[Exclusive Interview] ‘Archer’s’ Justin Wagner on 14 Seasons of Spy Games and Splooshes

Archer has been a groundbreaking animated comedy ever since its debut, but 14 seasons later it’s finally ready to call it quits with its super-sized finale, Into the Cold. Archer is typically praised for its kinetic comedy, stellar voice acting performances, and stylized spy shenanigans. However, Archer is an animated series that’s always looked incredible, partly in thanks to its art director and producer, Justin Wagner. Each Archer season further pushes boundaries with its visuals, and Into the Cold does the series justice when it comes to gorgeous action animation and espionage spectacles.

Justin Wagner graciously opens up on the unique challenges in bringing Archer’s final season to life, the evolution of the show’s look over its 14-season run, and how the series guaranteed that Into the Cold would end Archer on the high note that it deserves.

 

DANIEL KURLAND: This season introduces a new main character into the mix with Natalie Dew’s Zara Khan, who quickly became one of my favorite elements of the season. Was it exciting to get to design a new character who’d be sticking around on a permanent basis and did she go through many revisions before her final look was settled? Was her look figured out before Natalie’s casting?

JUSTIN WAGNER: Glad to hear you enjoyed Zara so much; so did we! First of all, simply put, yes. It was very exciting to add a new cast member. Generally, we get the opportunity to create a new character that’s villain-of-the-week so-to-speak or a recurring character, but to add a fully fleshed out cast member to our gang was a daunting and exciting task to take on. You have to create someone who automatically fits in with the rest of our crew, hits the writer’s description in script, is visually appealing, and simply could be seen sharing a drink with Archer butt-leaned against the office credenza. Luckily for us on Archer, our Character Design director Shannon Manor (who developed Zara) is finely tuned to the needs of our show. She began by submitting to us in Art Direction many sketches for possibilities of Zara, pulling reference from live action spy movies for attire and looking at some of our favorite actors/models for face. We whittled those sketches down to just a few choices and the one we landed on isn’t far from the Zara you see on TV. That face just stood out to us. Like a eureka moment, we in Art Direction could immediately see the words on script coming out of that refined sketch. That being said, yes, we did begin designing Zara without casting knowledge, but a lot of Archer’s production is done that way. For example, we begin our storyboarding with just the script, no records. It’s a testament to our crew, knowing this show in and out and being able to knock a design out of the park based on writing alone.

DANIEL KURLAND: Barry has also always been one of my favorite recurring characters. Has it been to continually redesign him and take his cyborg status to new places, including where he ultimately ends up in this season?

JUSTIN WAGNER: Man, Barry is such an office favorite over here. I think he may be one of the most quoted amongst us. Saying “later tater” as you leave for the day is as common as coffee in the morning. All that to say, redesigning Barry is a joy. When we in Art Direction heard that he’d be a refrigerator this season, we were stoked to do it. All sorts of questions were raised: Is he a mini-fridge? Can he have an ice dispenser to shoot ice at people? He’s a smart fridge, so what does the screen readout look like? All questions that are just simply fun to answer. And it was no longer just referencing Terminator for his skeletal cyborginess underneath, this was a true redesign from the ground up. Making the fridge red with those white stripes was just genius to mirror his normal tracksuit base design. And in practice, our extremely talented 3D team actually built the fridge and had it painted up in Archer style by our texture painter Haley Peterson. It was virtually like building a fridge from the ground up. Per the screen, we went a few rounds with Mark Paterson, the guru behind most of the screen designs on Archer, and landed on that Gameboy-esque retro look to maximum effect. We’re very happy with how ol’ Barry turned out this year.

DANIEL KURLAND: “Face Off” is a particularly fun episode that’s set at an exclusive vacation resort for the majority the episode. It’s a tight and contained location that’s kind of the opposite of “Mission Out of Control Room” that’s so busy and all over the place. Were those fun challenges to explore?

JUSTIN WAGNER: You’re gonna get tired of me saying this, but “challenges” on Archer are always fun to explore. Some of us have been making this show so long that we long for a complicated script to unfurl. As someone who comes from storyboards, I often think of the season 6 episode “Vision Quest” in this capacity.  It was an episode that took place entirely in an elevator, which is very easy on a department like backgrounds, but for storyboarders, man that’s like a math problem. How do you keep something like that interesting? Some of the same types of questions came up in both the episodes you reference from this season. Both have moments of feeling tight and contained while also opening up into larger sequences that you don’t want to overdo. The “Mission Out of Control Room” is both a “bottle” episode and a globe-trotter with the gang being in many separate locations. It became a problem for Art Direction to solve through mapping when we’d show something on screen versus showing it in scene. God bless our boarders who continually had to meet with us to review how these scenes would play out and what the best path was to take. We ultimately landed on something that was concise, played to the funny/action moments, and gave us a well-rounded episode.

DANIEL KURLAND: There’s an impressive mix of new spywear and outfits for The Agency team as they carry out their missions. They’ve gone through so many unique looks over the series’ run, but are there any favorite character designs or outfits that stick out to you and what are some production design details on this season’s looks that the audience is surely missing?

JUSTIN WAGNER: Well, the “tactile-neck” has certainly seen its years of use. It’s become the standard for us when the gang needs to go on mission, but it’s undergone some slight changes through the seasons. It always seems to need some light tailoring and sprucing up, especially when adding a new character like Zara to the mix. And there’s always the addition of something new to the old tactile-neck, like in the “Mission Out of Control Room” episode. We needed our gang to be able to stream video while on mission, so it was a challenge to add a camera and strap to our already cemented designs. Not only that, create a camera and strap that doesn’t interfere with animation or rigged characters. It’s about finding a compromise between something that looks good and works with what we already have. Additionally, there’s always new henchmen to create spygear for; I’m thinking of the second episode of the past season. We had a facility full of the Vanguard, a secret criminal society, that we went to more of a modern/nautical look for. You have to think of the environment when choosing these outfit designs. We went nautical here considering their base was built into the caves of the Greek coastline; it just made sense.

DANIEL KURLAND: “Plaque Removal” has some fun with cursed artifacts, which could go in a lot of fun, different directions. How did you figure out the specific look for these eerie tablets?

JUSTIN WAGNER: It’s always difficult to replicate something that vaguely connects to a real world artifact or historical object. You never want to do a direct copy, nor do you want to create something so vague it’s unrecognizable. For those tablets, we took a cue from the script and looked up African artifacts that British museums have on display. If it’s in the script, it just makes sense to follow that trail logically to the real world source. Luckily for us, there were examples of tablets that were digest sized, so the jokes of Archer placing them in his pants just worked out.

DANIEL KURLAND: It feels like each season manages to outdo itself when it comes to Archer’s heightened action sequences. There are a lot of highlights from this final season, but which action sequence is your favorite and which was the most challenging to bring to life?

JUSTIN WAGNER: I’ll start with some of the most difficult – hahaha: the Barry abandoned silo fight and the Fabian motorcycle/drone fight. It’s always difficult to handle action sequences like those when there are a lot of moving parts (literally and figuratively). The Barry fight had an enormous drill structure bearing down, each of our Archer crew attempting to take Barry on, and a fridge version of Barry falling into the mix. Similarly, the Fabian drone chase involved motorcycles, henchmen, two types of drones, and our Archer crew being handcuffed together. Both of those scenes took a long time to storyboard and for good reason: there’s just a lot going on there that you have to make logical sense of while simply giving the audience a fun time. My favorite action sequences this season have to be from “30 for 30” and “Keys Open Doors.” Archer and Zara having a henchmen knockout competition while sprinting through a very James Bond-esque facility? That’s just fun, and I think it shows with the varying ways we had them leaping over one another to take out bad guys. The second episode I mentioned was just fun to have a coked-up Lana with nearly superhero strength taking out drug dealers. We even got to do a great slo mo moment where she slides under firing bullets.  I’m sure the animators had a blast creating that Matrix-y moment.

DANIEL KURLAND: Archer has always been very international with its missions, but this final season jumps all over the globe and covers many diverse locations. Can you talk a little on the challenges and joys of animating these exciting locales?

JUSTIN WAGNER: I’ve said this a lot when talking about Archer, but this aspect is honestly what kept me excited season after season. I love how the show is set up to bounce from mission to mission. You may be in the Colombian jungle one week and in the Swiss alps the next, which is fun for the audience visually, but also very fun for us making it. It keeps each script fun and fresh. Some things our crew always considers is time of year, weather and time of day. So, even if we did travel back to a place we’ve been before, we make it fresh for ourselves. Making a scene occur at sunset immediately shifts the tone to an almost new environment. I think this question is where our Comp team on Archer deserves its glory. As our animation is being wrapped, our Comp artists are adding in all that extra stuff that makes the scene a real scene. Misty fog, lightning strikes, falling rain, streaks of strong sunlight peeking through clouds, or snowy gusts are all handled by that small group of animators. If you’ve ever watched an episode of Archer and really felt the environment the gang is in, you have our compositors to thank.

DANIEL KURLAND: Archer has covered so much over its run, especially with wild coma seasons in the mix, but is there anything that you wish that you could have gotten to design or animate, whether it’s dinosaurs, zombies, more horror elements?

JUSTIN WAGNER: Unbelievably, we’ve done a dinosaur!. Can’t believe I can check that off the list, it was in the Archer: 1999 season. That’s just a way of me saying, I cannot fathom the amount of varied designs we’ve tackled on this show. I feel very fulfilled per the variety of things we’ve gotten to create, but yeah, there are maybe a few things I would’ve liked for us to dabble in. You suggested it in the question, but honestly, I would’ve loved for us to have done a horror-ish episode. I would love to be taking cues from all these great modern horror movies that have been coming out over the past 10-20 years. Another one I regularly think about is a fighter jet episode. I know we’ve done dogfights in Archer (in the Danger Island season, and hell, even for that Top Gun parody we did years ago), but I’m talking a full on F-18 fighter jet action sequence with the Archer crew piloting. I would love to sit down, flip on some fighter jet reference and figure out how we’d Archer-ize that.

DANIEL KURLAND: Were there any particular films or television series that served as visual inspirations for any of the season’s setpieces?

JUSTIN WAGNER: Oh, for sure, and actually I feel like most of Archer works best when it has a light reference/homage to cinema/TV. One that immediately springs to mind is in “Face Off” from this past season when the doctor gets transformed into a horribly disfigured mutant creature. When you read something like that in script, your mind should immediately go to when it’s worked well in movies/TV. So, with that logic, we went straight to John Carpenter’s The Thing. From the design of the creature itself and how it’d be lit by our comp team, we considered it like we were building our own practical effects monster. You design it knowing that in-scene there are going to be flashing lights and silhouette needed to make it scary. You never want to see it blandly lit and uncomposed, that would kill the illusion. It was an absolute joy going back to watch scenes from one of our entire crew’s favorite movies and break down the hows and whys of how it worked. 

DANIEL KURLAND: It’s so nice that Archer is able to conclude its run with this super-sized Into the Cold finale event. Did you approach this finale any differently? Were you able to really go for broke or push the envelope in ways that you hadn’t before?

JUSTIN WAGNER: I think our crew pushes themselves on every single episode and frame of this show, so in that way, we didn’t do anything differently. If it’s a script that says Archer on it, we all know that it’s another opportunity to grow as artists and fulfill our agreement by thrilling the audience. Doing a supersized finale event like this was difficult just in its scope. Simply put, there’s a lot of action, jet-setting and characters to track. There’s a significantly big action set piece toward the end that really highlighted all the things the gang here at Floyd County Productions is good at. From design, to boarding, to set and character layout, to animation and comp, this big finale had us all on our A game. I hope Archer: Into the Cold provides the audience with some final moments with these characters we’ve grown to love and cherish like real people over the years. We at FCP certainly feel that way about them, and I think that comes through in our work. And with that I say, LATER TATER!

 

All 14 seasons of Archer, including the “Into the Dark” series finale, are now available to stream on Hulu