Lil Dicky on Dave’s Season 3 Finale Guest Stars: “It’s Such a Legendary Episode of Television”
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The post Lil Dicky on Dave’s Season 3 Finale Guest Stars: “It’s Such a Legendary Episode of Television” appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of Dave, “Looking for Love.”]
“I’m not going to lie, every finale we’re like, ‘We’ve got to do something big,'” Dave Burd, a.k.a. Lil Dicky, tells Consequence. And “Looking for Love,” the Season 3 finale of FXX’s Dave, does not fall short of that goal — thanks to a super-sized runtime and some major guest stars, including an extended appearance from the one and only Brad Pitt, who appears as himself in what becomes a surprisingly dark and tense story about obsession and fame.
Also featuring Rachel McAdams and Drake as themselves, “Looking for Love” begins with Dave (Burd) filming a music video with Rachel, building on the friendly bond they’ve developed this season. When Brad pops his head into the scene for a lyrically cued cameo, it’s a surprise, especially because his appearance is so short; afterward, when Brad asks Dave if he’s needed for anything else, Dave says no, “I think it’s kind of cooler to not overuse you.” It’s an impressive (and meta) misdirect, because when Dave gets taken hostage by an obsessive super-fan (Tenea Intriago) in his home, a badly-timed drop-by leads to Brad also being held captive.
Thematically, “Looking for Love” captures a lot of what Season 3 of Dave has been exploring this whole time, according to Burd. “There’s the theme of looking for love. There’s also the theme of looking for validation and fame, and my standing as an artist and all that, and when is enough, enough?”
The central idea for the episode, Burd continues, came from “Vanessa McGee, one of my main writers, [who] was always very keen on the idea of a stalker coming back into play. It’s such an extreme premise, and I pride myself in being very grounded, that I was like, ‘We need the right actor who I believe in that can pull this thing off.’ And boy, did we get it in Tenea [Intriago], who is as great as Brad and Drake and Rachel and all that — she is a force of nature in this thing, and it’s such a fine needle to thread of being believable, being scary, being funny. She’s such a perfect storm of everything this episode needed, and she killed it.”
In addition to the hostage angle, though, Burd wanted to up the stakes — and he’d heard about a certain fan of the show who could do just that. “We wanted to do the idea of a stalker and me and a dangerous situation, but I always was like, ‘Man, let’s get Brad Pitt involved.’ Because [there’s] no bigger Brad Pitt fan than I. This guy is such an inspiration to me. I’m a huge movie guy — movies are my favorite things, more than TV shows, and this man has been in my favorites. I’ve seen him in comedies and I’ve seen him working with my favorite directors… This guy is my numero uno.”
Finding out that Pitt was a fan of the show, Burd says, “was mind-blowing to me, but once I got that kernel of info, I’m like, ‘Well, maybe there’s a shot here.’ And I put all my eggs in this basket pretty recklessly. [Executive producer] Jeff Schaffer was like, ‘What are we doing here? We’re spending so much time breaking an episode that revolves around Brad Pitt. You don’t even know this man. You have no idea.’ And I was like, ‘Just trust me.'”
Continues Burd, “I said the same thing about Drake, the same thing about Rachel — all of them, I had known that they love the show, and I just approached them with a great [pitch]. It wasn’t just like, ‘Hey, come in and do this,’ it was like, ‘It needs to be you for this reason.’ And I think all of them are just such fans of the show that they agreed and it went from there.”
Burd does in fact have specific reasons as to why these guest stars were the right celebrities to involve: “I wanted to have this episode where there was somebody who also believed in themselves as much as I did, and then took it to an extreme level — all with the ultimate end game of all this, which is Brad Pitt. What he represents, in terms of… You can’t be more validated or famous than Brad Pitt. He’s the movie star of our time. And I just thought it was a really cool idea for an episode.”
McAdams, meanwhile, is “the ideal representation of hopeless romanticism — for our generation growing up, she was our dream girl and our dream woman who honestly portrayed my earliest visual representations, via media, of love. I was totally formed by her performances in The Notebook and Wedding Crashers.”
And Drake’s cameo in the final moments of the episode, Burd says, was essential because Drake represents “the other side, of the top of hip-hop, and being great at all costs and just getting there. What I love most is they’re not just cameos because they’re more than cameos. They’re significant characters. I don’t just do it because it’s cool to have these famous people on the show — all of them are so powerful to the stories and the themes and they’re all such great representatives of those themes at the highest level. So I’m really just honored to have them on board.”
Pitt’s involvement, as Burd says, went well beyond a mere cameo — the star was on set for four “long, long, grueling, 13-hour days. Really tough days. If he at any point was like, ‘You know what? I can’t do these days. I can only do eight-hour days,’ we would’ve been fucked. But he wasn’t that way. I gave him every opportunity — like, ‘Hey, man. You don’t have you to stick around till 4:00 AM to shoot your coverage. We can get this body double and use his shoulder if you want to get good rest.’ But he was like, ‘Absolutely not. I’m in this. This is so fun. I’m all in.’ And I think his performance is legendary in this episode. The autotune scene, he’s smashing his head [against the glass] — it’s so epic.”
As the hostage situation at Dave’s house gets more and more intense, eventually series regular GaTa (another person playing a version of themselves) ends up getting involved. GaTa tells Consequence that working with Pitt on set “exceeded my expectations. I knew he was going to be a dope actor, but him being a great person was the icing on the cake. He was so humble. He was speaking to everybody from the catering to the crew. He was just a nice person, he was easy to work with. And it was just surreal, man, when you sitting back and you watching those movies as a child growing up and then you’re right here with him and he’s just like, ‘Yeah, man. This is the moment.’ It just felt good, man.”
Dave (FXX)
Adds Burd, “I think everyone who works on the show was fully inspired and their best selves, because we all do this because we love cinema and we love storytelling. And when these icons are coming on and being like, ‘The work that you’ve done up to this point has been so great that I am now willing to lend my talent to what you’re doing,’ it was really uplifting for everybody involved.”
After all the physical violence he endures over the course of the episode (including getting shot by a crossbow), the fictional Brad’s fate is left a little up in the air at the end, deliberately: “We had full-on versions of Brad being dead, Brad being alive but not being the same, Brad being totally okay. We have all those scenes shot with me and Drake talking about it. But it just felt like too long of a scene to continue to add more pieces. And so I kind of like the open-ended-ness.”
Burd does point out that “when the paramedics come running in, if you look closely, there’s a little bit of a thumbs up from Brad, if you really look for it. So I view it as a beacon of hope that Brad will be okay.”
With the third season of Dave now officially over, GaTa is performing live in Los Angeles this week, and “pushing my music and taking on more roles. Any opportunity I get to display my talent, I’m working on stuff. And I’m trying to develop a cartoon with 20th Century and Onyx Collective. And I’m just gandering, grinding every day and just trying to be a better person and inspire people and keep pushing mental health awareness.”
Burd, meanwhile, says that “obviously, I’ve still got an album to finish, so I’m getting right back into that.” He’s got no predictions to offer on when that album might be completed: “Any prediction would be… How could you even take anything I say seriously at this point, with how wrong I’ve been in the past? But all I can tell you is I’m going to try as hard as I can and work as much as I can. No one’s on me more than GaTa, I tell you.”
In addition, he says, “I’m working on writing my first movie, and I look forward to living life. And I need a vacation. I’m going to go to Italy this summer with my girlfriend.”
Dave has yet to be renewed for a fourth season, but when it comes to Season 3, Burd says “I put my all into this season and I’m so proud. I’m very proud and satisfied with season one and season two, but in this season I had even higher expectations and the product exceeded my lofty expectations. I don’t think there’s a miss. All 10 episodes are so great. They’re their own independent short films, different genres throughout, and every episode one-ups the next one. I feel like we did it as well as it could be done this season.”
Dave is streaming now on Hulu.
Lil Dicky on Dave’s Season 3 Finale Guest Stars: “It’s Such a Legendary Episode of Television”
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