The voice for 'Surly' is, of course, very close to my own voice, but it's informed a lot by this story, by the arc and the animation and working with the whole creative team on 'The Nut Job' in finding what really works.
— Will Arnett
My definition of family is just unconditional love. The people who rely on you and who love you, they are there, too.
We live in an age where people will watch epic entertainment on their phones.
Vernon Fenwick. He's a cameraman at Channel 6 - he's April O'Neil's cameraman - and Vernon is a character who is from the 'Turtle' mythology.
The first paying voice-over gig I ever got was for a company called Harvard Community Health Plan, which is a Boston-based New England health care provider. I inherited a deep, gravelly voice from my dad, who has always claimed that if I ever get injured, he'll just take over for me.
I don't aim to make art in a vacuum - you want people to like it.
At no point was I like, 'Man, I gotta write me a part where people are going to take me seriously'.
I started acting as a teenager, but it wasn't until I moved to New York when I was 20 that I made any kind of commitment.
I spent a lot of time quasi-fascinated with characters who were super-dumb and super-cocky. I always liked that combination.
It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be.
I think that when I was in my 20s, I wanted to go after dramatic roles, and I didn't have a tremendous amount of success with that. I kind of backed my way into comedic parts. When you're young, you kind of take yourself seriously, and you think, like, 'People need to see what I can do.' And it's so laughable, especially with actors.
Pure unadulterated success is not as funny as failure.
The thing I always try to hold onto with 'BoJack' and with 'Flaked' is that maybe there is a sliver of hope that they are going to turn it around. They are just having a tough time getting there. And that's the thing with 'BoJack' - he is obviously depressed.
My first movie was this independent that I did on the Erie Canal in 1995, called Erie, that I don't know if you could even get, actually with Felicity Huffman. And then from that I did this film that was eventually called The Broken Giant later that fall. And then I kind of started getting into doing pilots.
And we... right from moment one, we were always kinda up against the wall a little bit when it came to the future of the show. There were always rumors.
But as a result of that, there was, once the show ended, there was this talk for sort of four, five months about what was going to happen, and if we were going to move to Showtime, and if we were going to be bought by ABC or whatever.
It doesn't look great if you cancel the reigning Best Comedy Program, you know, you're gonna take a hit from a... from sort of a public relations standpoint.
I pretty much choose anything I do in life based on whether or not I can work in my PJs. Certainly one of the perks of doing an animated film is that you don't have to go and get ready and wear wardrobe, and you just show up in whatever you're wearing.
I'm a dad first and foremost, then it goes hockey and then work, in that order.
You don't want to try to recreate something you've already done.
I know that my kids are big 'Turtles' fans because there's been this resurgence, especially with the new series on Nickelodeon.
What came out of 'The LEGO Movie' was the idea of 'Batman's the Dark Knight', so why is he so moody? What's going on? Why is he so banged up? And wouldn't it be fun to get in there and explore that?
One of the greatest punsters of all time, Peter Serafinowicz, is a good friend of mine, and I've been in situations more than once where people have been exhausted hanging around with him.
People have this preconceived notion of me. I'm 'Gob' to them: this thoughtless sociopath who lives this bizarre, ego-driven life. That would be insanity.
When I was a kid, I was a fan of comedy. I always loved Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Dave Letterman - not an actor, obviously, but I'm still impressed by his wit. I wanted to emulate them because they made me laugh.
Everything's not black and white. We choose to make bad decisions or not.
I'm not necessarily interested in telling the story of people who are super likable.
Any time you can build jokes around a story that resonates on an emotional level, it is going to have a big impact.
I am happy because I'm grateful. I choose to be grateful. That gratitude allows me to be happy.
You don't wake up one morning and say, 'Today is going to be a comedy day.' And the next day, 'Today's going to be a drama day.' Things happen in life that are fun and light, and things happen that are heavier. You just have to move your way through life, and I think 'BoJack' is a good reflection of that.
And I think that at a certain point, after all the time and all the conjecture and everything that had kind of gone on surrounding this show, I think that Mitch just felt like it was time to let it go. It was best for the show.
Arrested Development opened a lot of doors for me.
But since day one, we've always been kinda up against it. So at the end, it's not surprising that we were kind of led along for so many months and didn't know what the fate of the show was gonna be. It was... in a weird way, just kind of that was the way it's always been.
Look, I get it; you come home, you work hard, and you turn on your TV... You kind of want to escape a little bit and be taken away by something. Our show required you to pay attention, and if that's not what you wanted to do, then it wasn't going to be for you, and that's OK.
I say to my kids all the time - and this is absolutely true - I always say, 'Who's the boss?' and they go, 'You are.'
I'm a huge Toronto Maple Leafs fan, and the only other teams whose games I go to are the Rangers and the Kings.
When David Cross and I made 'Todd Margaret,' we spent time there. We were shocked and happy with the reaction that we got with fans over there. It was pretty awesome.
Because 'Gob' was a terrible magician, he was always, in great comedic moments, messing up his magic act. We used to have magicians come in to work on these tricks to actually get them wrong. But they still had to work. We had to bring magicians on to make magic not work.
'Gob' is a character that I enjoy playing immensely because I have so much freedom to take his dim-wittedness to all sorts of low levels. I find him interesting because when you see real people who are completely self-unaware, it boggles your mind.
You meet lots of people in your life, and sometimes you think that people are a certain way, and then they reveal themselves to be a different way.
As I get older, I'm sort of fascinated with the idea of somebody who could construct an entire persona for themselves - one that was really, in a lot of ways, fundamentally at odds with who they really were as a person.
With 'Mutant Ninja Turtles,' I wanted to play a character who lives more in the real world, although yes, I grant you, he immediately encounters, um, turtles, of the teenage mutant ninja variety.
If you have a character that doesn't have anything wrong with him, there's nothing funny about it. The idea of the straight man is very important. But I'd rather it be somebody else, because it's not as fun.
Venice is a place that is high on reinvention. The kind of place that you can go and be whoever it is you want to be and do whatever it is you want to do, and nobody's really going to ask you a lot of questions about it.
Any kind of run-of-the-mill flaws that are easily solved, to me, are boring. Situational flaws, for example. I like flaws that are rooted in a deep distrust in people because of a lack of love.
This might be controversial, but sometimes I think that being happy is a decision. I don't mean that in a way to diminish clinical depression. But on a more day-to-day level.
This pilot, by far, was the best I ever read - and I hope that insults every other pilot I worked on.
And then we've got Blades of Glory, and we've got Brothers Solomon, and I've got a script in development with this guy Chuck Martin who used to write on Arrested, and, you know, we have a few things in various stages of development.
Because I think a lot of people felt like, ultimately - and this isn't the first time I've said this, so I'll bore you again with it - but ultimately it was... I think it felt like homework a bit for people.
I mean, I gotta say one of the greatest victories on that show was when we got picked up for the back nine of the first season, and they made it a full order.
