Even spies have to
deal with the Human Resource Department. On Archer, the ISIS crew is stuck dealing with Pam Poovey, a rotund, dolphin puppet-wielding gossip. Luckily, while Pam herself isn’t much fun to be around, Amber Nash, who voices the outlandish character, couldn’t be nicer and more pleasant to deal with.

Nash, a lifelong Georgia native, got her start on television on creator Adam Reed’s previous show Frisky Dingo. We recently talked to Nash, who had just begun a European tour with her theatre group Dad’s Garage, about voice work, Comic-Con and what’s in store for Pam this season.

Where are you originally from?

I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, a little north of the city. My mom’s from Atlanta and my dad’s from the midwest, so I grew up in Atlanta and have been there pretty much my whole life.

How did you get into acting?

When I was in college, I was studying psychology. That’s what I got my degree in. I was going to school and working in restaurants. A friend of mine went to see an improv show and they were like, “You’ve got to go see this because you’ll really like it.” So I went and saw this improv show and I really liked it and I started taking improv classes. This is when I was like 19. I took the classes, then I kept hanging around and taking more classes and bartending at the theater, cleaning toilets and whatever I could do.

I eventually started doing sketch comedy there. They were doing a sketch comedy show at the time. And then started improvising with the theatre and then became a regular and quit my regular job and decided to start acting full-time.

How long have you been acting full-time?

Since 2005.

Before Archer, you worked on Frisky Dingo. How did the voice work come about?

There is another guy that is an improvisor at the theatre I work at – his name’s Christian Danley. Christian is an animator. He was working with the 70/30 guys on Frisky Dingo – or maybe even before that, he was working on Sealab, I think. So some of the guys – actually Matt [Thompson] and Adam [Reed] – knew that Christian came from an improv theatre and would come and check it out.

So I guess they had seen me in an improv show and when Frisky Dingo was being created, it was actually a different show from what it became. The original idea was something very different. I think it was more of a family. So they were looking for a teenage girl. They had me come in and audition because they knew that Christian knew me, and I was totally wrong for it. It was not at all something I would have done. So they were like, “Well, you’re not going to play this part.”

Then the show ended up becoming something totally different. When the character of Val popped up, they asked me to come in and read for it. I did and they liked it. I think actually on the first episode, Val might have been voiced by a different actress. I’m almost positive. So they had me come in and do Val later for the rest of the series.

Once that series was over, they took a big break and they really weren’t doing a ton of stuff anymore. When they came up with the idea for Archer, they actually had me come in and I guess I was doing pick ups for something – they needed me to do something. And they were like, “We want you to look at this.” The first time I saw what Pam looked like, they had Pam’s head on the screen, but she was delivering a line that I had recorded as Val. It was pretty much the same voice, it was just a little different because it’s my voice, you know?

They were like, “This is what we want you to do for this new show.”

Where does Pam’s voice come from?

Val is just my total regular voice. And then Pam’s is just a little bit different. And so the voice is actually when I tell stories as my mother, that’s the voice I use when I’m talking as my mom. And it’s kind of midwestern and my mom’s not from the midwest. So my mom doesn’t actually sound like that at all. It’s actually me when I’m making fun of my mother, that’s the voice I use.

When you record your lines, you just go in a booth alone and record them, right? You never actually interact with the other actors.

No. The good thing for me, because everyone else is in LA, is that I actually get to go in and I’m in a booth and outside of the booth is Adam and then another guy named Casey. So I get to actually interact with them instead of just being on the phone with them.

So yeah, when I go in it’s just me in the booth. They don’t even read the scene with me. I usually just deliver the line three different ways and if I’m not getting it right, Adam will be like, “Well think about it like this” or “Try it like this.” For all the lines I have in an episode, usually it only takes 30 minutes. It’s the best job in the world.

As someone who does improv, does it make a difference to you not being able to interact with other people? Was that challenging to adjust to at first?

At first, it was different and Casey, the other guy who is there, would read me in so I would have something to react off of. I used to definitely do it that way because I wanted to have that interaction with somebody. At first, I would just stand in front of a microphone and talk. But then, I got a really good note from a friend of mine. He was like, “Move your hands. Act. Do what you would do if you were on stage.” So now in the booth I’m just like wacky and crazy and I move around so I can actually get that voice to sound right.

At first, it was definitely a little weird as an improvisor. Now I’m used to doing it. And a lot of times, Adam will be like, “Just try some stuff” or “Make something up” or “Say what you think Pam would say.” I actually get to improvise lines pretty regularly. He’s really good about it. He enjoys having actors do that.

How was the character of Pam originally described to you?

I think they described her as “the HR lady that everybody hates.” When I went in for the first record, that was what I was going with. Everybody kind of hates her and everybody kind of mistreats her. I think that’s how it kind of was at first and then the characters changed a bit. The overweight HR lady that everybody hates. And I didn’t even know that she was bisexual at this point. I think that came out later.

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When looking to cast
the intelligent and sexy superspy Lana Kane on the brilliant FX comedy Archer, Aisha Tyler seems like such an obvious choice.

She graduated from Darthmouth College and was on the fast track to becoming a lawyer when she decided to pursue a career in comedy, which means she is both smart and funny. And as a self-described “guy’s girl” with an interest in video games, beer and sci-fi, she seems like the perfect person to deliver the witty and obscure lines of dialogue written by show creator Adam Reed.

We recently caught up with Tyler to discuss her roots in stand up, her enduring role on Friends and life as a superspy on one of the funniest shows on television, which returns tonight with all new episodes.

How did you get into comedy? When did you decide its what you wanted to do for a living?

Well, I did a lot of improv and sketch in high school and college. And I think in college is when I first started seeing other people do stand up and realizing it was actually something you could do as a job. Because before that it just kind of seemed like something magical that only a few special people did. Even though there were like the Steve Martins and the Bill Cosbys, I had no sense that it was a profession.

So I didn’t really figure out I wanted to be a stand up until I graduated college and I was working and watching the precursor to Comedy Central, which was this terrible network called Ha and thinking, “Oh, I could totally do this.”

Everybody before they start is like, “Oh, this looks so easy.” So I just started writing jokes down and I started on January of 1993, so I’ve been doing it like 18 years now.

When did you feel like. “I’m good at this”? When did you start feeling comfortable as a stand up comedian?

I never walked around like, “I’m so awesome.” I really loved it probably from the very first time that I did it. But I feel like when you’re a young comedian, you always have an overinflated sense of your own competency. You’re like, “Oh, people don’t see how great I am and how funny I am.” And you slowly almost work backwards from there and start to realize “No, I’m not, I definitely could work harder and I definitely could be better.” But I always knew it’s what I wanted to do. From the very first day I knew it’s what I wanted to do.

Were you always interested in acting as well or was that something that came along once your career started taking off and you started appearing on television?

I studied sketch and improv in high school, so I stem from sort of broad form comedic acting, but as soon as I got to LA I think I started studying acting and studying shows that I love. I remember just watching every episode of Friends and really knowing that show inside and out because it was comedic acting.

The old path for a lot of stand up comedians would be come to LA and then you get a deal for your own show. Obviously, that’s how Seinfeld did it and how Ray Romano did it and there’s so many guys who had gotten these deals. It used to be kind of hand in hand if you were a stand up comedian and you were getting any attention in town that you were thinking about the fact that you might at some point act in a show that was based on your act.

It sounds so calculating, but I think once I got here I realized I needed to be a better actor. I started studying pretty intensively. But then, of course, I started auditioning for stuff and started getting it, so it kind of was both calculated and organic.

What was it like, both for your career and simply being a fan of the show before you were on it, to have that reoccurring role on Friends?

I think it was a huge amount of legitimacy when I got that. It was like the hugest show on TV, pretty much and it wasn’t a little role. All of the guest stars previous to that, 90 percent of that had been huge names like Sean Penn and Brad Pitt and, I can’t think of his name right now, Magnum, P.I. …

Tom Selleck.

Thanks, Tom Selleck and Reese Witherspoon. So I just was trying just not to crap myself the whole time I was doing it. Talk Soup, I think the biggest audience we were getting at that time was maybe a million people. And I went from getting a million people a week to getting 25 million people just in the U.S. So it definitely changed a lot of things. It just gave me this air of legitimacy, like, “Okay, she’s a real actress, she’s on this show.” So yeah, it definitely changed everything.

Is it weird to think your episodes of that show are going to exist forever on syndicated cable? They are probably on somewhere right now.

I guess so, yeah. In a lot of ways it’s odd. I’m grateful for it because you’re always in front of people. A lot of things we do in this business, you make something and it just kind of goes into this big gaping black hole of obscurity and no one ever sees it again. So it’s great that that show has such an amazing third and fourth and eleventh life and people watch it all over the world. I did a series last year that aired in Europe and everybody there knew me from Friends, but also from 24. Amazingly, I’ve been just lucky to get some big shows that have had long lives. I’m mostly just stoked and grateful.

According to your IMDB profile, you are known for Death Sentence, Ghost Whiperer, Bedtime Stories and Balls of Fury.

Funny.

How did they pick those? We think you would agree, that’s not what you should be known for.

[Laughs.] Yeah, I don’t know. I have no idea, it seems just like bad algorithm math that picked those four shows, right? But those are all things I’ve done and Ghost Whisperer had a huge fanbase and that’s in syndication now on Ion, so people see that and they watch me die every approximate like nine weeks or so. You’ve got to take the whole resume, you know? You can’t cherry pick.

How did the role of Lana on Archer come along? What was the audition process like for that?

I just got sent the script by the show creator and he asked me if I wanted to do it and I said yes. It was very simply. I didn’t need to read the entire script. I read the first five to 10 pages and it was so funny, I just called my agent and said, “Yes, I’ll do this. Absolutely, right away.” It was very simple.

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Tonight Americans
will get their first taste of Wilfred, the lovable anthropomorphic dog that smokes pot, uses foul language and offers questionable advice to the depressed, but lovable protagonist Ryan. While it’s safe to say people here have never seen a show quite like it, show creator Jason Gann has been entertaining Australian audiences with the character for a decade.

Gann and his friend Adam Zwar first brought the Wilfred character on-screen in a 2002 short film. That eventually lead to a TV series in Gann’s home country of Australia, which ran for two seasons. Wilfred is set to make his American debut tonight on FX, with Elijah Wood playing Wilfred’s human companion Ryan.

We recently caught up with Gann to talk about adapting the show for an American audience, showing up to work in a dog suit every day and writing a unique comedy that is “ball-tearingly funny.”

How did you get into show business? When did you decide it’s what you wanted to do for a living?

I went to an all boys school and I wasn’t good at anything. Then they brought drama to our school for the first time and we did a musical. All the young boys played good women, so my first couple roles were women. I came on stage and said my first line and everyone laughed at me. I thought, “Oh my god, this is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.” I said my next line and the audience laughed again. I walked off stage mortified, like, “What have I done?”

And everyone ran up to me and said, “Ganny, they love you. They love you.”

I said, “What? They’re laughing at me.”

They go, “Yeah that’s a good thing. They love you.”

And I’m like, “Holy shit.”

From then on, that kept happening in every show I did. I wasn’t trying to be funny or anything. I was just coming out delivering my lines in what I thought was a truthful way and people responded to me. So after a couple of years of that I realized I had some sort of comedic performing gift, I decided to give it a crack. So I studied it and thought I might get to be either rich and famous or a drunken bum in the street, or maybe both, but I went for it.

You’ve definitely developed a deadpan style of comedy. Do you think that happened unintentionally because of those early years getting laughs on stage while delivering your lines earnestly?

I think it was unintentional. I think that if I had a video of myself at 14 delivering those lines from Paint Your Wagon as Suzanne, Leader of the Can-Can Dances, you’d probably find a similar delivery to Wilfred in a way.

Having said that, I branched out and had a good theatre career for a while. I played Hamlet when I was 22 and it went really well, but one review said, “This must surely be the funniest Hamlet ever.” In the dramatic roles I’ve played, I’ve extracted the comedy out of them.

But this particular series, Wilfred, the performance goes really extreme. I go into some very large territory. It’s kind of maniacal and larger than life, but I think the reason I get away with it is a) it’s truthful still, but b) because I spend so much time in that deadpan delivery that I can afford to push it at other times. And that’s something I developed over the years.

Wilfred began as a short film in 2002 and then was turned into a TV show in Australia. Where did the original idea come from and what was the process like adapting it into a show?

The guy who wrote the short with me, Adam Zwar, I was staying at his place one night almost 10 years ago now and he told me this tragic story of this date he had with this girl where when he went home with her, went inside briefly and there’s this dog sitting on the couch looking at him as if to say, “What do you plan on doing with my misses?”

We both thought that was funny, so I just started acting as this dog, offering him a bong and joking about his night out and pretty much that improvisation was the short film. As soon as we did it, we went, “That’s a short.” We wrote it down straight away. A week later, we shot it. It was completely organic. It wasn’t like, “Let’s come up with something for a short film,” although we knew we wanted to make one. It just went from there.

We had so much success with the short. It went around the world and had such a great following, which is unusual for just a short film. But we thought we could make a pilot with the money that we’d won. And because the short film was so successful, I just made that the first seven minutes of the series. I thought, “Well, at least I know people will love Wilfred in that first seven minutes.” So the seven minute short was the first seven minutes of the Australian series.

When we were making the American version, it developed into a really different show. I’m really proud of it for its differences. I knew I had to tread carefully with how we introduced Wilfred because he can be a real prick. And he has to be that. But you have to get that right balance of Wilfred right at the beginning because it can easily tip over. Particularly because I’m in a dog suit, audiences could go “What is this?” and maybe dislike Wilfred if I’m too much of a prick too early.

So with David’s script, and I think he got it just right, we worked on getting that introduction to the Wilfred character just right again. For us as TV makers and even the American guys who are producing the show, we’re already fans of Wilfred. When you love Wilfred, it’s easy to just assume that everyone will know and get it straight away. But you have to educate a new audience and slowly introduce them to Wilfred. I think that we’ve done that pretty well.

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It’s not easy filling Lex Luthor’s shoes,
but that’s exactly what Cassidy Freeman was asked to do when she was cast as Tess Mercer on Smallville. While originally brought in to be the show’s antagonist, Tess evolved over the course of the series and eventually ended up teaming with Clark Kent and his pals, taking over Watchtower from Chloe Sullivan.

We recently talked to Freeman about the evolution of her character and the end of Smallville, which aired its final episode on May 13. We also discussed her big scene with Michael Rosenbaum, her plans for life after the show and the chances of a spin-off with Tess and Emil singing Elvis duets.

How did you get into acting? When did you decide it’s what you wanted to do for a living?

Well I have two older brothers who are both actors and I watched them when I was a kid. They’re five and 10 years older, so I had a lot of space between us to be able to be inspired by them. I started doing school plays as a little kid and just really, really liked it. I’m not sure if I always knew I’d be an actor, but I always knew that I’d be performing in some way and it started super, super young for me.

Did you go to college for acting?

I did. I had an agent from when I was eight to 14 in Chicago, auditioning for movies and stuff. And then I got super close to a couple of things and the letdown from not booking them was a little too much for this 14-year-old girl to handle, so I stopped auditioning. And I just did school plays and played sports and was a teenager, which I’m really glad that I did that.

And then I went to college in Vermont – Middlebury College – for acting. It’s a liberal arts school. It’s not a conservatory, but I majored in theatre and Spanish, then left school and went straight to LA.

Some people we’ve interviewed go out to LA and work right away and others have long stretches of unemployment. Which camp did you fall into?

That’s one of the beautiful things about this particular field and also I think is kind of the representation of the West Coast is that there are no rules. I grew up in Chicago, which is the Midwest, but often people on the West Coast think that’s pretty far east. Then I went to school literally on the East Coast in that kind of world. And there’s a lot of like little rules and regulations.

And then you come out here and there are no rules. People come out here from the East Coast and they’re like, “Well, what’s steps one through seven that I have to fulfill to be successful?” And it’s not law school. It’s not business school. There’s no steps. All you can do is look back on people that you admire and people’s careers that you admire and see what steps they took and know that taking those specific steps is not going to give you the same results, but rather learn from maybe their life’s path or how they balanced their life and what they thought was important and how they set up their priorities.

So I came out to California not knowing what was going to happen, but my brother lived out here – my middle brother whose like my best friend. So I had that support system and we lived together. And his name is funnily enough Clark. He graduated from the same school I went to and we came out here when I was 18 actually for like four months or five months I lived in California just to see if I liked it or not. Then I went to college and then came back. And it took a while – and I say a while, but it’s not the same while as other people, which is apropos to what I was saying before that there are no rules. I was in town for three years and I did short films and I did student films and I couldn’t got hold of any manager or agent ever that would want to represent me. It was really odd.

Every six months that passed and I was frustrated, people would say, “Well it takes a while. Just stick it out. It takes a while.” Three years seemed like a really long time to 23-year-old me. But it’s really not a long time in the grand scheme of things, I’ve learned now. And it’s not a long time comparatively to people who have been there 20 years and are still going for it.

What changed after that three years?

It was really just, I think, a mixture of things. An opportunity came along for me to go to New York, actually, and do an Off-Broadway show with some people I’d gone to college with for like a summer theatre festival called the Potomac Theatre Project. I went back and everyone in LA was like, “Don’t go, don’t go. You’re going to lose your footing here. You’re going to lose your momentum.”

I was like, “I don’t have any momentum. Nobody knows who I am. What am I losing here by going to New York for four or five months – not even four months?” So I went and I did this show in New York and I got to really exercise my acting muscles outside of a class and really perform. A manager saw me in that audience and then she sent me back to LA. Then everything started happening.

So I think it was a mixture of that opportunity and also knowing myself better. Because I think life is kind of like sand – the more you grasp it, the more falls through your hands. But if you just relax a little bit, you can hold the whole handful.

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Judy Reyes is a New York girl at heart,
but her role as Carla Espinosa on the hit comedy Scrubs forced her to relocate from New York City to LA. Luckily, Espinosa was given a chance to reconnect with her Bronx roots while starring in the independent film Gun Hill Road, which is currently competing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

We caught up with Reyes as she prepared to head to Utah to talk Scrubs, Gun Hill Road and her dream of one day hosting her own cabaret.

How did you get into acting? When did you decide it’s what you wanted to do for a living?

I think it’s something I’ve always wanted to do ever since I was a kid. I was a bit of a couch potato. Back before there were VCRs, everything came on TV and I just loved watching it. I just didn’t necessarily make the commitment to pursue it until my late teens. I think most people really pursue it before.

I was doing just talent shows at my mom’s church and the woman who organized it was a member of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre Training Unit. They would offer free acting classes for anybody who wanted it. She organized this big talent show and I was already in college and had already started taking my basic acting classes and I just became a part of this big event that she was putting together.

Before you knew it, I was doing scenes from Bernarda Alba, singing a song and doing this dance number and I was so caught up in the event and how everything was such a success at the end that I just kind of knew. I know it sounds cheesy and corny, but I knew by the time that thing was over that this is what I wanted to do.

And actually, when I told my mom, she thought I was insane because I was in college and she was like, “Oh, are you crazy? No, no, just study teaching or be a social worker or something. Acting, no that’s impossible.” And I got so furious with her because for me it was an epiphany. I had this God given epiphany. “This is what you’re going to do.”

It was so clear to me. It was just like a moment, a flash. And I said, “I’m going to do it.” I slammed the door – which you don’t do to your mom in my house – and I literally never turned back. A lot of bumps in the road later, here I am still doing it. I know I made the right decision.

What was the next step for you? Did you decide to pursue a degree in acting at that point?

I was actually already in college. I was at Hunter College and they had a stellar acting program, it turned out. I took a few acting classes there and I got a job in a restaurant, so it was my part-time job because I was always working through college. And I in parenthesis “took some time off” and a good fortune of my career, I never had to go back. Never had to go back, never went back. So I actually never got my college degree.

Were you able to get roles fairly steadily and be an actor full-time?

I was. Once I got my restaurant job, I think I worked in that restaurant for four years on and off with some acting jobs in between. Right out of the gate, once I got representation, I book a lead in an independent film and I booked a play and actually got to choose between those two. When I came back, I got a Law and Order and then I didn’t do a thing for like two years. And that’s when I started to panic. That’s when I really had to recommit myself to “Is this what I really want to do?”

After reexamining and re-exploring, I really started to take my hardcore training in my classes and work in shoe stores and work in restaurants and make jewelry and do the ins and outs of what it really is to pay your dues and work really hard as an actor.

I became a founding member of what is now the LAByrinth Theater Company, which kind of was the home base to the agony of struggling as an actor in New York City. Because you get to play, it’s your playground. It was always kind of the life affirming, dream affirming place to go to whenever we had our doubts in the company.

When did you make the decision to come out to LA?

Actually, I moved out to LA once and I hated it so much I lasted nine months and I went back because I was so unhappy and, I would say, maybe psychologically and spiritually absent. My then fiancée was in New York City, my whole family was in New York City. I was actually such a mama’s girl – you know, first generation American, Latin family, living in the Bronx. I grew up there and I was just hating everything about this town.

“Nobody on the streets? What is that like?” “You have to drive everywhere? Fuck that.” “You need a car? I can’t handle it.” I was such a New York snob about everything. So I just went back after I got an agent and then I booked a pilot that took me to Toronto. I shot my pilot and then I took all my stuff and I went back home.

Then I just consistently started working from New York. All my jobs kept bringing me out here, but I would always go back home. Until Scrubs. Scrubs relocated me. It got picked up and I’ve been here since. I’ve been here for almost 11 years now.

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