Please Don’t Destroy on Trying Everything (Including Roller Skating)
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The post Please Don’t Destroy on Trying Everything (Including Roller Skating) appeared first on Consequence.
An important thing that comedy team Please Don’t Destroy learned while writing and starring in their debut film, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, is that if there was an action they wrote into the script for their characters, they would later be expected to perform that action. Like, say, roller skating. “That never ever occurs to me, and I don’t know why,” says Martin Herlihy via Zoom, as the trio speak to Consequence from their office at Saturday Night Live.
“That you have to do the thing that you wrote?” John Higgins chimes in.
“Yeah, like roller skating,” Herlihy says. “I’m like ‘That’d be funny, if those guys did that.'”
“And you’re one of the guys,” Higgins points out.
This meant that for the opening sequence of The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, in which best friends John, Ben, and Martin (yes, their characters share their first names) roller skate to work, all three of the guys had some training to do. “We had three or four weeks in Charlotte, North Carolina leading up to the movie, where we were doing pre-production and writing,” Ben Marshall explains. “But we were also simultaneously in our production office, which had a garage, where we had a skate instructor teaching us how to roller skate. And I’ll just say some of us took to it a little quicker than others.”
“I would be the latter option there,” Herlihy admits. “The lessons did not help at all. I started really bad and dangerous and I ended really bad and dangerous. [The instructor] was great — some people just aren’t are born to be on wheels, and that would be the case for me. It was really pathetic.”
Herlihy in fact wasn’t used for all of the roller skating moments — according to Marshall, “if you look closely, you can see in some shots that that’s me and John next to Martin’s stunt double.”
It’s just one of the unexpected challenges that might be a factor for an up-and-coming comedy group like Please Don’t Destroy, which has quickly conquered many different areas of comedy at an incredible rate. After breaking out during the pandemic for their online sketch comedy, the team got hired as Saturday Night Live cast members in the fall of 2021.
Around that same time, their comedy got the attention of Judd Apatow, leading to a classic example of how much success in Hollywood comes from being prepared for good luck. Says Higgins, “When we had a bunch of videos online starting to gain some steam, and people were starting to be like, ‘Whoa, yeah, what are these guys? What else can they do?’…”
“…We had a script kind of ready,” Herlihy says. (In case you couldn’t tell, even in an interview the guys often finish each others’ sentences.) Thus, when Apatow expressed interest in their projects, they were able to send him the script for Foggy Mountain, and during their first season on SNL, they spent their hiatuses working with Apatow on the project, which filmed during the summer of 2022.
Why write a movie in the first place, given how many different avenues for comedy there are these days? Marshall says “I think we all just grew up on these big dumb comedy movies and love them and feel like they’re not being made that much anymore. So we really wanted to make a standalone hour-and-a-half-long story that’s just hard, funny, and silly, like the stuff that we grew up on.”
The film features an impressive supporting cast, including Bowen Yang, Megan Stalter, X Mayo, and Conan O’Brien, who plays the cantankerous father of Marshall’s character. “It was like a dream come true,” Marshall says about getting to act opposite the equally red-headed comedian. “We had always talked about him for it and just prayed to God he would say yes, and when he finally did, that was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this is a real movie.'”
Getting O’Brien interested wasn’t hard, as Higgins explains, because “Judd saw him at a party or something and mentioned it to him and Conan was like, ‘Oh yeah, I really like those guys’ videos. I’ll read the script.’ So luckily he had seen our stuff on SNL and wherever, and thought we had a similar sensibility.”
When production wrapped, the trio returned to SNL for their second season, while also juggling the completion of the film. “We would do three weeks of shows, fly out to LA, edit the whole week, come back, do three weeks of shows. We couldn’t have been more exhausted, but it was kind of the coolest thing ever,” Higgins says.
Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (Peacock)
While they had prior experience with the editing process, thanks to both SNL as well as editing their own videos, “we didn’t know how everything kind of affects everything else in a feature edit,” Herlihy says. “It is so long and there are so many things to keep in your head. The editors really had an understanding of the movie as a whole and the tone of it and what jokes were where. That was something that we learned — you can’t change one thing without thinking about everything that it affects before and after it.”
Also, Marshall says, “We shot so many different versions of things too that the editing process was kind of like rewriting the movie. So it was very time intensive and hard, but so fun and rewarding too.”
In addition, they also went on a live national tour last summer. Says Marshall, “We’ve been so lucky, just getting to do so many things we want to do.”
It’s all a lot, but getting to work in all of these areas is something they’re enjoying. “This is the stuff that we wanted to really do — like, we started with live comedy, doing sketches and stuff, And then we pandemic happened, we started making videos, and then the videos happened. We got to write this movie and then, while we were waiting, we went back to live comedy. So it’s all just happening on top of itself,” Higgins says.
Adds Herlihy, “Yeah, I think we just don’t have a favorite thing. We like doing all of it and we feel really grateful to have opportunities and want to take advantage of all of them.”
Whatever they make, you’ll likely know it’s a Please Don’t Destroy project when you see it, because it’s a brand they’ve stuck with thus far. That’s why it’s in the official title of their movie: “We wanted it to be like Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where it’s just like, ‘Oh, one of those movies, so you know what to expect when you’re watching it,” Higgins says.
Put it another way: Whatever the Please Don’t Destroy brand is, it’s this.
It does make the title a little long, to Marshall’s amusement. “Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, on Peacock,” he laughs. “It’s like Titanic. Or Avatar.”
Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is streaming now on Peacock.
Please Don’t Destroy on Trying Everything (Including Roller Skating)
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