Photo by
Mitchell Haaseth/NBC
Former-Huff star Hank Azaria has returned to
television in the new workplace, romantic comedy Free Agents. In a recent conference call interview, Hank and his
co-star Kathryn Hahn talked about what sets the series apart from the rest of
the pack.
Hank noted,
“Alex, his greatest strength is also his biggest problem. He's very in touch
with his emotions and honest about how he feels which is good and healthy. However
it can slip very easily into whiny annoying. There’s a fine line between healthy
expression of emotion and wallowing which he hasn’t quite figured out yet.”
As for her
character, Kathyrn remarked, “There’s something to me that is appealing about
how she’s neurotic. Her shell is so well-defined. She's just polished. I like
her little micro chord shift and her shoes and her hair is fantastic. And I
love how much energy she spends on the outside, where her inside is just like a
total disaster. She's actually really paranoid, very concerned with how people
see her, which it just doesn't sound really appealing.”
Kathryn
realized that this is a challenging character to make likeable. She added, “It
really doesn't sound that cute. I could say, ‘Oh she's a lush. Like she loves
her liquor.’ But then suddenly underneath it there's a women that keeps her
pictures of her dead fiancé on her walls. There’s something about her that's
just really sentimental and an old-fashioned romantic in there, and that has
had her heart just trampled on. So in their she's a little softy.”
Hank
admitted that they’re adjusting to their new roles, “We’re still all learning
each other. It's almost like I to use a sports analogy. It’s like a team trying
to find their chemistry with each other. It takes a little while to gel. It
didn't happen overnight in Miami for LeBron and Wade and Chris Bosh.”
But Hank is
enjoying the chance to get in sync with his fellow castmates, “It's really fun
to do. They’re all really wonderful and we’re really lucky on this one. Everybody
is genuinely a good person, fun to work with, tries really hard, is very
generous. So we’re all having a good time.”
If you ask
the stars Free Agents isn’t just like
every workplace show on television and has even evolved in its own right over
the course of the first couple of episodes. Kathryn commented, “It's a
different kind of comedy… It’s so interesting. The pilot sets this very
grounded foundation that is now going to enable us to go off into a surprising
comedy, just comedy I think moments and scenarios. You needed to ground these
people first before they can do what we know we can do and like our wheelhouse
comedy-wise because the cast is so genius.”
She praised
the series creator for bringing his unique talent to the show. “John Enbom is
such an unbelievably funny writer and true writer. Yet we’re able to do these
very surprising and hilarious things. So it's extraordinarily funny. It's just
the right amount of lowbrow and highbrow that just hits me right in the funny
bone.”
Hank
agreed, adding, “It's definitely starting with reality. And the emotional and
the logistical reality of these people's lives, especially Alex and Helen’s,
and the reality of where they are emotionally.”
He likened
the series to another hit sitcom recalling, “Phil Rosenthal is a good friend of
mine who ran Everybody Loves Raymond
for years. And the way he used to describe it was the big rule is you just
can't take the train to crazy town is the way he described it. You can't be
funny for funny’s sake. You try to get as fascicle and outrageous situation as
you can. But it always has to be believable and based in real character
motivations and what people would really do. So it's hard. It's hard to write.
It’s hard to execute. And it's hard to get the right tone. But it's a worthy
effort.”
See if Free Agents strikes the right balance on
Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. EST/7:30 p.m. Central on NBC.
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