By RODNEY HO/ rho@ajc.com, originally filed Wednesday, March 11, 2015
When Atlantans Matt Thompson and Adam Reed cast voices for their animated series "Archer" in 2009, they picked some well known names such as Aisha Tyler, Judy Greer, Chris Parnell and Jessica Walter.
But they also reserved spots for two favorite Dad's Garage improv comedy veterans Lucky Yates (Dr. Krieger) and Amber Nash (Pam).
Thompson and Reed got to know Yates and Nash while working on their first animated series "Sealab 2021" for Atlanta-based Adult Swim. They'd see shows featuring the pair, who worked with their animator Christian Danley in Dad's Garage's improv group.
"Watching the three of them perform there just blew us away," Thompson said in an email.
So when the duo put together "Frisky Dingo" for Adult Swim in 2006, they chose Nash to voice Val, a marketing executive-turned-deadly Geisha assassin and Yates as the leader of armored idiots known as Xtacles. "They just killed in those two roles," he said.
It was a no-brainer to include them in "Archer."
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
Nash said in a recent phone conference interview that Pam, as the HR person at this dysfunctional spy agency, was written originally as "overweight and mousy." Reed over time shifted the character to better suit Nash so she became more brazen, more sexual. "I work in an improv theater with a bunch of dudes, and I have a trucker’s mouth and like I’m a real jackass," Nash said. "Pam's become so much cooler than I am as a human being so now I'm just aspiring to be as cool as Pam is one day."
Yates said he's a science nerd with a macabre sense of humor himself, which fits Dr. Krieger. "I would not want to play any other character other than Krieger," he said.
Reed knows them so well personally, Yates said their own quirks get incorporated into their animated characters. For instance, Yates says "yep yep yep" a lot so Krieger does, too. And Nash's use of "ding dongs" became something Pam says.
"We give them a lot of freedom to be their naturally funny, talented selves as much as possible," Thompson said. "They both control their respective character Twitter accounts, writing all the jokes themselves. These are two of Atlanta's funniest people, cranking out comedy."
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
Lucky said he uses Krieger's Twitter account to delve into Krieger's plans for world domination. Pam's Twitter occasionally explores her side job as a bouncer at a strip club called Crammers.
For Nash, this is a primo job that helps Dad's Garage, which is currently using 7 Stages in Little Five Points until their new theater is built : "It’s such an awesome thing that we still get to live in our home state and do this amazing show and work at the theater that we love every weekend. You know people will come up to see shows that wouldn’t have known about Dad’s if they weren’t already "Archer" fans, which is super cool, because that’s brought a lot of people to the theater that didn’t know about us, too."
I've known Yates for more than 12 years and wrote about his mock talk show he did at Dad's Garage in the early 2000s. (I was even a guest once.) He was also a regular character on Alton Brown's long-running Food Network show "Good Eats."
"This was really all I ever set out to do with this little career of mine," Yates said. "All I ever wanted out of this was to voice a cool cartoon character and have cool merch and be able to go to Comic-Con, and all that’s happened so I’m just riding it out until I die now."
Yates said the show works because the characters "really like each other but hate each other at the same time. They're a big huge dysfunctional family."
Nash agreed: "I honestly think that’s why the comedy works so well, because without the charm and the right chemistry I think as mean as these characters are to each other, it wouldn’t work. But you can kind of tell there’s this like underlying love, this weird, unfortunate family drama love that they all have for each other that I really think makes it work.
Yates would love the same group to get into new predicaments every season, kind of like season five, when it was re-named "Archer: Vice" and they became coke dealers.
"I wish every season this group of idiots had to go and figure out a whole new life for themselves together because we just got sh** canned or screwed their way out of the last occupation that they had," he said.
Facetiously, Yates also imagined Pam and Krieger in a spinoff show where they time travel. "Kind of like 'Doctor Who,' but a really terrible duo," he said.
SEASON FINALE
"Archer," 10 p.m. Thursday, April 2, FX
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