Long before they found success with cult classic films Super Troopers and Beerfest, the comedy troupe known as Broken Lizard came together after their days at Colgate University to perform sketch comedy in New York City. For their latest film Quasi, the group, comprised of Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, Jay Chandrasekhar, and Kevin Heffernan, left their highway trooper shenanigans behind in favor of returning to their roots by revisiting a long-gestating script that was filled with sketch comedy elements.
Ahead of the movie’s premiere on Hulu during the highest of holidays (for stoners), we had the chance to speak to the group about how their time on stage, working at a restaurant, and Monty Python, inspired a satirical reimagining of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Plus, we get an update from Lemme and Heffernan about the highly anticipated fourth season of their acclaimed truTV series, Tacoma FD.
Broken Lizard has been together for a few decades now. It’s been just over 20 years since the release of Super Troopers. After all that time, six feature films, and several other projects together, how has the process of working together and creating comedy changed for you over the years?
Erik Stolhanske: Well, we started in college 30-some years ago. Back then, we were doing sketches on stage with mermaid costumes. So actually, it was fun to come full circle with this movie because we were going back to our original roots of doing sketch comedy in Greenwich Village and taking out those old costumes that we used to have and throwing them on and getting back to a fun period piece instead of just modern-day cop station stuff.
Speaking of the modern-day slice-of-life stuff, with an emphasis on “slice” for Club Dread, it seems like all your movies have been really grounded in present-day comedy. Where did the inspiration for a period piece based on The Hunchback of Notre Dame come from?
Paul Soter: It’s actually something that we wrote when we were a sketch comedy group and just couldn’t get made. It was really more a decision to see if we could go back to doing the kind of stuff that we thought we were going to do when we were sketch comedians trying to be Monty Python. And this was a character that Steve had created based on a guy that he used to work with. At the time, that made the most sense. It’s 13th-century France, and it’ll be a big sort of costumey thing. So it’s a thing that we wanted to do forever.
Steve Lemme: It is a strange kitchen sink type of feel to it from back in that period of time. Even the oysters thing [in Quasi]. I worked in a seafood restaurant and was kind of an oyster expert, but we also made fun of the people that would come into the restaurant and eat oysters. I remember one time we were hanging out just talking about oysters, and another fellow came in and thought we were having a serious conversation about it. And he started to talk about Belon oysters and how they were the greatest oysters on earth. They tasted like the angels had dipped them in the ocean and swallowed them, you know? Anyway, you look at the script and it’s literally got everything that was going on in our lives [from] that moment in time. It’s such a random, random movie with lots of different things.
Paul Soter: I forget that was really the origin of that. Oyster lovers are as obnoxious as somebody who’s really into coffee and we’ll talk about coffee for an hour. Now, you meet marijuana people and they will not shut the fuck up about the science and the different kinds and this and that. And I think that idea was that we were wanting to make fun of somebody who could talk about oysters for an hour.
Steve Lemme: Like people from Baltimore, I love them. But when they would come into this restaurant I worked in, they would be like, “Oh, I see you got Maryland blue crabs on the menu. You know, we’re from Baltimore.” I’d be like, “I don’t f**king care.” And the same with the oysters. So we were just making fun of random things and writing about them. And it’s a nice little slice of our lives from that period of time.
Jay Chandrasekhar: Way to bring that back around.
Steve Lemme: Thanks, bro.
Did anything change drastically from the script when you decided to finally make it or were things largely intact from back then?
Kevin Heffernan: They were pretty much intact. We’d go through it every few years. We’d dust it off and you take out the jokes that didn’t fit anymore. If we made jokes that reference the 90s or something [that was no longer relevant], you realize it was time to take that out. We did a joke about the Chris de Burgh song “Don’t Pay The Ferryman” and now nobody knows what the f**k that song is. Nobody even knows. You can’t keep those in there. We would do that [once in a while], but structurally, it was always the hunchback in the midst of this conflict with the pope and the king while he falls in love with the queen.
Steve Lemme: There was a hot hunchback assassin. That’s probably the biggest removal.
Paul Soter: And her name was Dominique Wilkins, a 90s basketball reference.
Kevin Heffernan: Quasi 2. We’ll get her in there.
Steve Lemme: Well, there was a very funny scene where she shows up in the bar. She’s looking for Quasi and she runs into Duchamp. He sees her hump and he thinks he’s going to get in on her. And he starts rubbing her hump and saying, “Do you like that?” And she’s pretending she does… [laughs] Anyway, [it was cut].
Actors playing dual roles is a time-honored tradition in entertainment. William Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard are notable examples, but more recently we’ve seen the technique applied to Hamilton. Jay and Paul, what was the thought process to play dual roles in Quasi?
Jay Chandrasekhar: Well, the thing you may not have noticed is that we all play dual roles in the movie.
Paul Soter: Ours are probably just the most extreme. Maybe that’s why they pop. Most powerful.
Jay Chandrasekhar: It was extremely fun to play a king, to wear a crown, and to boss everybody around. I really enjoy that a lot. And then it was also fun to put some dirt on your face and play the bartender. It’s something that Python did. We watched it and loved discovering it when it happened and we just took a swing at it.
Paul Soter: And there’s logistical issues that are a new thing that we haven’t had to tackle before. You’ve got a stand-in who is playing your other character [and] you’ve got to act with a person who’s not necessarily an actor for that coverage. And then you switch around and then the camera’s on you, so you’re now in that in that other role. I’m so glad we did it, but admittedly sometimes you’re like, “Okay, I’m acting with a stand-in. I’m not acting with my guys.”
While all of you dabble in various areas when it comes to Broken Lizard productions, Jay and Kevin are primarily the directors. What are the differences in their approaches to directing?
Erik Stolhanske: Kevin’s more scowly. He’s a little more scowlier of a director. He might come in, he has his mannerisms… I think he’s more of a taskmaster [type of] director.
Steve Lemme: Directing and acting at the same time is a really hard job. And so the director is always angry. We discovered that on Puddle Cruiser and then Super Troopers where Jay was constantly angry because things are going wrong. You could see a light falling or something happening and the director’s got to keep an eye on all that stuff. Our job, the rest of us, is to keep these guys light and happy. In Club Dread, we made Jay a foppish raga Brit with dreadlocks [and] a British accent. In this movie, it was Kevin’s character, Duchamp, who had the wine in his bad teeth and was dirty. That was our way of kind of watchdogging [the anger].
Paul Soter: The idea is to make the director have to be as buffoonish as possible.
Jay Chandrasekhar: And then they have to be fun and light.
Finally, fans of Tacoma FD will spot a nu mber of familiar faces since Gabriel Hogan, Marcus Henderson, Eugene Cordero, and Hassie Harrison all show up in Quasi. Kevin and Steve, what’s different about working with these talented performers on a feature versus a sitcom? And is there an update on when we can expect to see the fourth season of the show?
Kevin Heffernan: Well, we just finished editing the next season. We shot 13 episodes and it’ll be out this summer. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but this summer it’s going to air. So that’s fun, 13 new episodes.
[Regarding the differences,] it was kind of interesting because we shot this movie in between seasons on Tacoma, so we actually rolled our crew over. We used the same crew from Tacoma to shoot this movie, for the most part, which made it fun to have those people come in and do something different, like this different era.
And it was the same way with the actors. The actors had some time down and we said, “Hey, why don’t you come do this?” They jumped in and it was really fun to see them improvise with these guys in a situation where we haven’t seen that before. And I think people who are fans of the show are going to love that aspect of Quasi.
Quasi starring Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, and Adrienne Palicki premieres on Hulu on April 20, 2023.
