The Workaholics
Weird & Nasty: The Workaholics Story
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JSQUARED PHOTOGRAPHY
The cast of Workaholics is quite possibly the funniest trio since the iconic Three Stooges blessed America with their jokes and pranks. They’re out of this world hilarious, out there, and to put it lightly, unpredictable. Their antics are slapstick gold and their comedic timing is worthy of an award. Now in its 4th season, each workaholic is leaving the confines of the world they present to us weekly on Comedy Central. Anders, now a father with a newborn daughter, has had a major stint on the groundbreaking comedy The Mindy Project. Adam is keeping his hand in comedy with a dip in ABC’s award winning series Modern Family, and Blake continues to entertain teens of the world with his line Bored Teenager.
These funny guys aren’t just a match made in Hollywood network heaven, though; they came together all on their own. Writer and Producer Kyle Newacheck grew up with Blake in Concord, California; their friendship dates back to the third grade, where Newacheck says he remembers drawing comic books with his now co-star. One hang out sesh led to another, and then enter Adam, who in turn met Anders, and just like that our favorite comedy troop was born.
I knew sitting down to chat with these guys would be like sitting in during one of the scenes of their hit TV show, and it really was. Read on and live vicariously through me as I chat with Anders, Blake, Adam and Kyle, self-made pioneers in the comedy world.
What’s the process for you guys when you all sit down to write an episode?
Adam: Uh, meth mostly.
Anders: There’s meth to our madness.
Adam: That is correct. We sort of just sit in a room all together and just spitball ideas at each other, and just kind of go, I think this would be a cool world, and take that as a jumping off point as to where a story can go from there. We do that for a couple weeks and then we swittle it down to the stories that immediately everyone is in agreement with it being the story that we can work with. Sometimes you’ll have an idea that you’ll really believe in, and the other guys are like, ehhhhhhhh, that sucks. So you go off and really fiddle with it, and then come back with a clear pitch in order to sell the idea to the other guys.
Blake: By the end of the script, any idea becomes a story.
Adam: Towards the end, when we’re trying to finish up the season, it’s a free-for-all.
Blake: For example, basketball. You got it, that’s a story.
Kyle: I’ll be there for the stories, and then I go off and produce and try and make it doable by the time that we’re ready to shoot. When I direct I still get a chance to be a part of the writing, on the last level.
How much of it is it improvised?
Anders: Thirty six percent.
That’s a very particular number.
Adam: We just improvised that number right now. So, that’s how good we are.
How much of your work is autobiographical?
Blake: Our names, so that’s a bit.
Adam: I think we kind of take, at least our vernacular, like how we speak: it is very much how we actually speak. So the weird words that we say, like “tight butthole” and stuff, we were saying that before the show came out. Well, since the show came out we’ve been saying it a lot more.
Kyle: Adam, Blake and I lived in the house for three years before we started making the show.
Anders: Yeah, we like to throw in a hint of irony. It’s almost like through a lens, we’re stepping outside of ourselves.
Blake: And you know, the friendship is one hundred percent real.
Anders: Stillll real.
Blake: Almost too real at this point.
Adam: I think that’s why the show clicked with people at first. You could tell we were friends, as opposed to trying to force a face of friendship.
Anders, you have a child now. How do you think that Anders would react to having a baby?
Anders: He’d raise it to be strong. That’s all I can do.
Adam: Or throw it in the pool immediately and make it swim.
Blake: That’s a guarantee.
Adam: We’re excited to see Ders’ dick. We’ve seen it in the past. It’s a nice one. But I’ve been told that…well, I mean, it’s kind of common knowledge that dad dicks are gigantic.
Blake: Right, right. Fatherhood and stuff.
Anders: It’s the hormones around the house. They girth you up a little bit.
Blake: I guarantee that if we get enough seasons you’ll see every character have a kid for sure.
Adam: Season thirteen, DeMamp has sextuplets.
What do you think it is about the show that hooked people from the start, besides it being great comedy?
Adam: I think what I like about the show is that it’s kind of like Arrested Development. Especially when we created the show, it was the peak of the recession. Stuff sort of hit and people were having a hard time fresh out of college finding jobs. So, you have these guys who have college degrees, but then they go to work at this crappy telemarketing spot. I think it’s kind of cool that even when the economy comes back, these guys are so dumb that they just have no ambition.
Blake: None.
Adam: These guys just like to party and have as much fun as possible. So I think they’ll stay. Right where they are.
Anders: They’re not career dogs.
Adam, you were walking around with a leg crutch for a while. Was your leg a victim of the shenanigans that you guys take part in?
Blake: Yep. Kyle was directing him into the ground, and he wouldn’t give him a break. Adam’s like, “I need a snack,” and Kyle’s like, “Just one more take!”
Adam: I’m yelling out, “I have low blood sugar!” We were shooting a basketball episode; I shattered the backboard. The ball bounced, and I jumped up to get it and I think I came back in the scene too quickly. I was lying in the ground for like two minutes, screaming, “No, oh God, oh no.” Everyone thought I was joking.
Blake: They thought that was part of the thirty six percent of improv.
Adam: They were like, “Wow, he’s really giving this a lot.” But then as I’m holding my knee in pain, I’m saying, “We need to rewrite. We’ve gotta rewrite!” As I was icing up my knee, we’re all pitching ideas. And I don’t remember who came up with the new idea.
Anders: It was me. Were you going to say it was me?
Blake: It was actually Fred Durst.
Adam: We rewrote the episode right then and had to change a huge portion of the episode to make sense for me not being able to shoot for a couple days. I was all pain meds-out. It happened on a Wednesday, and on Friday I’m on pain meds, acting in three scenes. You’ll see: I kept smiling through the scenes.
Blake: It was very lucky and unlucky at the same time. We had like two more days of shooting our whole entire season. It was like, “Shittttt. Of course.”
Anders: You know what, we changed everything and it actually turned out worse. So that’s cool.
Blake: There’s more Karl in the episode now. A lot more Karl.
What’s the craziest thing you guys have done this season, without giving too much away?
Blake: Besides Adam’s knee exploding on set, we did some pretty cool stuff. We shot at a brewery out in Los Angeles.
Adam: We had the whole brewery, all night long. I ended up doing some really cool stunts where I jump from a moving truck onto a moving car. So I do my own stunts.
Kyle: I think one of the craziest stories is, without saying much, is we have a penis swap.
What’s the grossest thing you guys have done this season?
Anders: I mean, it’s us.
Blake: Oh! We have a food fight with Norwegian food, like fish gravy and rat shit.
Adam: It’s like four minutes of the episode or less, but when you’re shooting, people don’t realize that, like, four minutes of TV is an entire day of shooting. So it was about 8-10 hours where we’re just covered.
Anders: They’re yelling out, “You need more gravy. He needs more gravy under his eyeball.”
Adam: Well, initially, Anders had queso up his nostrils.
Anders: Adam put rats on his body. That’s gross to me.
Adam: I had a lot of rats all over myself, and as the Peta person was taking the rats away, it clinged onto my neck, and I had horrible scrapes on my neck. So I’m going around like, “Is it bad?” Naturally everyone’s like, “Where? I don’t even see anything.” Then I look in the mirror and I’m bleeding.
Anders: Two weeks later, a rat started growing out of the scrape.
Adam: Oh, and Ders puked on me.
Anders: On purpose. Ish. The scene called for it.
Blake: Instead of “Let’s Get Weird,” now it’s “Make it Nasty.”
Anders, you’ve been prominently featured on The Mindy Project. Can you ever see Mindy as a character on Workaholics?
Anders: We had something where she was going to come and just saying something, but she’s busy. Busiest woman on planet Earth.
Blake: Besides Hilary Clinton.
Anders: No, busier.
Adam: Really? Whoa.
Blake: Then she might’ve just surpassed her.
Anders: I think it was around Election Day that she surpassed her. But sure, we’d have her. She’s fun. She can improv with the best of them, and we do thirty six percent on our show.
Blake: It’s either Mindy or Miley. One of those. Maybe they can be twins on an episode?
Adam: I can see it.
Anders: There you go, Miley Kaling.
What’s the biggest April Fools joke either of you have ever done?
Blake: This show.
Anders: It wasn’t exactly an April Fools joke, but I told a friend of mine that a childhood friend of ours died. I called him up and I was like, “Yo, Chris died,” and he was like, “What!,” and I was like, “I’m just kidding, man, what’s up?” He was so fucked.
Adam: I worked at the Hollywood improv comedy club. I had maybe worked there a month. I called the manager one time during the day, to talk to him about something. Basically I had him believe that the place had caught on fire, and I’m yelling, “It’s spreading!” and I hang up. Next thing you know, the guy that worked next door comes sprinting over with a fire extinguisher, screaming, “Where’s it at?” They told me never to do that again or they would fire me and that I was lucky it was a comedy club and that they have to take a joke.
Kyle: Dude, when I was in second grade, I took some Oreos, took the cream out, put some toothpaste in there, put em’ in a bag and handed them out to everybody. Nobody knew what hit em’. It was cool.
Blake: Well, April 1st is my mother’s birthday, so any type of pranking would be ruining my mother’s day. It’s kind of like out of the question—very serious day in my household.
Anders: As all birthdays are.
Final words on season 4 of Workaholics?
Blake: Let’s just say, we’ve made it nasty.
Adam: I think if you like Workaholics, you’re going to love this season.
Anders: We get back to the yesteryears. We’re back it. That’s another thing we’re saying now, too.
Kyle: We’re getting back to our roots. Just guys drinking beers, real stories, real problems, same old fun shows. We’re not trying to change much.
Blake: We’re getting as nasty as we want to be.
Adam: It’s a fun season; I’m excited for people to see it.
PHOTOGRAPHY JSQUARED PHOTOGRAPHY / WWW.JSQUAREDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM
STYLING ALEXANDRA MANDELKORN / WWW.ALEXANDRAMANDELKORN.COM
MAKEUP NICOLE WALMSLEY / WWW.NICOLEWALMSLEY.COM
HAIR SIENREE AT CELESTINE AGENCY USING PAUL MITCHELL
STYLING ASSISTANT DREW HAZELHURST
Production Bello media Group | WORDS BY DIO ANTHONY
