If there’s one thing hip-hop fans love to do, it’s argue about who the greatest rappers of all time are. Everybody has their personal lists of who they believe comes out on top, and now Drake has shared his, and one inclusion might raise some eyebrows.

OVO Hush (real name Anthony Palman and also known as Young Tony) shared a photo of some of his old CDs on Instagram earlier today, and Drake took to the comments with his unprompted top 5, writing, “My top 5 is Biggie, Hov, Wayne, Young Tony, and 3000 since nobody asked.”

Given that Drake was commenting on Hush’s post, it’s completely possible he was joking about including him in the top 5 alongside The Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Andre 3000. It’s worth noting, though, that Hush has been a Drake associate for a long time, as Drake has mentioned him on Twitter as far back as 2010. He is also credited as a writer on the majority of songs from Take Care and Nothing Was The Same. Hush has also been referred to as a ghostwriter for Drake, but the OVO crew claims his role is more advisory in nature.

Meanwhile, Drake is fresh off the release of Dark Lane Demo Tapes, which didn’t manage a No. 1 debut thanks to a country music legend.

The amount of craft that goes into making something that seems off the cuff and effortlessly funny is something that I find to be endlessly fascinating. And you probably do too, or else why would you click on an interview? As one of the three main creative drivers behind Reno 911, Tom Lennon was, of course, fully immersed in the hard work of making good comedy during production on the long-awaited continuation of the show that launched recently on Quibi.

But to hear Lennon talk, in detail, about the lengths they went to underwrite the on-screen silliness, is to understand the level of care that goes along with the work. And to hear him break down the motivating factors behind the work done with The State, his legendary sketch comedy group (with a roster that is foundational to modern comedy culture), is to gain a greater understanding of the tenacity that drives that concern.

We discussed all of that with Lennon recently, gaining a deeper understanding of some fresh Reno 911 bits and some classics from The State before learning what one of the busiest people in comedy does when his playpen is limited to his backyard.

So, I guess, the first question is, how close were past reboot attempts for Reno 911?

It was always a possibility. The cast now is closer as friends than we ever were. And we’ve all taken so many years off from it now. I don’t think it really ever got close until the Quibi scenario. I also think the notion of doing it just for another TV network or something didn’t really feel like the right move. There’s just something about Quibi that’s so interesting. I think the length is just a huge plus. I’ve heard, I think one person, complaining that they thought the episodes were too short. I had none of those feelings.

Is it freeing to not have to have the full narrative structure of a 22-minute episode? Because it does seem that there’s a renewed energy with doing it in almost sketch form, essentially.

What’s interesting is, the new episodes, they do have storylines. They’re just hella concise. Which I think is part of the fun of them. So yeah, very, very few episodes you have to follow from one to the next. But that’s not really the way people consumed Reno 911 anyway. It’s fun to do long Reno 911 episodes and movies. I enjoyed all of those things, but I should also point out that the vast majority of the way people really consumed Reno 911 was on YouTube. It’s funny because we frequently get sent links by people who are like “Check out these funny cops videos, these cops are doing something dumb.” And it’s on YouTube, and I’m like, “That’s from Reno 911.”[Laughs].

Was there anything that you incorporated into this season that you had left over from the previous run?

No, we really started fresh. All we took from the old show, really, was just a couple of things that I think we know that we’re good at. So, we’re really good at terrible PSAs. We just thought about, like, what are people’s strengths? We really wanted to do something with TT, which led to the giant 1917 episode. We’d all just seen 1917 and were like… TT is an old character who really doesn’t do anything except run around and scream. She has no agenda. And so we’re like, what if we do something like that, but we’ll like make 1917 out of a TT scene. So TT’s Auntie’s Funeral was very specifically an homage to the film 1917. If you noticed, we run through the construction site and there are giant explosions happening all around us. Our special effects guy, Micah Roehr, got in touch with the 1917 people to just confirm what was the best way to use super close explosions right next to you.

Honestly, that was my favorite part from this season, that and the forced perspective thing with the bike.

That scene has a title just because we always put a title up on the board. So the weird thing about that scene is that it is technically called, for us, “Dangle’s Michel Gondry Bicycle Nightmare.” It is definitely inspired by Michel Gondry videos where he played some sort of trick on you with the camera. It was interesting, we did some tests for Lieutenant Dangle’s Michel Gondry Bicycle Nightmare. And the original idea that I pitched was, what if it was a huge bicycle, so they steal my bike and then way, way, way far away, someone brings in a bike that looks the same size. But it’s like six or eight times bigger than my bike, that’s why it looks the same size.

And Jim Hensz, our first AD, he is a brilliant dude. And Frank Barrera, our GP, actually did a lot of tests. And we figured out that there was no way to do it with a giant bike in the back. That was physically impossible for us. But we could do it if we could get a spot where we can put a tiny, tiny, tiny bicycle. Out of everything we’ve ever done on Reno 911… I’ve shown our Michel Gondry Bicycle Nightmare to some people and the joy of watching people’s faces when they figure out what’s happening, it is pretty pronounced.

Is the writing process for these any different from the previous show?

The process is literally exactly the same. It’s me and Ben [Robert Ben Garant] and Kerri [Kenney-Silver] sitting in a room and we put cards up on the wall, sometimes they’re based on like a big context idea, sometimes they’re very simple. Like Lieutenant Dangle keeps trying to get recruited for Space Force. That was the first idea and then the twist that we decided is, it was so sad that he’s never, of course, going to make it. That episode is really about, Jones and Junior had read some of Dangle’s letters on his laptop to try to get into Space Force and then they hire a dude to pretend that he’s getting me trained for Space Force.

How does Tim Allen get involved with that?

We always aim for… whenever we’re casting a scene. We’re like, “Well, who’s the dream?” Tim and I have been friends for a super long time. We are very close and I was like, “He is Buzz Lightyear, do I just ask?” And he was like, “Well, send me some notes on the scene.” So I sent him some notes and he sent back his notes already in it. And I was like, “Oh, he must be doing it if he just sent me notes on the scene.” It was really fun.

Obviously 2009 [when the show ended] and 2020 are very different times with different sensitivities and things like that. Was there any change in your approach or concern about that going into the show?

If there’s one thing I’m certain about it’s that any piece or episode of Reno 911 will probably piss someone off, there’s just no way around it. What I will say is that I think the show is not mean-spirited in any way, I think it’s a remarkably upbeat show and always has been and always will be. The characters and cast are a very diverse group of people who… No one’s being fed any dialogue to say, ever. So you’re getting a very real sort of take on things. I mean, we did a huge piece about Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. Have you seen Gary the Klansman, in our episode called Let’s Shoot A White Guy?

Yes.

You know, we’ve seen that Richard Spencer video where he gets punched and we’re like, “We got to do something like that.” So Gary the Klansman, played by Chris Tallman, just gets punched over and over and over again. It’s one of my favorite scenes that we did. So we did a Richard Spencer piece. We did a weird white lady calling about black kids in the pool piece. We’re doing all of these things. There’s an episode with the kids from Copwatch, which is a real organization that watches the police. Here’s, what’s weird: you can say like, “Oh my God, Reno 911 is so political, look at all these hot button issues they’re addressing.” But the answer is, watching the show, I don’t really think you notice. We’re only doing those things if there’s some other level of funniness to them, for us. Like just Copwatch, that’s not inherently funny in any way, but the Reno Sheriff’s department staging shootouts, just so they can get the Copwatch kids to jury duty, that to me is a pretty great sketch.

Honestly, I don’t know how you could do the show if you didn’t… especially considering these things are in the news. You can’t do a show about cops that’s having fun with the idea of police and it’s a satire of police without mentioning these things. And I think you guys do a really good job of finding the funny.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, that’s what’s weird, we’re a show that definitely has some dumb cops in it, but it’s made by people with a very high level of respect for law enforcement. We shoot usually at real stations and we know how hard that job is. So the butt of the joke usually in Reno 911 is these specific characters themselves.

If you’ll indulge me, I have a couple of questions about The State.

Sure.

When you started up The State, was SNL even on your radar? Were you trying to upend that or push back and be like a counter for that? Or do you not even care and you’re just doing your own thing?

Oh my God, we cared a lot. All of us had been raised on Saturday Night Live. There were a couple of fractions in The State who loved different things. There were die-hard SNL fans. There’s a big chunk of the group that just basically treats Monty Python like it’s a religion, almost. We were fascinated with SNL. And at the time, I genuinely think that in The State we probably thought that SNL was like Wham! and we were going to be The Clash. At this age, now that sounds really pretentious and dumb.

It’s spot-on though.

It’s exactly how we felt. We were like, “We’re not going to do a bunch of dumb characters who say something over and over again.” And even when we did do that, we did it as a total fuck you to everyone. The State‘s attitude, even to each other, was fuck you. [Laughs] And we were so hard on each other. I came in the other day and my son… because there’s a couple on YouTube. He doesn’t know we have the full DVD set, but my son was watching just a random episode of The State and I’ve got to say, it held up really well.

It really does.

I think it holds up so well because we were so angry and so pissed off. And we were just like, none of us were going to give an inch, especially with the other members of the group if we thought the material was like, okay. SNL now is amazing. SNL is really incredible, at times. But in 1988 when we met, it would not be probably your dream run. We probably had felt a little weary of very sort of corporate bright TV show, that SNL had been during part of our teenage years. During our childhood, it was insane and dangerous and then it got a little less dangerous and I think we wanted to be more dangerous.

It’s so impressive to me that you’re still able to work with some of the same people going on now 30 years — are you still pushing yourselves in that same way? Are you still not giving an inch?

I think the main thing about The State, and why the vast majority of the State still works all the time… I mean, we’re just hard on each other, but we’re also fanatically supportive of each other too. We acted in every way like a gang. And I mean that in the good ways and the bad ways. But definitely like if you weren’t in our gang that means we’re against you. We didn’t like any other sketch groups until like Exit 57. We gave them a pass because we liked them, and Upright Citizens Brigade we gave a pass and became friends with them. But we really thought of it sort of like gang stuff.

But the reason that you see everybody in The State around so much is the group of people, as individuals, they’re relentless. I mean, it’s a relentless group of people who make each other crazier sometimes, but almost always make each other better also. I’ll give you a great example of an insane State sketch that shows us at our best would be like The Waltons theme song. It’s really, really bizarre. So it’s Kerri, Michael Showalter, Ben, or maybe Michael Ian Black, and we’re all in these sort-of large wigs, and the wigs are little too large and their suits are all like light lavender, and they’re just singing the Walton theme song. And they pitched the sketch, and I was like, “I’m totally going to support this if one thing happens, which is at about the midpoint in the sketch, I want all of you to start bleeding from your mouths as if you’ve had like a terrible stroke. So like the blood just starts kind of pouring down your chins.” And everybody was like, “You know what, that’s exactly what this sketch needed.” Now some of The State seems like nonsense, but we’ve definitely thought about it and crafted it.

I mean, just the instinct to go to a darker place is a favorite aspect. I wrote this large article on the era and I tried to find representative sketches and wound up with Sideways House Family for The State. I can’t even imagine how that was even put together, but it goes to such a dark fucking place.

Sideways House, it’s so funny because my mom always thinks that in I some way Sideways House was based on our life. [Laughs] My mom was a… she’s still with us, but she was a hoarder for a long time. So there was stuff sort of piled up pretty high literally everywhere in the house. So she always sort of thinks that’s about us. But I guess that is, in many ways, a signature State sketch because the idea was just take something really stupid and bright and upbeat and shiny, like sitcoms, and then give it a funny title, because everything we did on The State always had funny titles, no matter how weird it would get. And then so the sketch opens with the theme song [Lennon sings this, remembering it with no issue] and then everything in the sketch is just tragedy. Joe’s [Lo Truglio] dead, Joe fell from the bathroom and is already dead.

And playing the hell out of a corpse also.

It was amazing. And he had his pants down and toilet paper in his hand. The mother, everyone is in tears. And then actually, I think if you look at the take I tripped and hit my ankle as I come through the door. So when you see me really upset in Sideways House Family and I’m screaming when I came through the door, I hit that … you know the real, the bony part of your ankle? You can see in the bit, I hit it on something by accident, which I’d never done in rehearsal, but it hurt so bad that I’m really about to start crying. And then again, like really a great State sketch, it’s not really about the Sideways House Family, it’s about the introduction of Michael Ian Black’s character as the wacky neighbor.

I could stay on with you all day and talk about The State, but I have to wrap up. I do want to ask, though, is Cannonball Run still a thing that’s on your radar?

I have absolutely no idea. I know that Ben and I wrote a couple of drafts of it. But if you write in the studio system it’s always weird. So we’d written some drafts that I know people loved at Warner Brothers, and then the next thing I read was that there was a director attached and they were looking for new writers. I literally got emails from people saying, “Congratulations,” because they saw that they’d announced that a very good director had been put on Cannonball Run. And then I was like, “Thanks. Did you read the whole article where they said they were looking for new writers?” This happens all the time, yeah. It’s part of the process.

You work so much. I mean, my God, the amount of credits on your IMDb is crazy. How are you dealing with this slow down now with everything?

You know, I think the same reason that The State got off the ground when we got on the air is why I’m still doing stuff now. Like most days I go to the box of wigs or I put on the Joe Exotic outfit and I do a sketch in the backyard with what I have around. So, yeah, like 30-something years later, I’m doing basically the exact same thing that got me started in every part of the industry, which was doing sketches with stuff that I have around and filming them and editing them myself. That’s it. So it’s kind of back to the basics really.

‘Reno 911’ season 7 is available to watch on Quibi.

Soccer Mommy released their anticipated sophomore album Color Theory just a few months ago, but due to the pandemic, Soccer Mommy’s album promotion and touring plans were put on hold. However, vocalist Sophie Allison still managed to stop by SiriusXM’s studios (in February) to perform several of her Color Theory tracks, as well as an emotional tribute to The Cars’ late lead singer Ric Ocasek.

Armed with just her electric guitar, Allison performed a stripped-down rendition of The Cars’ 1984 hit “Drive.” Allison infuses her own style into the cover, forgoing the original version’s synths while drawing on angst in her lyrical delivery. “Who’s gonna tell you when / It’s too late? / Who’s gonna tell you things / Aren’t so great?” she sings.

Ahead of Allison’s rendition, the singer has been finding unique ways to keep her fans entertained in quarantine. Allison and her band recently shared a series of 8-bit videos accompanying their Color Theory track “Crawling In My Skin.” The videos take place in five different cities and aim to provide consolation to fans who were supposed to see the band live but found their city’s concert canceled due to the pandemic.

Watch Soccer Mommy cover The Cars’ “Drive” on SiriusXMU above.

Color Theory is out now via Loma Vista. Get it here.

While it was previously reported that Migos have been working hard on their upcoming album, Culture III, during quarantine, a new interview has revealed that the three-man weave from North Atlanta may not end up releasing their next album under that title at all.

Speaking with GQ in a new piece discussing “creativity in the time of quarantine,” Offset remarked that the trio has still been working on their new album via regular calls with Quavo and Takeoff but that he has grown bored with the concept that drove their previous two albums.

“Ever since ‘Bad and Boujee’ went No. 1 and then we dropped Culture and Culture II, I’ve heard the word ‘culture’ so much,” he lamented. “As artists you challenge yourself—you have to keep moving forward. So I’ve been thinking of a plan to make something as powerful or more powerful [than Culture].”

He doesn’t mention that his daughter is also named “Kulture,” which may have contributed to his hearing the word so much, but he, Takeoff, and Quavo have also had two full years and three solo projects to reflect on the lukewarm reception to their second Culture album and polish their respective skills.

The efforts they’ve put in during quarantine have resulted in MIgos Monday releases “Taco Tuesday” and “Racks 2 Skinny,” as well as a promised mixtape before their third entry in the Culture series. However, if Offset has his way, we may getting something drastically different from what we’ve come to expect when quarantine is finally over.

Read GQ‘s entire story here.

As sports leagues around the country begin putting plans in place for a potential return to play, the various broadcast partners must begin preparing for a very new reality when it comes to what games will look like. The expectation is that most leagues will be operating without fans in the stands for the foreseeable future, as Adam Silver has reportedly told players its possible they won’t be able to play in front of crowds until a COVID-19 vaccine is available — meaning fanless games could stretch well into 2021.

The trick for those broadcasting is how to create a more regular gameday atmosphere when there is not the buzz in the stadium or arena that typically exists. We’ve already seen in UFC’s return how eerily quiet things can be without fans in the building, although the flipside is the opportunity to hear more of what is said in the Octagon by the fighters. That will be the same challenge facing those that show the major team sports as well, and Fox’s Joe Buck offered some insight into what his network will be doing on a recent appearance on Sirius XM’s Andy Cohen Live (via Newsweek).

“It’s pretty much a done deal [using fake crowd noise],” Buck said. “I think whoever is going to be at that control is going to have to be really good at their job and be realistic with how a crowd would react depending on what just happened on the field. So it’s really important.”

Not only will they be working on how to pump in crowd noise — which some leagues will be doing in stadiums anyways to help make things feel a bit more normal for players — Fox is apparently working on how to digitally add fans to the stands for when they cut to wide shots.

“On top of that, they’re looking at ways to put virtual fans in the stands, so when you see a wide shot it looks like the stadium is jam-packed and in fact it’ll be empty,” he explained.

Buck would go on to elaborate on Twitter on Thursday that he wasn’t saying the virtual fans was a done deal, but that it was being looked into, as were a number of opportunities for the broadcasts.

It’ll be very interesting to see how the various networks handle their broadcasts, from who gets the most creative in making arenas and stadiums look “normal” in terms of fans in attendance to who finds ways to take advantage of the unique opportunity to put more of the on-field/court chatter from the players into the telecast. Whatever the case, while there will surely be a learning curve that can only take place in real time, fans will be tuning in no matter how ambitious the plans once live sports are back in our lives.

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Jason Lee was introduced to the American wrestling audience in 2016, through the Cruiserweight Classic. The young man from Hong Kong told the WWE Universe about how when he watched TV as a kid, he thought “One day, I want to be Bruce Lee, so I want to show people how to add kung fu to wrestling.” He was eliminated from the tournament in the first round, but that was far from the end of his wrestling career. Today, the twenty-seven-year-old is one of Dragon Gate‘s rising stars, and he might be one of the industry’s most underrated players.

Lee was inspired to start wrestling when he was ten years old “watching WWE on TV in Hong Kong. I thought that it’s a very exciting program, and I want to do it for my life.” He started pursuing his dream as a teenager by training with Ho Ho Lun, the founder of the Hong Kong Pro Wrestling Federation. He debuted as “Jason New” in 2009, when he was just sixteen years old.

In 2012, Lee started traveling in Japan to work with Pro Wrestling Zero1, training in the company’s dojo and returning to Hong Kong every three months to renew his visa. After “maybe two and a half months” in the dojo, Lee was allowed to have his first match for the company, which kicked off a three-year period as a Zero1 regular. He was the first wrestler from the still-young Hong Kong scene to be offered a full-time contract for a Japanese company.

Lee’s persona evolved when he had the opportunity to do more work overseas and wanted to make himself more memorable in the wider wrestling world. When Lee and Lun headed to the UK for a tour of the indies in 2013, Lee says “I was thinking how to perform like I’m from Hong Kong.” He changed his ring surname from “New” to “Lee” to bring Bruce to mind and started adding a kung fu element to his character and using nunchucks in his entrance. He says he’s never actually trained in martial arts, though: “It’s my gimmick only.” And as for the nunchuck skills, “I actually learned from YouTube.”

A few years later, the Cruiserweight Classic added to Lee’s international resume and fulfilled a childhood dream. “It was a great experience because I always wanted to step in a WWE ring,” Lee says. And after years performing mostly for Japanese audiences, the Full Sail crowd was a change of scene – though American fans weren’t all that different from those in Hong Kong. Lee says that while in Japan fans would typically applaud, then react dramatically “when you have something special… in America and Hong Kong, even you just enter, and they will pop up, make noise.”

Both Lee and his mentor wrestled in the Cruiserweight Classic, but only Ho Ho Lun stayed on with WWE afterward (He left the company in 2017.) Lee realized a career in sports entertainment was not in his future when “I saw the other episodes of the cruiserweight tournament. The guys who were in the first round, they came back for tag team matches or something like that,” but Lee wasn’t invited back after his first-round loss to Rich Swann.

Though he didn’t get a WWE offer, an opportunity for another major company was just around the corner. “I went back to Hong Kong and maybe two months after the cruiserweight tournament, I had a show and some kind of sponsor from Japan got a connection for me with Dragon Gate,” Lee says. “He said, ‘I think you might fit in Dragon Gate style and it might be good for good for Hong Kong Pro Wrestling,’ so he told me to go and try out.”

The sponsor turned out to be right. Lee’s tryout was a success, and after making his Dragon Gate debut in 2017, he quickly fit right in with the company’s wrestling style. The key to that, Lee says, was a lot of drills in the dojo. “Japanese style training is kind of about spirit. Like, you maybe have to do a lot of squats and pushups and cardio. They just want to see your spirit of not giving up; you have to finish strong. But Dragon Gate style, it has a lot of movement and it’s fast, so they do a lot of cardio.” Lee came up with some different moves he could to do fit the promotion’s fast-paced matches, and the work he put in paid off – “Dragon Gate fans remember and like me.”

Since 2019, Lee has been a full-time member of the Dragon Gate roster. He’s held one championship, the Open The Triangle Gate trios titles alongside Masato Yoshino and Naruki Doi, and two of his favorite matches have been unsuccessful title shots with or against Kaito Ishida.

As stablemates in MaxiMuM, Lee wrestled his favorite tag match alongside Ishida when they challenged R.E.D. (Big R Shimizu and Eita) for the tag titles last September. A few months later, Ishida turned heel and Lee had the singles match he says he’s most proud of against his former friend, challenging for his Open the Brave Gate (junior heavyweight) Championship. Lee lost that match, but he’ll have another shot at Ishida this week when the two face off in the first round of DG’s annual King of Gate tournament, which was pre-taped without an audience and will air on the Dragon Gate Network starting May 15.

Beyond this rivalry, there’s still a lot Jason Lee wants to do in Dragon Gate. He especially wants a match with Doi, one of his mentors in the company, and to become Brave Gate Champion. As for his wrestling career as a whole, Lee says, “Actually, my goal was to step into the WWE ring, and I’ve done that. For now, I want to wrestle as much as possible in my life.”

Bill Murray always goes above and beyond for late-night TV. For David Letterman, he dumpster dove, swung from the rafters like Peter Pan, jumped out of a cake, pulled a Liberace, and pretended to run a marathon. For Jimmy Kimmel, he’s gone for a canoe ride and popped onstage wearing a dress and cowboy boots, but when it comes to a quarantine Kimmel visit, Murray kept things simple, not to mention super real, by hopping into the bathtub. The interview was geared toward promoting the Stripes star’s upcoming, four-way “Nacho Off” competition with Guy Fieri for restaurant worker relief during the pandemic.

Hey, one needs to be clean before visiting Flavortown. That rule matters even more these days, and Kimmel praises Murray for knowing the value of soap, long before our current situation rolled around. The interview doesn’t dig deep into the cause until the final minutes, which is when Kimmel pays lipservice to how Bill and Guy’s sons, Homer Murray and Hunter Fieri, will join them for the virtual chip-and-cheese competition on Friday. The cause, though, is a vital one that hopes to raise even more money than the many millions raised by Guy Fieri himself. Anyone who wants to view the competition can do so from Food Network’s Facebook page while (ideally) donating $10 to the Restaurant Employee Relief Fund.

The above interview stays mostly bubbly and upbeat. “For the purposes of today, it’s kind of a celebration, because I haven’t seen you in a while,” Murray explained. “I thought a bubble bath would be appropriate.” He also talked about how much he misses sports, especially Chicago Bulls games, and the Space Jam actor wanted to remind everyone that he immeasurably helped out Michael Jordan in the film. “People forget I got the assist on the game-winning basket,” Murray offered, but “I wasn’t even interviewed after.” Well, this bathtub interview makes up for everything.

Death Cab For Cutie leader Ben Gibbard has made himself one of the predominant musical voices of the quarantine era thanks to his daily livestream performances (which have since become a weekly affair). On one of those broadcasts, he debuted a new song called “Life In Quarantine,” a tune that is of course about the times we’re living through.

Fans are used to seeing Gibbard perform from his home, but he did it in a slightly different way last night, as he took to his home studio and performed the aforementioned single on The Late Show. Gibbard’s acoustic rendition was gentle and lovely as he delivered poetic lines like, “The sidewalks are empty, the bars and cafes too / The streetlights only changing ’cause they ain’t got nothing better to do,” and, “The airports and train stations are full of desperate people / But no one is going anywhere soon.”

When Gibbard originally performed the song, he said, “I know this is a really f*cked up and scary time for everybody, including myself. And I know that we’re all trying to figure out what we can do to make it better, or what we can do to alleviate the suffering of someone else.”

Watch Gibbard perform “Life In Quarantine” above.

Death Cab For Cutie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Daveed Diggs is about as far as he can get from his breakout role in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway juggernaut, Hamilton. He’s ditched musical sermons on democracy for rousing speeches meant to fuel a rebellion. He’s left the stage and hopped aboard a train that’s circumventing the earth at dizzying speeds, keeping what’s left of civilization shielded from a nuclear winter.

Well, not at this very moment. Right now, he’s holed up in his home, like the rest of us, waiting to hear what fans think about the long-awaited Snowpiercer spin-off on TNT, set to drop May 17^th. Diggs is familiar with fandom – Hamilton managed to make show tune geeks out of theater virgins – but he also realizes now might be a strange time for a post-apocalyptic drama, even one that carries the prestige of being created by Oscar-winner Bong Joon Ho. A strange time, but not necessarily the wrong time. We chatted with Diggs about the weird kismet of Snowpiercer landing during a pandemic, the trajectory of season one, Hamilton reunions, and making art under quarantine.

Between the film and the comics, there’s a pretty devoted fandom that comes along with this world. Was there pressure to get this right?

I knew about the fandom. I hadn’t seen the film when I was sent the early version of the pilot and I hadn’t read the graphic novels yet, so I went and did that before I auditioned. I know what it’s like to be a fan of things but I don’t know that I was nervous about it, because I think this version exists in a different space. It doesn’t feel like it takes away from it. Because what frustrates me when I’m a fan of something is when I see somebody come along and make a mockery of the thing that I love. [This] feels more like another reason to dive back into a world, if you love it.

The show makes an interesting choice early on, using a murder-mystery storyline to introduces us to different characters in different cars. Why did having that procedural approach make sense?

I think the thing that television gives the opportunity for in this world is to spend time in each class, and to spend time with a lot of characters — getting to understand their motivations and what makes them tick, and just live in the world a little bit longer. I think the kind of procedural-esque structure, particularly of the early episodes, is mostly useful because if we’re hanging out with Layton, everything’s new to him too, right? So we’re getting to experience things with him. I think once the tone is set for that, we get to sort of spread out and it becomes a little less procedural feeling.

You can’t do anything about the timing, but are you worried at all that people might not have an appetite for apocalyptic stories right now?

I’m sure somebody is worried about it. [Laughs] That’s not my job. You know, when I read the really early and very different version of the script years ago, it felt like it was in conversation with our current times. And it still does, maybe in a different way. I think all the conversations that the show is having still continue, because we are all still existing in a pretty similar class structure to the one that is made obvious for the sake of simplicity on a train, right? I think all of those conversations get to continue, but different things jump out based on what the big moment that we are going through as a society and as a culture is. Right now that is COVID-19 and so I think the claustrophobia of it, the lack of movement, the limited resources, like, all of those things come easiest to us because those are the things we are experiencing. It definitely hits different.

Andre Layton is the protagonist of the show early on, but I don’t know if you’d classify him as the “good guy.” Are there any good guys on this show, or is that kind of the point?

I just don’t think any story is really served by heroes and villains. That doesn’t help us. What I like about this show is that it tries to make sure that every character is a human, and then asks us to empathize with them, to try to understand their motivations. That’s something that I think culturally we have a hard time doing. It’s a big ask. But Layton feels real to me because he is flawed.

Sure.

Also just as a career choice, right, as a character that I may in the event of success be playing for a very long time, it’d be super boring if he was infallible.

That brings up an interesting point that relates to Jennifer Connelly’s character and her journey throughout the season. She’s positioned as Layton’s enemy, but the more he learns about train life, the more that changes. How did you build that complicated relationship off-screen?

The more we hung out on set, the more I grew to understand her. I think the great thing about those two characters is that they respect each other an awful lot. They grow to respect each other even when they are working against each other. That is a really interesting thing to play. And particularly with someone like Jennifer, who is so great, there’s like, I don’t know, I wouldn’t call it competition because I don’t think she felt it at all. [laughs] But for me it was like, “All right, I’m not going to let Jennifer act circles around me in this scene today. Not today.” And so, you know, having so much respect for her made it easy to transfer that to her character.

Layton is the face of this revolution in season one, but is he the right choice to lead once the dust settles? Do you think sometimes our “heroes” have shelf-lives?

That is really the question of the show for Layton, right? What you see him grapple with all the time is that he leans so much on his moral compass and on his code. That gets challenged so often based on new information. Whatever he thought, he had no idea how this train worked or why it worked. And I think that leads him to make a lot of really tough choices. Whether or not he’s going to succeed … I don’t know. I’m fascinated by that journey too. It certainly continues on into the second season. I don’t think we answer that.

Can you answer anything about where we’re going in season two, because there’s a big cliffhanger we’re left with?

I think the spirit of the show is that it doesn’t really slow down very often. There’s not a lot of room to breathe and that trajectory does not stop at the end of season one.

Thinking about how Wilford is portrayed in this first season, is there something we can learn about how these characters worship him, and how that worship blurs the line between belief and harmful ignorance?

Yeah, that is one of the big questions that Snowpiercer asks us as an audience to ask ourselves, right? The interesting thing about Wilford is he did create the world so there’s an interesting argument for a God status there, I suppose, if you’re looking for religion. Something that’s brought up a lot is that people need something to believe in and this is such a complicated question when we apply it to our leaders, right? Does the necessity for belief equate giving that much power to somebody, or to a group of people? And is it also necessary that that come at the expense of not educating your public? Not giving them all of the information so that they can make informed choices. This show does such a good job of bringing up a ton of issues that we are all struggling with and systems that we’re all living within, whether we know it or not. You can engage with it at whatever level you feel comfortable with but I hope, for people who feel so inclined to revisit the show after their first viewing, they’ll get another bite at some of these issues that are going on.

We’ll end on Some Good News, literally. How did that Hamilton reunion happen?

I mean, John [Krasinski] reached out and everybody said yes. It was kind of a no-brainer. You know, I will say this about quarantines: it makes it really easy for you to do things like that. All we had to do was record ourselves doing our part of the song. There are things that I think we’re learning about the effect we can have, at least on people’s moods, particularly for performers, or celebrities, or whatever. It’s the same thing that Some Good News showed me. I watched the first episode days before John asked me to do the thing, and found myself just like crying the whole time. Like really happy tears.

That was sort of the first time I had let myself cry during the pandemic. I had a lot of stuff pent up. I think we’re all going through these waves of anxiety and stuff and that show helped me so much. John will tell you himself, he’s just scouring the internet for good news and regurgitating it. You know? So, it allows us to take some of the pressure off of creating something that is perfect or creating something that looks a certain way or whatever because we all understand the constraint. We’re all stuck inside. I’ve been doing a lot of performances with The 24 Hour Plays organization. And that’s the same thing. The conceit is always, this is what writers and actors and directors were able to put together in 24 hours from start to finish. That’s as long as you spend on it. So it removes the need to be perfect and to be polished and just gets at the heart of the thing. It makes it pretty easy to spread a little bit of joy when you can.

TNT’s ‘Snowpiercer’ premieres on Sunday, May 17th at 9:00pm EST.