Peacock’s new series In The Know has a lot of things I love: comedy, stop-motion animation, and interviewing. All six episodes debut Thursday January 25th. The show’s creator, EP, showrunner and star is The Office and Silicon Valley actor Zach Woods, who joins me for a fun and revealing Animation Scoop Q&A. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: You’ve done a lot of voice work [including] The LEGO Ninjago Movie, The Angry Birds Movie 2 and The Simpsons. What do you love so much about animation?

Zach Woods: I think my relationship with animation changed a lot with this. My favorite thing about animation is when you’re in a room with other people who are acting with you. The mode of animation where you’re put in a little isolation chamber and you’re just hearing your own voice and thoughts and recording stuff… I’ve always thought that to be very, very difficult because you’re not reacting to another actor, so it feels like you have only your own self-conscious litany in your head to keep you company. Whenever I’ve done stuff where you can improvise live with people in the room, I’ve always liked that. For this, even though it’s animated, we made sure that for the first recordings that it was the whole cast together in-studio. We could get some sort of a feeling of each other’s company. It felt like people who care about each other, or at least have a working familiarity with each other. I like that a lot. I like doing voiceover in a booth where you can look at the other person.

JM: There are a lot of strong characters on this show. It’s got an office setting, but also the radio studio. It’s about a show on NPR. You voice the host. How was it diving into that NPR world? There is a style and a rhythm to it. And have you always been really interested in it?

ZW: (laughs) I was raised on NPR. Whenever I hear the “All Things Considered” theme, it makes me think of the smell of cucumbers from my house when my mom or dad would be chopping up salads and NPR would be on. I wish it had required more character work, but sadly I am a stone’s throw away from Lauren Caspian in terms of my own disposition, cultural reference points and moral hypocrisy. You know when people go live with cops for three months to play a cop? I’ve been living with NPR archetype for 39 years, unfortunately. Me. But the one thing I do think is funny about NPR is their bizarro cadence. The weird vocal affectations and the gentle [cadence]. I remember hearing this thing once that Chuck Yeager, the pilot, would talk in this gravelly, low voice with a little bit of a southern twang. And that’s why now whenever you get on an airplane, the pilot [sounds like that]: “We’ll be cruising at 35,000 feet.” It’s this imitation of an imitation of an imitation of Chuck Yeager. I don’t know if it was Ira Glass, but someone set that template and then so many people have borrowed it. So I thought that was kinda funny.

JM: Lauren likes to interject his own comments — his own feelings — his own thoughts. He even goes in random directions and hopes that the celebrity guest you have on is interested in what he’s gonna say next.

ZW: (laughs) I do think there’s something funny about someone who’s a professional interviewer who’s mostly interested in being listened to. And for Lauren… interviews are like a jam session or a tantric love session or a scrumptious banquet. It’s where his sensuality expresses itself. He really, always feels like he and the guest have this otherworldly connection, and I think he’s probably not tuned in to them enough to know that they are usually at best confused and at worst full-on alienated.

JM: What’s fascinating about these interviews… is that they are the real people, like I’m talking to you right now over Zoom. I’m seeing you. They are not stop-motion animated characters. You have Hugh Laurie, Ken Burns, Norah Jones and Mike Tyson on… and you’re seeing them. What was the decision behind that and how it all came together?

ZW: We wanted to do real interviews. Those interviews [except for one scripted one with Jorge Masvidal, for the purposes of a storyline] are all real. We did the stop-motion after the fact, but the interviews themselves are improvised. We’re just talking to those people. They’re seeing a picture of Lauren on their screen, and I’m seeing them. I’m playing Lauren into the microphone and asking them questions Lauren would ask. I am naturally generally curious about people, so I like asking questions. When people ask, “What would you do if you couldn’t be an actor or a director?” I often say, “I would like Terry Gross’ job” because it just seems like such a fun thing to be able to find people you’re fascinated by and then spend time asking them the questions that you want to ask them. It’s part wish fulfillment for me and part, “I think we just thought it would be funny to see real people react to this strange, effete NPR guy.”

And the other thing is: I know from doing press as an actor, you’re often in a junket… you just say the same thing again and again and again. With this, we thought, “If it’s the weirdo NPR host, he will knock these people off of their script that they’re probably very eager to be knocked off of, because it’s so boring to hear yourself say the same thing 900 times. And we’ll get a weird window into who they are by virtue of the fact that they’re being interviewed by this puckish little freak.”

JM: That’s so great that they’re real conversations. I was wondering about that because it felt that way. They really go along with it. Jonathan Van Ness is great.

ZW: Oh. So funny.

Mike Tyson

JM: Who surprised you the most with how deep it got? Mike Tyson talks about loss. I was like, “Whoa! We are getting deep here.”

ZW: Dude! Oh my God. I’ve been fascinated with Mike Tyson for as long as I can remember. And Mike Tyson was so profound and kind of shattering. At one point I asked him a question because I just couldn’t help it. It wasn’t really a funny question or even a Lauren question. I just said, “Do you ever feel protective of the little boy version of yourself that had to go through all of the trials and tribulations that you had to go through?” And he goes, “No. I took the punches so my children don’t have to. That little boy had to walk through the fire. He had to be burnt.” I was like, “That’s such a heavy, intense, poetic thing to say.” And then when he’s pining on loss… he’s talking about how… “Loss is a part of love. In a way, it’s the greatest part. Life is about loss. And we lose our hair. We lose our friends. We lose our ability to function. And then we die.” That sounds very morbid but he sort of frames it in a way that’s somehow sadly uplifting all at the same time. Anyway, Mike Tyson blew my mind.

JM: Yeah. It’s fascinating. How did you design the radio / recording studio? It looks great.

ZW: We worked with ShadowMachine. The people we worked with were based out of Oregon, and they were the ones that did “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”. They were so unbelievably astonishingly talented. The production designer was Rob DeSue. This was kind of a small-budget show, so we couldn’t go to a lot of locations. So we needed a macro location that didn’t feel claustrophobic. Rob designed this thing where each little mini-space in the larger office had so much character and specificity. It felt NPR-ish but also kind of inviting. Our DP Michel [Amado Carpio] had this incredibly elaborate chart where he would track where the light was for every shot of every day (even though we were shooting all of the episodes at the same time), so the lighting changes over the course of the day. The design was spectacular.

JM: It’s really cool. Joining you on this journey is animation legend Mike Judge. He’s the co-creator and also voices Sandy, with hilarious movie reviews of “Palm Springs” and “Boyhood”. Hysterical.

ZW: (laughs) Mike’s so funny. That was actually based on a character Mike did. I just looked on his Instagram and there’s this pretentious movie guy who just kept talking about “Film”. We adapted the character from that. Mike was sort of the godfather to the whole thing. He does something in his satire which I think is so important: It never feels like he’s punching down and it never feels like he thinks he’s better than the people he’s making fun of. He somehow manages to make ruthless fun of people without it feeling sanctimonious, superior or bullying.

Zach Woods

JM: What do you NPR says, feels and reacts to “In the Know”?

ZW: We really go in on Terry Gross. Lauren is very jealous of Terry Gross and trashes her very elaborately. I really hope Terry Gross and Lauren Caspian have a lifelong feud and that she hits back twice as hard. And that there’s an escalating, soft spoken NPR war between Terry Gross and Lauren Caspian.

JM: Whoa. So I hope we hear this show being talked about on NPR. That would be cool.

ZW: (laughs) Me too.

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Jackson Murphy

Jackson Murphy is a movie critic and entertainment columnist. He is the creator of the website Lights-Camera-Jackson.com, and has made numerous appearances on television and radio.

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