Two-and-a-half years after I spoke with Matthew Beans about DreamWorks series Trolls: The Beat Goes On!, he’s now the executive producer of sequel series TrollsTopia. The musical comedy adventures feature characters introduced in CG film Trolls World Tour. Season 2 of TrollsTopia debuts this Thursday March 18th on Hulu and Peacock, and Beans can’t stop sharing the feelings he has about this franchise!

Jackson Murphy: What was the transition process like going from one Trolls show to the other?

Matthew Beans: We work hand in hand with the franchise. We follow their lead. We knew that another movie was coming up, so the big question to start the transition was, “What are the feature people doing?” We got a chance to see an early version of Trolls World Tour. So that told us a lot about where the world of Trolls was heading and what would be important to Poppy and the rest of the Trolls that we knew. Then it was just about chipping away at what the important themes were and how to capture that and develop it into something that you could make more than one story out of. In fact, a lot of stories about. We settled on this idea that what the fans want to see is more of those new Trolls that were introduced in World Tour interacting with the Trolls that they already knew and loved.

Matthew Beans: At one point, a premise for how to make that work came to me. Instead of going out and visiting them in all their different worlds, which would be really hard to execute because you would have a new territory every episode. That would become really difficult to execute. Instead, I thought, maybe Poppy invites them in, and she does it to start a social movement – to create this ideal place for Trolls to explore each other’s cultures. And that’s where it all began. And once you have that, you’re just filling out details: who’s coming in and what kind of people are they like? Once you know what they’re like, you start asking what they look like and on and on and on. And eventually, we just started writing stories that seemed to fit that context.

JM: It’s great fun – you’ve got the sequel series to go along with the sequel movie. What percentage of Trolls World Tour did you know so early in advance to help you out with the direction of where to go with this? How much did you really know?

MB: We knew the story. We knew the tone. We knew who the six tribes would be. We knew the main identifiers: rock, funk, techno, etc. But those Trolls movies are very board-driven, so they change a lot. There weren’t a lot of specifics that we could really nail down other than the most central ones… who the main Trolls were gonna be. But other than that, it was a constantly evolving movie so deep into the process. I think the first version that we watched was pretty different from what ended-up on the screen that everybody saw.

JM: Interesting. And lots of people got to see it when it was in Drive-In movie theaters, especially where I am, and of course on VOD – almost a year ago. Can you believe that?

MB: I don’t.

JM: When that was going on and Trolls was making headlines for big reasons – for families during this time – and you’re working on this show… how was it for you working on this show and having this movie being such a big part of people at the time?

MB: I was surprised. Not surprised that people loved it and wanted to see it. I was just surprised at how quickly that baton hand-off of people expecting to see it in the movie theater and then transitioning right into being open to seeing it at home and being willing to pay for it… that all of those things happened so seamlessly just shocked me. At first, I was very concerned that not many people would see World Tour and then TrollsTopia wouldn’t have much of a fanbase, but I was wrong in the best of ways. I was surprised and delighted to see how successful and beloved it was, and it really paved the way for the series. So that was great.

JM: Trolls: The Beat Goes On! was on Netflix. TrollsTopia is on Hulu and Peacock. So you’re transitioning the fanbase over to those as well. I think when we spoke the last time, Peacock didn’t even exist. How has it been working with the teams on those platforms?

MB: Great experience. Hulu has been the studio that has interacted with us most in the production part of it, and then Peacock and Hulu have both been involved in distributing the show. Hulu’s been great. They’ve been so supportive and they give really good notes. They’ve been big fans of the show. They seem to get it and be supportive of what we’re trying to do. I have zero complaints about the new platform.

JM: Nice. And as I was watching some of these episodes and thinking back to the other series, I was wondering: when you have the actors record for their characters, do you ask them to focus on the dialogue first or do you say, “Alright. Why don’t we do the songs and then go to the dialogue.”

MB: Usually the songs come later for the actor. The process usually goes that we write a script, and in the script we identify what the song needs to be – more in terms of what story element it needs to fulfill. And then we send that to our music producer, who’s incredible, and she creates that song. But while that’s happening (while she’s writing the song), we’re already recording the actors for the script. So it’s usually not until even a few months later that the actor gets to record the song for that episode. It takes a while. So dialogue first!

JM: Okay, so get back into the mindset of that specific episode and those specific motivations… how is that for you and the actors as well – to come back a couple months later and try to get back into that frame of mind?

MB: We craft it with Alana Da Fonseca, our music producer. She’s just so excellent at her job and really seems to understand the tone of the show. We hammer out emotional drives and what’s important to the characters and how the performances should sound with her. She creates a demo, and then the demo gives a pretty clear blueprint to the actors of what it should feel like and what state of mind the character’s in when they’re performing it. And then beyond that, if the actor needs a little refresher, we’re usually recapping for them, “Remember, this is the episode where you’re on the runaway train and this is the moment in the story where this happens.” Once they have that information, they’ve got all they need.

JM: That’s good. And I love the fact that Kenan Thompson is voicing Tiny Diamond on this series.

MB: Absolutely!

JM: He is one of the most talented comic actors of our time. One of the best ever on SNL. What stands out to you about working with Kenan and having him voice this role here on this series?

MB: Well, first, the fact that he wanted to do the series is so satisfying. We of course could’ve found a voice double to make the show work well enough, but it was gonna be no replacement for the real thing. I think that reveals how enthusiastic he is about the character, and when you work with him, you can tell how much he enjoys Tiny Diamond. And… he’s incredibly calm. When he comes in, he has a very laid back rhythm and process by which he works. He listens to what you say very, very carefully and then he thinks about it. He’s in no rush to get things done, which is tremendous. And then beyond that, I’m laughing. The whole time we’re recording, I’m cracking up. A lot of times it may be because he improvizes a new line, but then sometimes it’s just because he delivers the line we wrote in a way I didn’t fully expect. And being caught off-guard in that way is delightful. He’s just the best.

JM: That’s so good to hear. And that has to be a gift… to have this character and to have somebody like him voicing this character. That has to feel really good to be like, “Wow. I can have him do so much with this and allow for material to grow with this character and be so fun.”

MB: Yes. That is very true. We saw the feature film and the work he did in that, and that gave us the ideas for our scripts. And then we brought those scripts to him, and he feeds off of that. And then we get ideas from that new performance and it just builds and builds. And now we can write Tiny Diamond jokes and dialogue in our sleep because we’ve experienced it so many times that we know how he sounds and what the basic concept of his character is – it’s been a terrific experience.

JM: And also since the last time we spoke, you became a Daytime Emmy nominee for The Beat Goes On!, which is fantastic. Did you take part in the whole “virtual awards show” thing that’s now the norm?

MB: (laughs) I did. Yes. I was on screen for, I think a total of seven seconds. (laughs) But it took six hours of prep: me waiting in my computer, getting logged on, waiting in a virtual greenroom. There was a four-hour rehearsal day of similar waiting on my computer while people explained how it was gonna work. And it all amounted to about seven seconds. But it was fun, and I was thrilled to be nominated.

JM: Yeah. Maybe it’ll be quicker this year if you’re nominated again.

MB: Yeah. (laughs)

JM: One of the main themes I saw in the “Cakes on a Train” episode, which talks about the idea of a “perfection cake”, is that “plans go off track but it all works out anyway”. How has that theme applied to the last year of your life?

MB: Oh wow. It’s probably the main theme of the last year. It wasn’t intentional. We didn’t draw on that when we wrote “Cakes on a Train” because I think that was pre-pandemic. But I would say that disruption and our relationship with disruption is the main theme of the pandemic, for me. And learning to make peace with something you can’t control coming in and ruining what you had planned – and learning to be open to the idea that when that happens, it’s not necessarily for the worse. It may be something that drives you to look at life differently and to grow in ways that you would not have grown in because you were sort of stuck in a rut or stuck thinking about things from one perspective. Obviously there’s been a lot of terrible things that have come out of the pandemic… but being open to the fact that the awful stuff is not the only theme of this kind of global disruption.