Inside the Disgusting, Improbable Birth of the Sewer Boys in 'Dicks: The Musical'

Nathan Lane hates the Sewer Boys. "To this day," comedian Josh Sharp says, "we’ll text him and be like,'‘Can’t wait to see you in L.A. I think the Sewer Boys are going.' And he’ll be like, 'I won’t appear anywhere with those creatures!'"

Lane, Sharp, and the Sewer Boys are just four members of the star-studded cast of Dicks: The Musical, A24’s riotously funny—and endlessly strange—musical comedy. Directed by Larry Charles, the film is based on Sharp and Aaron Jackson’s off-Broadway show, Fucking Identical Twins. Jackson and Sharp play Craig Tiddle and Trevor Brock, two well-endowed coworkers and best friends who discover, like a Bizarroverse version of The Parent Trap, that they’re twins who were separated at birth. They join forces to get their estranged parents—played by Nathan Lane and Megan Mullaly—back together.

The rest of the cast includes rapper Megan Thee Stallion as the brothers’ domineering ice queen boss and Saturday Night Live!’s Bowen Yang as God, but the true stars of the show are (to Nathan Lane’s chagrin) the Sewer Boys.

At this point, you're surely asking: What the hell is a Sewer Boy? Well, when we meet Lane’s character, Harris, we're also presented with the two creatures that live in his apartment. Their names are Backpack and Whisper, and Harris rescued them one day from the—you guessed it—sewer. They toe the line between adopted children and pets, pink and fleshy like a baby, but also veiny and lizardlike in their faces and limbs, with horrible bugged eyes and gnashing teeth. Vaguely slimy and naked (except for diapers!), they dance around in the background, popping up to horrify everyone but Harris, who lovingly feeds them pre-chewed ham from his own mouth.

“It was so funny to watch [Lane] work with them,” Jackson says, “because he would be like, ‘These are foul,’ and then he just throws himself one thousand percent into it. In the blooper reel, there’s a lot of Nathan dealing with the feeding of the ham to the Sewer Boys.”

In the stage version of the show, Jackson explains, Backpack and Whisper don’t actually appear in person, but are referenced in a throwaway joke about the father, who is “misinterpreting gay culture.” In the film, the Sewer Boys are expanded into characters in their own right, voiced by veteran voice actors Tom Kenny and Frank Todaro. They're even a major part of the film’s outrageous emotional climax.

“We loved the weird sci-fi aspects of the script,” Jackson continues, “and to get to blow them out a little more was a pleasure for us. So we really leaned in—in every draft of the movie—no matter what happened. We went through thousands of drafts, but the Act Three climax was always focused on rescuing the Sewer Boys, no matter what. They'd always be giving us notes, and we'd be like, ‘It's this!! This is the movie!’”

“This is not the kind of movie that needs intricate stage directions—until you get to the Sewer Boys,” Sharp adds. “Then it's truly like a full-page, five-paragraph block text: They are from Hell. They are vile. They are gorgeous. We really connected with them.”

While a big-budget studio production might choose to digitally render characters like the Sewer Boys, Sharp and Jackson always lobbied for puppets. “We love those '80s movies like Gremlins, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and E.T.,” Jackson says. “Even Jurassic Park, which was this CGI masterpiece, had so much practical [effects]. We really wanted that."

Sharp quips: “Baby Yoda walked so that Backpack and Whisper could waddle quickly.”

To bring Backpack and Whisper to life in all their horrid glory, the crew behind Dicks worked with practical effects designers Alisha and Zach Silverstein—who, as Zach puts it, “have complementary skills.” Alisha made puppets as a costume designer for Adam Ruins Everything. Her brother, Zach, studied sculpture and works with “specialty costumes”—i.e. latex replicas of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Predator suits. The Sewer Boys required not just latex molds and airbrushed paint, but also a mechanized, animatronic skeleton underneath that would move their faces and limbs around.

“It definitely taxed all my abilities, and then some,” Zach says. “I've worked with latexes and foams, but it's different when you now have to put a skeleton into it that has to function. It's got rigging and wires. All of a sudden one no longer functions anymore. Oh, crap, okay, the whole set gets shut down and we have to fix the puppets. I’ve seen documentaries about the Ninja Turtles going through that when [Jim] Henson did the first film. The faces would stop functioning. They would call it a turtle meltdown.”

The Sewer Boys went through an intense design period that attempted to marry the aspects of human and lizard into what Sharp, Jackson, and director Larry Charles had in mind. Sharp and Jackson sent over a moodboard of practical and creepy references, then Charles and the designers would then trade sketches back and forth. Preliminary drawings were sometimes too humanoid or lizard-esque, leaning more towards Dungeons and Dragons than diminutive, dancing hobgoblins. The final versions, which were first sculpted from clay and then digitally scanned to create latex molds that fit over animatronic bodies, somehow managed to find a middle ground between human and beast. Even better? They were kind of cute.

“They’re so creepy, but you can’t not love them,” Alisha says. “It’s this weird duality. Striking that balance was something that Larry and Zach and I discussed early on, figuring out how to make them endearing, but also kind of gross. Their teeth are kinda bucked out; they have this janky overbite. It’s those oddities that really helped make them less creepy and scary.”

Because of the ongoing strike, the actors found out a day before the film's Toronto International Film Festival premiere that they’d be able to attend, thanks to the preliminary agreement ironed out between A24 and the Screen Actors Guild. In case things didn’t work out in time, the studio’s contingency plan was to have Backpack and Whisper walk the red carpet. “Now the Sewer Boys have been on every red carpet!” Sharp says. "I do think they were given a lot of prominence because they were like, 'They might be the only non-union actors we can put out there.'"

Dicks doesn’t skimp on wringing comedy from every single aspect of its script, needling and provoking and drawing jokes out as far as they can be stretched. Thankfully, the puppets fit seamlessly into Sharp and Jackson’s comedic style. “Even when we were doing this as a stage show, we used to always call it ‘human cartoon,’” Sharp explains. “Our acting style is much more like Hanna-Barbera than it is Stanislavski. The idea of getting to be the human interacting with the puppet has always been a dream.”

He remembers watching in awe as the puppeteers from Los Angeles’ Bob Baker Marionette Theater—four to each puppet—expertly took all of Larry Charles’ notes: “He was just directing them like they were full actors and being like, ‘You're scared—not that scared though. A little bit of hope. OK, now, one of you knows you're gonna be rescued, but the other’s not so sure.’ And these master puppeteers are like playing every intricate emotional beat.”

“There’s nothing like something tangible,” Alisha says when asked about the differences between practical and digital effects. “I don’t know, at the end of the day, that you’re saving money [by working with digital visual effects]. It looks too clean. There’s no grit to it. There’s no feeling and emotion.”

“The combination of the two is really the hybrid direction that we're gonna end up going,” Zach adds. “There will still be some practical and some CG and one can't fully replace the other. It's having both in the box and making the soup.”

And how will the Sewer Boys fare in all of this?

“I hope you can one day talk to them,” Sharp says. “They're beautiful actors who have been at it in the biz for so many years. For us, it was just an honor to give them a platform, but I know they're very hard to schedule press around.”

“I hear they're getting very hard to work with,” Jackson adds. “But for this first project, they were a dream.”

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