The Making Of "Workaholics"

This feature is a part of Complex's Workaholics Week.

You read the Workaholics cover story with Anders, Adam, and Blake. You watched the gang get weird with acid on last night's season three premiere, "The Business Trip," where Blake mistook a male stripper's package for a toothy monster and tried to choke it out. You even bought the new season two DVD and Blu-ray combo, but still you want to know more about your favorite show: How did the guy from Whitney become a child predator? Who was originally supposed to guest star in place of Marc Summers? What kind of weird shit have the guys seen while actually tripping on mushrooms?

Find out all of that and much, much more, as the stars of the show take you behind the scenes of every the first 20 episodes of Workaholics.

Interview by Justin Monroe (@40yardsplash)

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Adam: We did the exact same episode for the pilot presentation, and we had to re-do it for the actual show, recreating a lot of those moments that we had already put on tape. It actually changed quite a bit from the pilot presentation that got us the show to what you actually see, for how much improv we do, how loosey goosey we keep it. That’s how it just ended up a lot different. And by a lot different I almost mean the exact same, but if you’ve seen the pilot presentation you’re like, "Whoa this is so different!" The plot was all the same its just like our dialogue since we improv so much there’s a lot of dialogue and the jokes.

Blake: There’s one less poop dollar in the episode that made TV.

Adam: You had to get rid of the poop dollar for time.

Anders: For the guest star, we were gonna go with a basketball player from the Clippers, who we had a connection to kind of, and then at the last minute that fell through, if it was even ever a reality, so then we had our backs up against the wall.

Blake: The basketball player was supposed to be Baron Davis, and at the end we had this whole thing where Bear-on Davis wanted the bear coat, and then when he fell through we started to say we were gonna have Dallas Raines, a local weatherman that I was obsessed with.

Adam: I don’t know if the world was ready for the Bear-on Davis bit. But then we started to think, who from our childhood would we actually be really stoked to see, and specifically who would Blake be the most excited to see? I don’t know who said it but we came to the conclusion that Marc Summers would be the man. Marc—total fucking surprise—was just all about it. He’s not a germ freak like everybody thinks of him. He’s beaten that and shakes hands and all that jazz.

Blake: He was really cool. He didn’t ever say why he was so down to do our show but he did tell a lot of like old-school Nickelodeon stories and it was really quite magical.

Anders: When [showrunner] Kevin Etten told us Marc Summers was in we lost our minds. That moment was like, “Whoa! We have our own TV show and we can get people like Marc Summers to show up! That’s awesome!”

Adam: It was inspired by some actual mushroom experiences we’ve had. I’ve tripped a few times. I’ve seen some weird shit on mushrooms: I’ve seen Suge Knight in a pot of plants before and freaked out. We didn't implement that, though. We wanted to keep it grounded and real and show how dumb these dudes can be while on drugs, and I think we pulled it off. We come off as fucking idiots. [Laughs.]

Blake: We were also having some problems with cockroaches in our house [which was also the set] and that kind of spawned it, like, what is the dumbest solution to this? Well, we could sleep at the office. But what do you do in a boring-ass office? At first we were like, you just go crazy, and then we thought to kick it up a notch, do some fucking drugs.

Anders: Regarding the cockroach, in the beginning of that episode, they find a cockroach in my ear and that sends us into camping in the office. On the day day we’re filming, our props dude rolls up with a jar and he’s like, “So here’s the roach,” and he’s got a jar full of earwigs, which are not roaches at all. He didn’t have any roaches, so we had to go in afterwards and dub over that it was like a baby cockroach. [Laughs.]

Adam: I was the the one dubbing the shit over, and for whatever reason we couldn’t match it properly, and it just goes, “Oh my God, it’s a [alters voice dramatically] BABY COCKROACH!” [Laughs.] If you got back you can hear it. We’ve had a lot of rat issues in the home, too. And there are a lot of ideas floating around about how to get these rats involved in the show.

Anders: Yeah, during Sweeps Week we know what we’re doin’.

Blake: That was actually spawned from the original web series a little bit. We always wondered what it would be like if Ders was in power. I actually thought for a while that it would be a cool dynamic of our whole show if we were three guys who lived together and Ders just so happened to be one step above us, but I think we made the right call on all of us being equals, for sure.

Anders: Yeah, 'cause then you’re like, Why are these guys friends if this one dude is such a dickhead? And if he’s such a dickhead and they’re dicks back, what brings them together? But I think it’s funny to have the dynamic where you’ve got two wild guys and then one guy who wants to be straight-edge but just can’t get his shit together, so he pretends he’s got it together. I think they can all kind of look to each other as equals, and that there’s some similarity.

As far as similarities between the webisode and the episode, there was a promotion, there were pranks back and forth, as the power struggle took hold, and there was a bike-lock incident, but that’s about it.

Adam: Eddie Barbanell, who plays Brad, is so awesome. We didn’t wanna write all this crazy stuff for him to say, 'cause we didn’t want to make a mentally handicapped person say “I want to go fuck some chicks,” or “I want some chicks’ pussies.” We didn’t write that in at all, but he was constantly improv-ing about how much he wanted to go fuck chicks. [Laughs.] So we just started going along with it, and he was really, really funny—professional as hell, too. We keep it really loose on our set, so we don’t really snap into character right until it’s about time for action, and he would tell us to shut the fuck up, that it was time to get to work. [Laughs.]

Anders: We had a few people audition and Eddie sent his audition in from Florida. He just crushed it. His dad filmed the audition and they e-mailed it to our casting director and we were like, “This guy’s gonna be fun.”

Blake: I think the line that really sealed the deal in the audition was “I run on train like chicks like you.” He nailed it.

Adam: He said it like he was doing Shakespeare, so eloquently.

Blake: Another cool moment that came from that was, when we were driving around at night it was game seven of the Lakers in the NBA Finals. We actually got to pull the car over and stop in the middle of traffic on the back of this trailer hitch, and it being our first season, that’s when it hit me that we’re really living out our dreams: We’re filming, we’re in LA, the Lakers are winning, we’re like a part of something. That was a pretty magical moment for me.

Adam: Yeah, it was cool we shut down the whole street and got out of the car and turned the stereo up and the whole crew gathered around the car to listen to the last two minutes of the game. It was pretty cool.

Blake: Kyle’s brother, Adam, and his now-wife, Haley, used to live with us and if I do remember correctly they might have came up with the concept of keg nog because we always had a kegerator at the house. I remember Haley mentioning keg nog and I wrote that shit down in my mind and then we made up a whole holiday [Half Christmas] around that alone.

Adam: There was that cool scene where me and Blake are trying to celebrate Half Christmas in the parking lot drinking egg nog and there was evidently a huge accident on the freeway, like a quarter of a mile away from our office. There were like five helicopters circling this event that had just happened and we had to shoot this scene right then so I ended up just improv-ing a line, “I guess they’re there covering the strike” and me and Blake talked about how the strike is such a big event now, even though its just me and him. That’s how we got away with there being like insane helicopter noise throughout that entire scene. We shoot in pretty shitty areas, so there tends to be helicopters. A lot of gang shootings, a lot of double homicides. [Laughs.]

Also, the bag boy striker at the grocery store, that’s my lifelong childhood friend, Austin Anderson, who actually moved to California with me to start doing comedy. We were able to hook him up real quick-like.

Adam: I got to make out with the wonderful and beautiful Rebel Wilson, like six times. We were locking lips! Woo! I was getting some tongue action.

Anders: We had a bunch of Juggalos and Juggalettes on set, too, and one of them tried to stab our medic with a broken bottle. She was on some like drugs and probably dehydrated because it was hot, and she started slurring words and falling over, and then our medic came up and over to tend to her, like, “Let’s go sit you down somewhere,” and she screamed, “I’m not going anywhere!” And she busted a bottle and tried to fucking cut him.

Blake: That was our first contact with Juggalos, and to be fair, there were some real cool, die-hard dudes who rolled out for basically no money. There was one dude pulling a double shift where he was like working at a pizza place till like 2 in the morning and driving out all the way to LA from butt-fuck nowhere just because he was down for the cause and this episode was spreading the word about the Juggalos and ICP [Insane Clown Posse].

Adam: We actually we sort of shit on them and at the end of the episode a little bit 'cause we get in a fight with them, but even though we did that they still were really cool and supportive and they’re just happy that we were talking about with Juggalos basically, the movement. Very little death threats, I feel. [Laughs.]

Adam: We went after Paul Walker and a bunch of people for that role of the predator and nobody was nearly as good at the predator as Chris D'Elia. He was a friend of mine through stand-up and we brought him in not knowing what to expect—he’s a really funny stand-up but I’ve never seen him act in anything—and he came in doing that voice and that character and we were all like, “We have to hire this guy.” Before he auditioned, he was like, “Do you have any tips on like how you want me to play this character?” My one note to him was: “You are the coolest dude we’ve ever met. That’s all you need to know. Just be the coolest dude, whatever you think the coolest dude ever is.” And he came with that, and we were like holy shit.

Anders: [Laughs.] Holy shit, that’s not cool. But holy shit, that’s what you think cool is? All right, it’s really weird…but rock and roll. We had some pretty good actors come in to audition for the role. I don’t remember anyone being too bad. I don’t like to dog auditions where people really go for it, but we had some people that were over-creeping it and didn’t realize they were supposed to be cool.

Adam: Yeah it wasn’t that anybody was horrible or anything; everybody was just fine but I think Chris took that character and he was so specific with it that it really worked and it really helped the episode. "To Friend a Predator" is a lot of people’s favorite episode, and Chris is a huge reason why.

Adam: Arnold Schwarzenegger was my hero growing up, and Hulk Hogan was my hero, and Jean-Claude, so these like giant, muscular, freak shows of dudes were like my heroes and I just always thought that it was the funniest thing, dudes with giant muscles just standing on stage flexing, so for me doing that episode and standing on stage and flexing and all that shit was like check that off the bucket list. Now I don’t actually have to work out all the time and do a competition. I’ve already done a fake one.

At first they like gave me a robe to walk around in because it’s just you with your dick stuck in this little Speedo and we shoot for like 12 hours, so like a solid 8 hours of that day I was in a Speedo, and for like the first couple hours I was in a robe all like wrapped up and then after that I was just letting it fly and it didn’t bother me at all. It was so bizarre being back stage with all the real body builders. They just did not give a fuck; they were pulling their dicks out and adjusting them in front of all of us, and you’re just like, “OK, nope, this is normal,” while they’re talking about how swoll each other look. It was incredible, so cool.

Adam: Chris Parnell was just pro as fuck. He came in and just like every scene was just really on point. SNL alum and all that, it was like it was cool having someone with that pedigree on set showing us what’s up.

Anders: We went after him and he was cool enough to do a show that he didn’t know anybody affiliated with. It wasn’t like a favor—he’s not like a friend like Chris D’elia. We hadn’t even aired yet. I mean, we weren’t really a show, we didn’t exist, and he was like, “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

Blake: Thanks for believing in us, Chris. You’re the best.

Anders: Having cameos made the show feel more official. We’d been making Internet videos with each other for a while, and I see these guys every day anyway, and OK, the crew got bigger, and we got to cast friends here and there that we knew were actors and actresses, and we had some people who you recognized from some show, but then with someone like Chris Parnell, you’re like, this is the guy who rapped on “Lazy Sunday,” the biggest Internet video of all time, and he was one of my favorite guys on SNL during his era and the fact that he was about to read lines that we wrote was pretty cool.

Blake: That was our first filming with the Odd Future crew. We were just starting to get into Twitter and I was listening to some Odd Future and I noticed that this kid Taco was always in the background and I was like, it’d be a really cool little shout out to have him play a high school kid causing trouble, so I tweeted at him and he tweeted back and next thing you know Taco came through looking clean.

Adam: Woo! Woo! And then he shot us with a paintball gun.

Adam: It was like 110 degrees in the Valley and they had me outside playing soccer with all of the construction workers while Ders and Blake look down at me from the window. I was pouring sweat because I was in a long dress shirt, undershirt, and black dress pants, and then we went down to shoot the scene afterwards, after I had been playing soccer for like 20 minutes, and Blake says his line to me and I just stared at him. They were calling out my line and I couldn’t even get a line out. I think I had a mild heat stroke. We had to put ice on my head and on my dick and my armpits—it was really intense. I don’t know if the medic just wanted to see if I would put ice on my dick or if it’s a real thing but he insisted that I put ice on my dick.

Blake: Having [Arrested Development creator] Mitch Hurwitz on the show as Fun Eric, that’s beyond a cool actor, a cool musician, 'cause that dude creates some of the funniest stuff. He's legendary status, and a lot of people wouldn't even recognize him just by looking at him, but just having a dude that is like that influential in the comedy world I thought that was really cool. And he was funnier in person if you could even believe it.

Adam: It was cool to have the guy who created Arrested Development, someone that big, sort of christen us and say, “You guys are talented and you guys are doing it right.” He didn’t say either of those things.

Anders: He didn’t talk to us.

Adam: He said it with his eyes, I think.

Anders: I don’t know if I have laughed harder on set. Mitch was just a fire hose of comedy, and he doesn’t break character, so you feel twice as stupid when you laugh because he looks at you in character and is like, “What are you laughing at? I’m just a person talking to you.” But the things that come out of his mouth are ridiculously funny. There was no point in trying to one-up him. I just went and sat in my car and put the hose into the tailpipe. The guys were like, “No, dude, you’re funny too,” and I was like, “Just let me go,” and then they were like, “Fine,” and then I was like, “Oh, fuck you guys,” and then I just went upstairs and continued the episode.

Adam: That was a weird moment for all of us.

Anders: The casting process for “Temp-tress” was a very interesting casting process it was just a little bit more fun. We thought just to get the right girl we should meet them all in person.

Adam: We really did our homework there. Nicky Whelan is such a babe that if you walk into a room and she’s there you can’t help but stare. She must live the weirdest life where people are just staring at her all the time.

Anders: You just wanna cut your own face off. She’s a babe.

Adam: You wanna gouge your eyes out. She’s too beautiful.

Blake: My favorite scene of any season we’ve done is the masturbation in the car scene. Originally, because the temp was so hot, we were gonna masturbate in the bathroom at work and we were gonna have separate stalls. Somewhere around the last draft of the script we decided to go out to the car and make it even more awkward, set up towels and stuff.

Adam: For erection scenes, our pants are stuffed with all of our real cocks. We all have giant dildo-shaped cocks. While shooting the masturbation scene you can’t really see anything because it’s all shot from the waist up, so in order to sell it we just were shimmying our shoulders a lot. You wouldn’t masturbate that way ever in your entire life but that’s how we beat off. And while I was fake masturbating, I accidentally locked eyes with my sister, who was a PA season two. It was so awkward.

Anders: I was looking at her too. That’s weird.

Adam: Watch it, bro!

Anders: We rented out a mall, shut that bitch down. We had an escalator all to ourselves—now that’s Hollywood!

Adam: I think it might’ve been the first time we were on location and people found out and came there specifically to see us, which was pretty rad. It’s happened more season three but that was the first time because it was still pretty early on in season two.

We didn’t get to shut the entire mall down, though, just a certain section, so other sections were still going and for some reason we didn’t know that this guy had a band that would play on the 3rd floor at a certain time of the day and then they just like started rocking out for coins in front of the store, and so we had to quit shooting for like 20 minutes while this guy did like Dave Mathews Band covers.

Blake: And we got in trouble for the whales tails. A mall cop made some girl pull her pants up because she was wearing a whale tail.

Adam: He said it was inappropriate for the mall. Don’t worry, we got the shot.

Adam: That was a fun one ‘cause you don’t often get to see that side of Ders. He’s like our in-house straight man, usually the one to be like “Here are the rules,” and like set shit up. He’s the one usually that carries the story, so this was kind of a cool one, to see him go crazy and be the wild man.

Anders: It was fun to exercise that other muscle, get in those riffs where you can just clown around and not whine, “Guuuuuuys, we need to go!” Plus, there’s nothing like wearing sweatpants and a sleeveless golf shirt all day. That’s arguably the most comfortable outfit ever.

Blake: That the sex doll weighed like 180 lbs. It was not fuckable.

Adam: They’re so heavy; you’d have to work out and train to have sex with it. I don’t know how some fat schlubby dude would be able to. The doll was in our prop room for like a week before the shoot and every crew guy kept asking, “Did you feel her titty yet?” Everyone went in there and snuck a titty grab—pretty hard, not the most succulent breasts, if I do say so.

Anders: We cut a lot of that. That was like a 46-minute episode originally and we were like going around looking for sponsors to like do a power episode where it’s a special event. It would’ve been good but we decided to just trim it down to be a half-hour episode and I think it turned out pretty smokin’.

Adam: Yeah that’s probably my favorite episode of season two. Once you get down in that sewer set it was really, really radical. All of the sludge and everything looked disgusting but it actually wasn’t disgusting at all, it was like broken up brownies. It was basically Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory down there.

Anders: Last week, somebody asked me, “What sewer did you guys shoot that in?” I was like, “That was a set, homie.” They couldn’t believe it, so props to our set designers and set decorators, and, really, to us, for selling it, because you wouldn’t believe it was real unless you saw it in our eyes. So really it was all us.

Adam: I’m a little upset about it though. We call out Ed Helms, saying how big of a dick he has, and how now if you have a big dick it’s having an Ed Helms, and we didn’t hear anything from Ed Helms. If any TV show ever says that having an Adam DeVine means you have a huge dick, I’m contacting them to say thanks for spreading the word. I’m butt-hurt, Ed.

Adam: Kevin Etten, our showrunner, knew and liked Battlestar Galactica and I think he was the one who felt Katie Sackhoff would be good as the homeless lady, and then she came in and she was really good, she was profesh as hell. People loved her—when the episode aired people flipped out on Battlestar, which is pretty cool. And we got to ride that horse and carriage up the freeway entrance. Even though we knew it wasn’t gonna go onto the freeway I immediately got terrified that the horses were gonna take off and suddenly we were gonna be on the 405 with two horses.

It was fun to shoot the music video, too. “I wanna suck, suck on your booooooobs!” I kept forgetting the lyrics, so I ended having a little piece of paper on the keyboard that I kept glancing down at and I think in a couple of takes you might see me like glancing down acting like I’m playing the piano when I’m, in fact, reading the words to “Suck on Your Boobs.”

Blake: And that dude is not Jakob Dylan, nor does he look anything like him.

Adam: We cast a Jakob Dylan lookalike and for whatever reason he didn’t look anything like Jakob Dylan. We kept him in a hat and glasses, so it might as well have been Karl in a hat and glasses. But we just thought it’d be cool if a random celebrity was helping me sing this song, and we thought Jakob Dylan might be one of the most random. Shout out to Wallflowers! Woo!

Adam: It feels like a movie, ‘cause we’re out on the road and we got to shoot in Malibu. It’s the most cinematic thing we’ve done, I feel.

Anders: And Jeff Fahey, the most interesting man in the world, blessed us with his presence. He’s an actor. He’s the real deal. He could get right into the moment, and we’re just fucking around, so once someone called cut we’re like, “Wassup! So yeah, what were we talking about?” With Jeff, you’d look into his eyes and you’re like, oh shit, this dude is for real some vagrant that has abducted me and I don’t know if he's going to stop driving when they call cut. He might just take me to Mexico.

Adam: He had the coolest Hollywood stories ever. He was talking about how he went to Coolio’s wedding and shit.

Anders: You know how everyone goes to Hedonism for Thanksgiving? We just figured we’d make an episode about it. One of the writers had a family member who had gone to Hedonism recently and we wound up getting stories from her. Pastafari is real, that’s a real restaurant.

Adam: One of our crew dudes had been there a few times as well, which made us look at him in a different way. He's transportation, and I won’t let him move my car anymore.

That was the episode I was really sick because I had eaten a toilet doughnut. We were in the writers’ room and everyone was asking me how much money it would take for me to eat a doughnut out of the toilet. I said 500 bucks. I couldn’t back down, so I did it and I think all of the poisons hit me that week. In between every take it was just me being violently ill. But I’m happy I did. $500 is nothing to sneeze at. I gotta remember my roots. It's my retirement plan if this doesn't work out.