While Seth Green is synonymous with fans for his comedic roles on the big and small screen, he is a big name behind the scenes, too.
He’s a producer, writer, director and voice-over artist. The 46-year-old Hollywood giant is also behind the long-running stop motion sketch comedy series, “Robot Chicken”, which he created with Matthew Senreich.
Ahead of the 200th episode celebration, I got to interview Green about the show, which has been blessed with many well-known actors lending their voices to characters over the 10 seasons.
He’s had 50 Cent, Gillian Anderson, Steve Aoki, Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Banks, Kristen Bell, Megan Boone, Wayne Brady, Tisha Campbell-Martin, Tom Cavanagh, Emilia Clark, Megan Fox, David Hasselhoff, Neil Patrick Harris and Diablo Cody, among a host of other stars.
On bagging such big names, he revealed: “I’ve spent my entire career in this industry and have gotten to meet a lot of people.
“So in the very beginning, it was quite a bit of trading favours or just convincing somebody that it would be a low impact work commitment.
“ The show, for most actors, takes only about 15 - 20 minutes to record. And it is also fun.
“We typically bring people in to play something they’ve never played before.
“You know actors that look a certain way can only physically be believable as a certain type of character in film, but on voice-over, you can do anything.
“So that’s fairly enticing for a performer to come and do something very silly, to come and do something that they would never get to do on film and also we can record anyone anywhere in the world and we can do it very quickly so that is usually appealing to people.”
Revisiting the show’s journey, Green admitted: “It wasn’t conceived as a show, it was really short webisodes in 2000.
“ I wasn’t setting out to create a show or put something on the air.
“It was just something fun that we were doing. And then the opportunity came to make a season of it and we didn’t imagine it would go beyond that.”
Each year, Adult Swim kept renewing the show.
He laughed: “So I’ve just focused on making as good a show as possible.”
Several Emmy’s later, Senreich and he have done well.
Green pointed out: “We always try to do things that we haven’t done. And to that end sometimes it is exploring a character or a pop culture trope. It is shooting something in an original way.
“This last season, we played around with openings. We did an opening that mimicked the Saturday Night Live opening.
“We did an opening that mimicked Monty Python’s Flying Circus. We just tried to do things that were creatively exciting.
“And for our 200th episode, we set out to do something that we have never done before. Without giving spoilers, I’m pretty excited about what we were able to achieve.”
“Each year we learn about what works and what does not work, based on the previous year. And so we will always try to do something more. Try something different.”
Green says he still has an infinite number of people on his wish list like Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer.
He added: “It’s up to us to find a part that warrants their talents and to put it in front of them in a way that would make them interested.”
Having started an animation production studio with several partners, he added that they’ve developed several live-action concepts, “some that we’ve been able to put on the air and some that we continue to develop”.
*“Robot Chicken” is available on Showmax.