This reboot has an insane cast. Did you have people in mind when you started casting?
Farquhar: Well, in some cases we had people in mind, but in general, what we do is we sit around and we come up with names of people we want to work with and we go and ask them. And almost always they say yes. And also we have people who come to us and say they want to be in the show. One name that comes to mind is Chance the Rapper.
Smith: Right. We had to write him a character in the show because he really wanted to be in the show. And we had offered him a role of an existing character and he turned it down because he wanted his own character. So what do you do with that? Now, you got to go to the lab and write a character.
Farquhar: Chance had us arm behind our back. [laughs] “Write me a part.”
Smith: But that’s a fun challenge to have. It’s a good problem, as I describe it, to have, because like Ralph’s saying, for the most part, we think about people we want to work with and then we try to write a character around that person. And for the most part, that’s really paid off. Even guest stars coming to play themselves. That’s always fun when you get a character coming and play a general extension of themselves. That’s always cool.
Has there been a particular person that surprised you how easy was to get them to sign on for the show?
Smith: Easy is a relative word, because even getting an actor to say yes does not mean that they’ll be in the booth tomorrow, you know what I mean? Now you’ve got to work with their schedule, and who knows what time of the day we’re going to end up getting them. So we’ve had recording sessions in odd parts of the day or morning or evening or whatever.
Farquhar: Bruce and I, we don’t do the work, casting does the work. So we put out the request, we don’t know what they do. They go do the leg work. That’s when we say, “Oh hey, we got Chance the Rapper.” And then they call up Chance the Rapper’s representative and say, “We paying him five dollars,” and they say, “Get out of here.”
Smith: So it’s a lot of back and forth.
Farquhar: It’s a lot of back and forth. It’s never easy.