lines just for him. That was a wonderful moment.

A.L.: Liv, who plays young Van, was not initially meant to be long for this world. Liv is such an incredible actor, and they brought so much to so little in the pilot. We wrote the pilot, we shot the pilot, and then COVID happened, so we had quite a bit of time before we actually had a writers’ room and got green-lit. In that interim, we were able to see what Liv could do. We said, “We can’t kill Van! We can’t do it!” And then here we are, season three!

It was similar with Laura Lee. She was meant to die in episode two, and we just loved Jane Widdop so much that we thought, Why kill a character now when people don’t know her yet? At first she was meant to be sort of a Christ-like sacrifice, that the Believer was the only one who died. We thought that there was something really interesting in that and it could accelerate the sort of anti-faith that would be slowly subsumed by the faith in the wilderness that took over. But then we were like, “Ah, she’s too good!” And then we were like, “What if she tried to leave in a plane?” [Laughter.] We just got so excited at the idea of little Laura Lee being like, “I’m gonna fly this fucking plane!” So she lasted eight episodes, and we are so happy for it.

A.R.: I hasten to add that some characters have died who were also very good!

A.L.: Oh, 100 percent!

A.R.: It was obviously a foregone conclusion that Jackie was going to die going in, but we were all very, very sad to see Ella go.

A.L.: It was really heartbreaking. From the beginning, Ella had a one-season deal because we all knew what was gonna happen in the finale, and Ella would come to us and be like, “Are you sure?” And we were like, “No, we don’t want you to go, but we have to! Like, we built this entire season around this!” So yeah, killing off a character means nothing but good story, and it’s often really heartbreaking. I think it’s really lovely that the actors have started having funeral parties for each other.

Oh really? That’s hilarious!
A.L.: Yeah, I’ve attended several. It’s very sweet. They’re very closely knit, particularly our younger cast. Luciano Leroux got a good one.

The other side of the coin, where you see an actor bring something to life and want to write more for them, it works in the opposite direction as well. Because if the audience falls in love with a particular character, that may also be a story-driven reason to dispatch that character. [Laughter.]

I learned early on in my career from Julie Plec: “They think they want them to get together, but they don’t. Because as soon as you get a ship together, it’s boring.” And “They think they don’t want them to die, but they do.”

Is there any chance Ella will be coming back in flashbacks or anything like that? You’re wiggling your eyebrows in a way that suggests maybe?

A.L.: Maybe.

Let’s start with a scene from the season-one finale, the moment we discover the crazy shrine in Taissa’s basement, and she also realizes that she won her Senate race. When I talked to Tawny Cypress about it, she was unsure how to play that moment, that look right at the end. And then you came over to her. What did you tell her?

A.L.: Oh my goodness, I don’t know if I’m gonna remember it correctly! [Laughs.]

What you told me you said was “We want to see the bad one.”
A.L.: We said we wanted to see the bad one and then I said, “More evil.” And to be clear, we don’t see the two Taissas as good and evil. For us it’s more a dichotomy of the practical — the reason — versus something more in touch with the ethereal, the unknown, a more primal version of her. But that’s a lot of things to say to an actor when they’re trying to get a shot! She tried a couple times, and I was like, “More evil!” And then she did that and I was like, “Nailed it! Okay! Moving on!”

J.L.: I remember being in editing and seeing that moment. We were choosing from the millions of hours of footage and then we saw that and thought, Oh, that’s the thing. Because she could look very pleased that she won the election, but also bubbling to the surface was a conscious, or perhaps subconscious, reckoning of her id and her other. And that smile seems at least, to me, to convey all that at the same time.

At this point in season one, we’re still not quite sure what’s going on with Taissa. Is it a psychological thing? Is it something more supernatural tied to the woods? Are you still trying to maintain some ambiguity there?
A.L.: Absolutely. And we will be diving deeper into this dichotomy of self — the one that is willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wants — in season three.

The dog’s head. What was the process for figuring out how to render that?
A.L.: We have an incredible special-effects team, and they took a picture of Biscuit and made the head. And then we had to keep saying, “I think it should be gooier.” There’s a lot of weird conversations that happen when we’re making this show.

As you continue to evolve these characters, using Taissa as an example: How much do Jasmine Savoy-Brown and Tawny Cypress — their feedback, or the way they’re responding to something — dictate where you go with the character?
J.L.: They 100 percent do, though in the writers’ room, we’re ahead of the actors. Also, our actors operate differently. You can imagine how complex it is when one actor you’re working with does not want to know where her character is going, but another actor, sometimes in the same scene, does. They have very different processes. So you have to take them aside and collaborate with each of them. But in the writers’ room, we understand quite a bit more because we’re making the entire sweater, and sometimes they’re only seeing the thread of the sweater they happen to be playing in that exact moment, right? We take it as a very sacred task to help guide them toward what we believe will be the better outcome and also open ourselves up to their feedback to make sure they can play perfectly and tonally correctly what we’re asking them to play. Unless they can emotionally invest in it, they can’t do that, so it’s very much a push-pull.

It seems slightly harder for the older actors because it does help them to know what their younger selves were going through, whereas the younger actors technically wouldn’t know what happened to them as they got older, so they don’t have to worry as much from a continuity perspective. Is that something that presents difficulty for you?
A.R.: I don’t think it’s difficult. But existentially, for our younger cast, it’s a strange thing to know what kind of a person you grow up to be — a strange, poignant thing. All of us, whoever we grow up to be, it’s a reflection of our strengths but also our weaknesses, and that’s definitely true of all the characters on this show. So I think it’s an accomplishment that they’ve managed to be so in the moment and naturalistic even though they know, in some cases, how tragically things turned out for them.

Are there any younger actors who don’t want to know? Do they skip the pages that talk about their older selves? 
A.L.: Yes, there are! I don’t know if I should name names.

Sure you should!
A.L.: Samantha Hanratty does not read the adult parts. She doesn’t want to know.

Let’s talk about the end of the first episode of season two. It’s one of my favorite needle drops in the series: While Tori Amos is singing “Cornflake Girl,” young Shauna takes a bite out of Jackie’s ear, which marks the first time we see one of the Yellowjackets actually consume human flesh. When I saw that, I cackled — the “things are getting kind of gross” and then the sync with “you bet your life it is.” Did that song come from your music supervisor? Was it something you scripted in? 
A.L.: I don’t think we scripted it in, but we went into season two knowing that we had failed ourselves and the world by not having any Tori in season one. I think Nora did suggest that we drop it here, and as soon as we heard it we were like, “Yes.”

How often do you script songs in? 
J.L.: Not that often. It depends on the writer who’s writing the draft, but generally speaking, if one of our writers drops a song into the draft, it’s a reference as opposed to the exact song. We’ve got a very open process, and we’ll take a great song from anybody — our editors, who are wonderful, often suggest songs. Our writers, our post producers will suggest songs. It’s not uncommon for us to audition 20 to 30 songs for a tricky sequence.

A.L.: In the pilot, we scripted in a bunch. I know everyone says, “Never script in a song!” and then we just broke the rules. We scripted in the Liz Phair and the PJ Harvey in the pilot. We did script in the Montel Jordan in season one. We were like, “We just have to use that.” But everything else is trial and error. It’s fascinating, because you can think a song will be perfect over a scene and then you see it and you’re like, “Nope, that did not work at all.” Then other things you would never dream of thinking were right will work perfectly. We were all shocked when the Offspring was the perfect song for the reunion.

Are there times when you want a song and you just can’t get the rights to it?
A.L.: That happens occasionally, and sometimes it’s just too damn expensive.

J.L.: Bart wrote a beautiful letter to Enya. She basically refused us, and we’re not used to that, so we didn’t know what to do. And Bart wrote this really beautiful letter and then Enya said “okay.”

A.L.: Yeah, we tried so many things in its place for the season-one finale, and every time we were like, “It’s not Enya though!” Sometimes we go out of our way. Some people are like, “Fuck yeah, cannibalism! We’re in!” And then other times we have to send script pages and let them know what it’s gonna be.

This sequence is the first time we see actual eating of human flesh. It’s been implied throughout season one, but this is confirmation. What conversations did you have in the writers’ room about when that reveal should happen? Why did it feel important to do it at the end of the first episode of season two as opposed to dragging it out longer?
A.R.: You nailed it: We didn’t want to drag it out longer. This was the promise of the show. Everyone knew that, everyone understood that on some level. What’s the point of dancing around it? And the question which is more interesting is, Who is it? How do they feel when it happens? What drives it? And so it became an interesting window into this friendship. [Laughs.]

J.L.: I remember when it clicked for me that I could actually tell that story, and it was when it could become a Shauna story, when the story could be told through Shauna’s point of view and Shauna’s desire to consume her best friend because it’s an act of honor, of honoring Jackie, but also an act of dominating Jackie. And once I could wrap my mind around the fact that that’s the story we were actually telling, that it was consumption and embodiment and hatred and love all mixed up together, then the eating became an ancillary part of that. An interesting part for sure, but not the core emotional part of it. That’s how I remember it coming to life.

When you were making the first season, it wasn’t out in the world until after you were done with it — you weren’t subsumed with fan feedback or any social media yet. That was very different in season two. Ashley, if I’m not mistaken, you look at stuff on social.
A.L.: I do. [Laughter.]

How was that to navigate in season two? There was more attention, and I’m sure you want to see the feedback but also not let it mess with what you’re thinking creatively.
A.L.: It’s tricky. It’s not easy. I am probably the guiltiest party when it comes to looking at Reddit or the site formerly known as Twitter. It’s hard because you work so hard on the thing and the whole point is to tell this story and have people watch it, so it’s natural to be curious: How are they responding? What do they like? What do they not like? Which, you know, is great when they like it and it doesn’t feel great when they don’t, but that’s fair. Everyone’s allowed to have their opinion. I can say with total honesty that it didn’t really come up in the writers’ room. We never had conversations like, “Oh, they hate this,” or “Oh, they love that,” because we do have a plan. And while, as Ameni said, it gets shaped and we change it and we improvise in the room, we tried to really shut out the feedback because it’s a dangerous loop. There’s a difference between fan appreciation and fan service, and fan service doesn’t serve anybody. Also, people like different things. If you listen to what this person likes, it might be something that somebody else hates. You just have to trust that you created something people respond to and you have to keep doing it.

J.L.: I’m in awe of and very grateful for the fan feedback, but I want all of you to do a quick thought experiment with me. I’m the kind of writer who sits down already hemmed in by the infinitude of choice. Like, you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Okay! Okay! Yeah!” There’s so many ways to go. All those pages are blank and you have to make them up. If you’re also then going to say, “Oh, and think about all the things I read on Reddit, and all the things that people tweeted about, and all the things that people texted about,” you’re literally going to be paralyzed. You have to trust your own instincts. It’s all you can do. And hopefully you’ll still be making something that people invest in and like.

A.L.: And we trust each other. The feedback that is most important is within the writers’ room because everybody knows the show so deeply, is so invested, cares so much, has brought so much of themselves to it. As Jonathan said earlier, we’re very honest. Sometimes it’s like, “Uh, I don’t think that’s gonna work.” The phrase “bad idea” comes up, like, 5,000 times because it’s a defensive mechanism — “Okay, here’s the bad version” — and then inevitably someone will say, “I think that might be the good version, actually.” So we use each other as the most important feedback loop.

A.R.: I was gonna say when you mentioned cackling at the ear-eating, I certainly remember the entire writers’ room cackling at the ear-eating. That was just one of those things where I don’t remember who said it, but it was like, “Yes!”

Jonathan, you wrote the Jackie episode, where she is eventually eaten. When you’re writing those kinds of scenes that involve cannibalism, is there a conversation about how much is too much, how much of this is too gross? How do you figure out what that bar is?
J.L.: That’s a great question, and I do also want to say I did write the episode, but this is not false humility: We all wrote the episode, because that episode would not exist without the great writers we have on staff, and the two people sitting to my left and right. It’s a group effort. Yes, somebody has to implement it and write it, but the ideology and mythology comes from the great work in the writers’ room.

In terms of what’s too gross and where the lines are, it’s like obscenity, in a way — you know it when you see it. When something crosses a line, you’re like, “I think that’s now getting into a gratuitous level of gross that we don’t need.” For example, the Greco-Roman flash while they’re eating Jackie, if you recall, they’re all dressed in those robes. That was a defense mechanism for the characters to try and put some distance between themselves and the horror of what they were doing. The footage that we took of all this stuff is probably like 40 minutes long, but if you look at the sequence, it’s probably 50 seconds. And that’s because we wanted to be able to have enough footage to cherry-pick just the right moments that got you in the jugular and made it feel visceral without overdoing it.

A.L.: That said, our bar is pretty high. [Laughter.] It’s rare that it does happen. We have had moments. There are a few in season three when we were like, “How far is too far?”

Can you think of any examples from the Jackie episode when you had to say, “This is too far?”
J.L.: I’ve got an eight-minute audio clip, which perhaps one day I’ll release, of Ben Semanoff, the director; myself; the production designers; and our young cast standing around the model of roasted Jackie that we had built, and all the crevices into which we were putting her edible flesh made of rice paper and molasses and all that stuff.

A.L.: And jackfruit.

J.L.: Yeah, and jackfruits, and the various actors wondering who was gonna throw up first. [Laughter.] There was a moment when some of that flesh material was sort of in her face, and the question of whether or not we should eat out Jackie’s eyeballs came up. Here’s a bunch of professionals standing around like, “Hmm, should we eat out Jackie’s eyeballs?” And we didn’t. We didn’t think it was necessary. So you’re welcome, America!

A.L.: We did eat her face, though.

J.L.: We did eat her face, but her face and her eyeballs, I would argue, are two separate things.

A.L.: Yes, so our line is eyeballs.

Let’s talk about a scene from the season-two finale, when they’re playing Queens Card and Shauna gets the bad card. Was it only gonna be Shauna?
A.L.: It was always gonna be Shauna.

Can you talk about why? 
A.L.: [Hesitates.]

I didn’t think that was a trick question!
A.L.: It’s become clear to us over the first two seasons that while Shauna’s not necessarily a classic main character, she most represents the duality of protagonist and antagonist that all our characters represent in this show. She is the impetus for so much, whether it is her toxic but deeply felt friendship and love for Jackie, which has the consequences that lead to the cannibalism, or the fact that she had betrayed her best friend, which the consequences are, obviously, the baby dying, which has its own reverberations for the rest of the characters. She is in her way as much the core of what happened to them and drives it maybe more than anyone else. It felt correct to us that this is coming home to roost in the present day with the wilderness choosing her.

Are there other meanings we can extrapolate from each of the cards they pulled? Are they telling us something about the characters?
A.L.: Currently the queen is the only one who matters.

It’s also a misdirect, right? Because when we see it the first time, Natalie gets the queen, and obviously she’s the one who ends up dying. Was that also part of your calculus?
A.L.: Yes. And it is not a coincidence that Natalie, who at one point had chosen the queen, dies here.

From a practical standpoint, the blocking in Natalie’s death scene is interesting and probably a little bit of a challenge to work through. What do you remember about shooting that sequence?
A.L.: It was a very difficult day of shooting. We shot the card draw and the chase and her death all in one day. Luckily, because it was winter, we had more night. When we shoot in the summer it’s the opposite — it doesn’t get dark sometimes until 11, so it makes it difficult to shoot night scenes. I remember we had more stunts planned for the chase, and we cut the stunts because we wanted to have enough time to have the death scene really given its due. I don’t miss the stunts — I don’t think we needed to see them tackle Shauna and all that.

It’s difficult, the days where a character dies, because we all feel it. Juliette and Christina, they committed hard, they wanted to feel it, they wanted to make it work. And Karyn, who’s an incredible director, got them to a beautiful place.

A.R.: I think it was raining too.

J.L.: It was freezing cold.

A.R.: But it was thrilling. It’s thrilling to see Christina in this adult character we don’t see emoting very much finally breaking and letting loose. It was powerful to see an actor switching modes like that. And it’s so difficult to play your death.

A.L.: Juliette is just so wonderfully idiosyncratic in her choices in ways that made Natalie so alive. I’d love to see a supercut of Natalie just getting on and off beds, because the way Juliette would do it, we were always like, “That’s a choice that hadn’t occurred to me, but I fucking love it.”

J.L.: It’s true. Usually you try and jump some time when you’re doing a TV show because you want the momentum to keep up, but Juliette could walk through a room in a way most humans never walk through a room and you’d be like, “Let’s use that, it’s so interesting.”

I’m assuming you knew that you were gonna kill off Natalie in the beginning of the season, because you were probably writing toward that, right?
A.L.: We knew we were writing toward it. When we were shooting the pilot, when Natalie has the vision of Misty at the keg party, at the time we had to talk through it with director Karyn Kusama because she was like, “I don’t understand, is Misty there? Is she party-crashing because she wasn’t invited?” We were like, “No, no, she’s not there.” She was like, “Then why is Natalie seeing her?” and we were like, “Well … at some point this will have pretty great significance.” We had intended that as a prophetic moment for Natalie, that this girl who she wasn’t really friends with and didn’t have a deep relationship with would become really important to her. In our minds this was her sort of seeing the mechanism of her own death. We weren’t sure exactly when and then we realized that the hunts lining up were the perfect opportunity. Cutting her journey short felt right to us because she was on a good path, and it felt as though she was genuinely trying to get better. From a storytelling point of view, what better time to stop that than in its tracks? It’s very tragic.

A.R.: I like to think the last couple episodes of season two answer a lot of questions about why Natalie is so broken as an adult. She really has felt like she didn’t deserve to be a survivor this whole time. She’s living at other peoples’ expense, she literally ate them to live, and here she is in the wrong place, in the wrong life. It felt so inevitable and beautiful and sad.

A.L.: The line that gets me is, “We’ve been here for years.” To me that speaks to her addiction, her inability to break free from the past. As much as we’ve always seen Shauna as the impetus for many things, we’ve always seen Natalie as the moral core of the group, and I think her making the choice to let Javi die was something that irrevocably broke her spirit. She could never forgive herself.

You obviously had to tell Juliette that her character was going to die, and you had to do that with other actors. Is there any protocol in terms of how you inform somebody that they’re being killed off?
A.L.: We break from protocol. I’ve worked on many shows where people are told essentially the day before the script comes out, and that is often done so that people aren’t upset and bringing that into their performance. That feels strange to us. These are our colleagues, and so we will often tell people pretty well in advance. Sometimes that does upset them, and that’s the risk we run. But Juliette, I think, prefers doing films to television. This was her first time being in a show that was ongoing. She had been in some limited series. She’s just kind of a nomad. It’s so interesting to me how much of our casting lines up with these — Ella is a bit of a Jackie in a great way, and Sophie’s kind of a Shauna. It’s incredible! Sophie Thatcher is such a Natalie, Juliette is such a Natalie. In that sort of freewheeling, nomadic, artistic drive, I think she was not upset. She was ready to move on. I think it worked out.

J.L.: I think the premise of the show and the promise of the show would be rendered kind of toothless and hollow if there weren’t consequences for what they endured in the woods. And these recurring patterns — like, why would they be having a hunt as grownups? Well, the reason is because they’ve never been able to escape the rhapsodic freedom they felt in the woods, even though it was harrowing. There was some kind of endorphin rush where they felt primal and free and unshackled and then they came back and live their middle-aged lives in these domestic cages. You miss that. That’s not a healthy thing, but it’s a thing. And so of course we’re going to make sure that what they experienced, and what they continue to experience, is along the lines of that trauma.

A.L.: The most important line in that scene is “There is no ‘it.’ It was always us.” And then Lottie says, “Is there a difference?” That’s the premise of the show. Is there a presence out there that was influencing them, or were they inventing a religion as a way to cope with what they had to do? That’s the central, core question.

I want to talk a little about season three. Anything you can speak to to give us a hint of what to expect?
A.L.: This is so hard for us because I want to tell you everything about season three! What we can say is that winter is over. We’ve been saying it’s “Yellowjackets in full bloom.” There is a lot of fun but also some horror — not horror in the genre way, but in the existential way — of what happens when they’re not in dire straits, because again, things don’t really get “better” per se.

J.L.: Normalcy is even more frightening, in a way. They’re there, and there is no anticipation of not being there. What does that do to the group dynamics? What does that do to their psyches?

A.R.: Everyone — our art department, our costumers, everyone — did just such outstanding work this season. And without spoiling anything, everybody got to be super-creative, including our gross, gory special-effects people.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how gross is season three?
J.L.: It all depends on our threshold.

A.L.: Yeah. If 10 is eyeballs, I’d say we’re at like a 9.5. There are some moments.

You added Hilary Swank and Joel McHale to the cast. Is there anything you can say about their casting or what they’re gonna be doing at all?A.L.: Fun fact: The Joel McHale casting came about because I went to see Built to Spill at the Troubadour and he was there. I had been drinking with some friends and we got into a debate because I was like, “That’s obviously Joel McHale,” and they were like, “It can’t be Joel McHale, that man is not as old as Joel McHale, because he looks incredible.” Then I was at the merch table and he was there, and because I had some drinks, I was like, “So you’re Joel McHale,” and he said, “No, I’m just the world’s best-paid Joel McHale impersonator.”

But we started talking and it turns out he’s a fan of the show and then he bought us all our merch, which was delightful. He was also drunk. [Laughter.] And I was like, “You should be on the show!” and he was like, “I would fucking love to be on the show!” and I was like, “We actually have a part for you!” And then it was months later that we reached out and he was like, “I thought you were just drunk and kidding!” I was like, “No, we really wanted you on the show!” It was wonderful. He is, like, the hardest-working man in Hollywood. He is constantly working, so we had to do some shuffling to make the schedule work, but he was super-game, and it was so much fun to have him on set.