EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Romany Malco aka “Darius” from Unsupervised

After talking with guys like  Romany Malco and David Hornsby the least few weeks about their new hit show Unsupervised, I’ve come to learn one thing, they are extremely proud of what they’ve accomplished with this show, a prime time animated series that is hysterical without going too extreme and usually finishing up an episode with what has become a lost art in a lot of television shows lately(not just animated) and that’s having a morale to the story. After the jump see what Romany Malco thinks about his new gig voicing the character “Darius” in Unsupervised which currently airs Thursday Nights 10:30pm EST only on FX.

You know, when I was talking to David Hornsby(who plays Joel) about Unsupervised before the premier I asked him if any of the characters in the show bear any striking similarities to kids he went to high school with. His answers gave us some interesting insight:

“There’s not usually one specific person we’re talking about, but the three of us with our combined high school
experiences have different stories and it’s funny.  We try to find that universality between all three of us because we had very different high school experiences in a sense.  We have different backgrounds, but there’s something that’s true to all of it. 

 There’s always the slut in school or people who they consider the slut.  Or there’s always the druggie kid, the drug dealer who’s also super nice.  Or there’s the ‘Joel’ character; there’s that kid that has a super old parents who’s maybe a step behind.  There’s a kid that Rob Rosell plays [‘Russ’] that has always seem to have a broken limb.  He always seems to be in a cast. 

  So we were just trying to find what is true to that always happens, we have to do that.  We have to put that in because that totally happens in high school where you almost kill yourself doing something, throwing a party even if it’s that simple.  We do open the yearbooks and we do talk about maybe different people or experiences and they can inspire, but nothing is like particularly based on one person. “

So I, being a relatively newcomer in the interviewing game, honestly thought that if I asked this same question to Romany Malco(“Darius”), that the answer would be about the same. However, I was quite surprised that Maynard High School certainly brings to mind some similarities for Romany, read on to see what his response was:

When you’re reading the script and you’re seeing the show and you’re seeing these different kids and these different personalities, do you ever point them out and say, you know we didn’t kick it like that when I was in school, this kid reminds me of a kid I used to know, or this guy reminds me of a neighbor I used to have?  Do you have any personal experience that you’re really oh, wow that looks familiar? 

Literally every episode.  I’m lucky, I get to read opposite David all the time, David Hornsby, who’s actually one of the creators of the show, I get to read opposite him, and there’s always a moment where it goes silent in the booth and he’s like, what is it?  Is everything okay?  And I’m always like, yes, this just reminds me of – and I’m telling you I had West Indian parents, I grew up in the Caribbean, I grew up in New York, and I grew up in Baytown, Texas, and the fights at the games, we had those for real.

 Wow!

This is no joke, Baytown, Texas, there are two high schools, Lee and Sterling, and they were serious rivals, and we literally would go to games with the intention of having fights.  We were that school.  The dude with the patch over his eye, we had that guy.  The whole “Yo, we built a lake you’ve got to come down and see it,” we built that lake.  I’m not exaggerating.  It’s so weird because I didn’t grow up in Hollywood, so as a result of that I think that my references tend to come from a different place.  A lot of people have this huge catalog of movies and shows and cartoons that they can reference.  I don’t have that.  I have real life experiences.  I grew up with those dudes. 

Anyway, I can go on and on but one for sure is we had this creek that ran behind our house and once in a while you would see life in it, and we literally did go there and intentionally shovel the bank into an area so we could create our own little pond.  Now, here’s what’s crazy, we’ve even done that in New York.  In New York we dug a big trench when I lived in Queens, and we dug a big trench in my yard and filled it with water and then we went to a pond in Queens, and at the time we didn’t catch any fish but there were a bunch of these little tadpoles so we brought the tadpoles back and put them in the pond that we made.  And I kid you not you haven’t seen anything until you see these frogs hopping all over your street in Queens, mashed, …, people freaking out because a frog chased them to their front porch and they think a frog is chasing them, people … because they got cut off by a frog, I’ve done it all. 

I guess that’s what’s great about the show too, is you guys have this message really, there’s fighting at the local school and then near the end of it David does a really great job, I think, of putting a really important moral in the story.  How important do you think it is to have morals in shows that are probably more family friendly and where people are going to learn from them, so they don’t get in a fight at school and they don’t hang with the bad kids?  How cool was that for you?

  In my personal opinion it’s everything.  In my opinion if there’s no moral to the story, if there’s no point to the story, what is the point?  That’s how I’ve always been.  Like I said, “I’m burdened with optimism,” that’s a quote that I got from a producer of mine back in the day named John Feldman, and I don’t really want to be a part of anything that isn’t really delivering some type of message. 

It doesn’t mean you have to be preachy, because sometimes the stories that I write, the morals are the darkest and most twisted things you’ll ever hear.  Look at Tijuana Jackson, that’s all I hear all day is give me the most twisted, the moral to the story is life is like a vending machine, there’s … change and … you don’t need.  I’m doing stuff like that all day in my standup.  So I’m not saying it has to be the most optimistic and enlightened thing, no, but I believe that usually the reason that we hang on to a story from the beginning to the end of the book is because we are rooting for someone, and we want an outcome for that someone.  So that outcome is usually, especially in movieland, you usually encapsulate that outcome in the moral, something that we can hold on to.  It’s a quote, something that we can walk away with.  I love that about this show, even when the moral is so jacked up.  In fact, that’s my favorite … .  So that’s just my opinion.

Romany and I had a lot more to talk about on the phone. Read on below to see what Romany did for the Super Bowl, what he’s working on now, and more thoughts about his role as “Darius”:

 

 JohnBlabber: Hi, Romany.  How are you doing today, buddy?

Romany Malco:  I’m good, John.  What’s up with you, bro?

I’m doing good, dude, just staving off this post Super Bowl hangover.  Were you rooting for anybody last night in particular?

Man, everyone’s going to be so disappointed in my answer.  I don’t know what it is, I had this creative surge over the last five days, and I just recently moved to Brooklyn, I just got a brand new apartment and started hanging out in the new apartment two days ago, and I literally spent yesterday sitting on the floor writing this pilot that I think is going to be the most amazing thing I’ve probably ever done in my life, and basically doing that and checking into Twitter to keep up on the game periodically.  I spent my entire day doing that, literally takeout delivery, the whole deal, experiencing my new apartment, checking out the game and halftime reports on Twitter, and writing. 

Oh, geez.

That’s not true.  And I hung out with my cousin because she came after the game.

It sounds like an interesting Super Bowl Sunday. 

I’m normally at Super Bowl, do you know what I mean? 

Oh, wow.

Yes.  I was just really, really inspired by something that I’m working on right now and you can just rely on Twitter and get the updates.  With moving back to New York naturally I was rooting for the Giants anyway, so it all worked out.

There you go.  You’ve got to, otherwise your neighbors are going to be mad at you.

Oh God, I’m staying at a place in Prospect Place and I walked all the way up to my apartment in Fort Greene, and on the way strangers kept telling me, “Go Giants.”  And in my mind I was like how do you know that I care?   If you don’t care – it’s just expected. 

To segue into Unsupervised, I’m a big fan of the show, a big fan of your work, and I’d love to learn more about what was your interest in the show, how you first heard about it, and was there something in there that was appealing to you personally that you wanted to give it a go?  Tell me about your original interest in Unsupervised.

I don’t know if most actors will ever admit this, but look, I tell on myself all the time, you can just look at my timeline on Twitter and it’s obvious that I tell on myself, and straight up, I’ve always wanted to do voice over on something.  And I got to do a little bit of stuff on American Dad, but for whatever reason I had never really landed the gig that I wanted, so when I learned that there was an offer out to me to be involved with this project instantly I wanted to know more.  But when I started learning who was involved, that had a lot to do with it. 

And no matter what happens the track record of these gentlemen, they’re just brilliant people, they really have the type of taste that I like, and honestly speaking, anyone who is on – I’m giving you a longer answer than you want, but I just have to, the game has changed so much and FX is one of the networks that is in the business of empowering their artists.  They have a different business model to the business model of a lot of these different networks, and what I mean by that is FX is encouraging co-ownership of material.  I call it the network that builds rock stars.  They don’t just throw something out and if it doesn’t get the ratings that you want in the first three or four episodes can it.  They really do take time to nurture and grow an audience around the material that they use, which tells me that they get behind the stuff that they believe in.  So that was another major factor.Then when I realized Justin [Long] was going to be involved, you know I’m a fan, and…, everybody involved just made me excited to be involved.  And at the end of the day it was the people. 

Then lastly and most important, I read that pilot and was busting up.  My agent read the pilot and she was busting up.  My manager read the pilot and she was busting up.  My dog, who’s going through the Evelyn reading school thing, read most of the pilot.

(laughs)Wow, that’s awesome.

 I’m sorry for the long, extended answer, but all of those factors had a lot to do with it.  I wanted to be in business with people that are in business with FX because somewhere down the line I will be doing that type of business with FX.  And it’s good to learn and know the options that you have, the type of business models, and the people with entrepreneurial mind sets are the people that I’m just usually attracted to.  You can take almost any job you want in Hollywood, but I’m the type of person that I want to work with a certain quality of people, a certain mindset of people, and this is giving me that opportunity.  The sensibility and the humor, the relatability[sic] of the project, all of it is just awesome.

Sure, sure.  Thanks, man.  One more question, you mentioned the flavor of the show and the type of show that it is, and what I liked about it, it was not extreme in its humor like Family Guy or like South Park.  It’s a show that I can watch really with my family if I want to.  Give me your comments on the direction of the show and the style of the show.  Was that part of what got you into it?

Yes, well, the truth is, I did not know really what the show looked like until after the fact.  But it really looked like places that I had grown up in Texas.  I lived in Baytown, Texas and I literally ran around and lived and grew up with people like these guys. 

But the thing that I caught on to almost instantly was, and this is going to sound really cheesy, in fact it might be one of the first things I tweeted when I started doing this show was it was nice to be a part of a show where these kids, and these kids are like burdened, oh I shouldn’t use this quote but I’m going to, as my longtime friend and producer, Jon Feldman says, “These kids are burdened with optimism,” and I thought it was a rare quality for shows because usually there’s so much sarcasm and shock value humor in cartoons, and it’s rare that you come across a couple of lead characters that are almost motivational speakers in their own right.  They’re looking at it from such a young and naive perspective.  And of course as you get older you become more aware that your childhood and your upbringing had a major impact on your self-esteem and your outlook on life, and as a result of that it tends to, if you allow it to, if you’re not aware of it, dictate what you become in life. 

But these kids are still in their naïve phase and they’re completely unaware of that and working so hard to do better.  I live for that.  I’m telling you, look at my Twitter line, look at Tijuana Jackson’s Twitter line, look at my Facebook page, I live for this.  Before this show ever came along I was talking and doing this just from a different perspective.  So I love that about it and I love the contrast of them being in the neighborhood with ‘Jojo Vanetti’ and all these guys, do you know what I mean?  I grew up like that and I relate to that, and even though I was a lot skinnier, I was ‘Darius’ in Baytown, Texas.

Good stuff.  I guess to kind of wrap it up, Romany, when we got into the call we were talking about a pilot you were writing, is there anything you’re working on for 2012, anything that we can look out for?  What can we expect for Romany this year?

Here’s what’s going on, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m just going to say it anyway, let me think about it, I’m basically going out on camera to perform a show.  I don’t want to tell too much, but I’m going out for a show and literally meeting the people within the span of my social network, so anywhere from Facebook to Twitter to whatever, I’m actually going on the road on the tour bus and meeting with people and documenting it for a show. 

Wow…

Yes, I’m really excited about that, because if you looked at my social network you’d get a good sense of how I engage, and it’s very personal, because really I’m thinking out loud.  And a lot of people would prefer not to share their private life like that, but for me it’s the whole point.  The people in my personal life, when I engage them I engage them on a very real level.  Why wouldn’t I do the same?  If I could multiple my span or my outreach why wouldn’t I do the same? 

I’m really curious on people’s opinions.  I grew up, like I said, in a West Indian family, a lot of my family’s from the country, and I don’t have that etiquette as a lot of people that was passed on from their upbringing.  I don’t have that etiquette.  So a lot of times I can be offensive or I can be off the mark, and it’s nice to learn other people’s upbringing and their perspectives or culture, and so this has been an opportunity for me to do that.  So now we’re taking that whole thing and putting it on the tour bus and I’m actually going cross-country doing that and it is really exciting.

Awesome, awesome.  It sounds like you’ve got a busy plate, so thanks so much, Romany.  I really appreciate you answering all my questions.  I hope I didn’t burn you out.

Just a couple more things.  I have a movie called Think Like a Man that comes out in April with me, Kevin Hart, Taraji Henson, Michael Ealy, Gabrielle Union, Jerry Ferrara from Entourage, Gary Owen, Terrence J., who’s the host of 106 &Park, and Regina Hall.  And three weeks after that I have another movie coming out called A Little Bit of Heaven, and it’s got me, Whoopi Goldberg. I play Kate Hudson’s best friend, it’s got Kathy Bates in it, and it’s a complete opposite, it’s a drama, but it’s a really heartfelt drama.  So those are the other things that I have going on that I forgot to mention. 

Awesome, and pretty cool that you get to work with Kathy Bates and Whoopi Goldberg.  What was it like working with those guys?

Well, Kathy Bates really knows how to set the tone.  She’ll crack jokes in between takes.  She’s got a real dirty sense of humor, and you know I like that a lot, okay?  And of course me and Kate Hudson, we go together like cooked food, that was easy.  But I really did learn a lot working on this project because of the concentration that it took.  It was a drama.  Oh, I’m also on The Good Wife right now.  I forgot to mention that.  So I’ll be on The Good Wife until the end of the season.  But to work on a drama and have to focus and concentrate like that with a real thespian, it really humbles you, it makes you pay attention, because the last thing you want to be is the odd man out amongst such a talented cast.  So I had a blast with that.  I had a real blast with that.  I really, really, really like Kathy Bates and I’m looking forward to working with her again.

That is awesome.  All right, Romany, thank you so much, man.  I really appreciate it.  I’m so pumped for Unsupervised.  It’s I think one of the best new animated shows of the year.  I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the episodes.  Thank you so much for your time.

   I really appreciate it, man.  Have a good one.  I’m looking forward to talking to you again.