At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, we got the chance to talk with some of the cast/creators of Hulu’s adult animated comedy Solar Opposites.
Co-created by Justin Roiland (“Rick & Morty”) and Mike McMahan (“Rick & Morty”, “Star Trek: Lower Decks”), “Solar Opposites” centers around a team of four aliens who are evenly split on whether Earth is awful or awesome. Korvo (Justin Roiland) and Yumyulack (Sean Giambrone) only see the pollution, crass consumerism, and human frailty while Terry (Thomas Middleditch) and Jesse (Mary Mack) love TV, junk food and fun stuff. In season three, this alien team strives to be less of a team and more of a family team.
“Solar Opposites” is executive produced by Roiland, McMahan and Josh Bycel. The series is produced by 20th Television.
Most of the third season episodes dropped just before the convention, but there is a special Halloween episode that will premiere on Hulu this Monday, October 3. We got a preview of the special and upcoming fourth season from series co-creator Justin Roiland (“Korvo”) and writers/executive producers Mike McMahan (co-creator), Josh Bycel & Danielle Uhlarik. We also had a fun chat with stars Thomas Middleditch (“Terry”), Mary Mack (“Jesse”) & Sean Giambrone (“Yumyulack”) about what it’s been like working on the series. There was no video recording allowed at the press room roundtables, but you can read about our conversations below.
Note: this press room was combined with the press room for the upcoming series Koala Man, which is also produced by Justin Roiland, but we’ll have more from the creators of that series in a separate post.
Co-Creator/Executive Producer Justin Roiland (“Korvo”)
Has the move to people working from home made it easier to work on the show?
Roiland: Yes. Animation, the video game studio stuff I’m doing, it’s all distributed development stuff. So it’s like everybody’s working from home. And then what you need … is a really good production team. So you need a really good producers—or producer, depending on how big the project is—who are basically in charge of all of the minutia … there’s a lot of meetings that happen over Zoom. It’s not that much different, honestly, with Zoom. How weird is it … we were forced into this reality where it’s like, Oh, this is totally great. It works. I’m working from home. I can do more work from home and take more meetings and more pitches and more just everything than I’ve ever been able to do because I can back-to-back my meetings. I used to have to bake in travel time and all this nonsense and now I can just be bouncing around and I can do a full day of work.
Can you talk about the Halloween special?
Roiland: I’ll tell you that Korvo is absolutely f**king terrified of anything to do with Halloween… like candy corn, even just if you get some cotton and start stretching it, and it starts to look like a spiderweb… anything… So that’s sort of what it’s about. But then it just goes to all these insane places, ultimately, and I don’t know what all to say. I can also say Cryptkeeper… you can make of that what you will, but I don’t know, that might actually be a spoiler. Mike might be mad. But anyway, but it’s really, really, really fun, and we also kind of love the formula of 11 normal episodes and then a special. We’re kind of clicking into that as the Solar kind of rhythm for each year.
Are we going to learn why Korvo hates Halloween?
Roiland: Without giving too much away… kind of, yeah… whenever we do an episode where it’s like, “We’re not going to learn backstory”, we at least have some funny hand-wavy thing that satiates that for the audience, the why of at all. We have a good team that’s really cognizant of that stuff. We all have good tastes in comedy and the stuff that we like to watch. I feel like we all have a good bead on when something’s really good and when something’s not so good, and we very much apply that to Solar.
When a joke manifests, how do you know if it’s a Rick and Morty joke or a Solar Opposites joke?
Roiland: You surround yourself with amazing teams. And for me… when I come up with something, I tend to funnel all that into the game studio. Well, not 100%, but because there’s always stuff that’s like This is definitely a Rick thing or a Morty thing or this is definitely a Korvo/Terry thing or like a Yumyulack or Mary Mack, who does Jessie. I can just hear her saying this, you know, but for the most part, I funnel that stuff into the game studio, which is Squanch Games. And we’ve been working on this crazy game for like the last five years. And it’s almost out, called High on Life. It’s really cool. It’s a first person shooter blah, blah, blah… you can look into it online. It’s really, really neat.
Has there been anything that you’ve written for one show, and then moved it to the other show?
Roiland: I think yes. I know I’ve had ideas that just we just couldn’t quite figure them out in a way that made sense for Rick and Morty. It wasn’t for for lack of trying, but Rick and Morty is like a bucking bronco that you’re on the top of and you’re just trying to hang on for dear life. The stories fight with you, because there is this sort of pursuit of perfection on that show… It’s a very different kind of process… but I can’t think of any ideas specifically that ended up transitioning to something else, but I bet there is, but it would have to be me sitting down and really doing an audit and then going Oh shit this, this was the thing. So I don’t have a legit answer.
Executive Producers Mike McMahan (Co-Creator), Josh Bycel & Danielle Uhlarik
Could you talk more about the office environment that has been teased for season four?
McMahan: For us as comedy writers, on this show, we like to do things we never get to do. And usually you’re getting given notes that are like “Stay in your lane. Do what the show is about.” and on Solar Opposites, it’s like we’re slipping dramas in there, we’re changing the tone of the show all the time. Because the leads are these aliens, we kind of let their naïveté dictate what we’re going to do in any one season. [The end of] season three … it was kind of inspired by the last episode of the FX show The Shield, where it was like “Be careful what you wish for, you’re safe, but now you’re stuck in this office environment”. And so, at the beginning of season four, we’ve switched the genre of the format of the show from being a family comedy to being an office comedy, but our aliens are really bad at office stuff. And, of course, they work in the stupidest office—but it should feel like the worst episode of The Office, in a funny way.
Will you still be mixing in The Wall storyline?
Uhlarik: Yeah, so we transitioned from like a horror, monster kind of theme that we did in season three to Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy. It’s very Cold War.
Bycel: We ended the last season on the rise of this theocracy.
Uhlarik: Yep, with Sister Sisto, and, basically, what religion has done inside The Wall, without spoiling too much. And the thing that also got us really excited was we continue on with the Silver Crop story in a really fun and surprising way. And it’s got legs the same way The Wall did. So we’re doing even more kind of a drama spin
Bycel: We’re trying to do as many spin-offs as we can, as Mike likes to say, it’s almost like we’re greenlighting our own—we have our Solar Opposites network.
McMahan: Someday the executives are gonna be like, “Are you treating your show like a little app store of other shows?” And we’re gonna be like, “Oh, no.” Because nobody would ever let us write a Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy. We’re comedy writers.
Bycel: Well, don’t tell the network.
McMahan: Well, luckily, if it’s little people that eat jelly beans, and they’re doing it, it’s awesome. And it works really well. And it’s just a dream to get to write that stuff. Plus, with 11 episodes, we have more time to do alien stuff and extra weird drama stuff. So it’s never like the show isn’t what it was in the first place. It just keeps growing in a cool way.
Bycel: Yeah, I mean, once we got to 11 episodes, we were able to do my favorite. One of my favorite episodes of season three is “99 Ships”, which is where we get to see… we sort of extrapolate from the opening credits into what happened, and we learn all this stuff about Shlorpians. That was when we got the extra episodes… Mike sort of had that in his back pocket for a while. We got to do an episode like that. So that’s what’s great about doing more episodes, and we’ll be doing another special. We’re announcing our special today, that will be coming in the Fall, at the panel. And then we’ll do another special, the year after.
McMahan: For season four, we’ve already written another special. We like making fun of holiday specials. We love TV, and we love making fun of TV in a way while we’re making TV. We like a thing in a thing in a thing. And when we just got eight episodes, we were like “Okay, two of these episodes can be ridiculous, and then six have to be on point, right?” So now that we have 11, we’re like, “Ooh, we got more.” That’s why we had the whole episode where they’re stuck in a line the whole time. Because we’re trying to play with the format and see what we can do that no other show can do. And that’s kind of what Solar Opposites‘ flavor is—what can nobody else do that our show is both smart enough and silly enough at the same time to be able to get away with?!
Is there anything that you pulled yourself back from doing?
McMahan: Yes, but only because we’re like, “Let’s let this slow cook a little bit longer.” Like with The Wall, we want to go slow. If we jumped ahead, like you have a baby character in The Wall and it’s like, “Oh boy, now we have a baby.” And it’s like, “No, we’re gonna have to figure out everything, we can’t just age her up.” You know what I mean? Once you start having something so ridiculous that when you add these little guardrails and boxes, you have to write it, and you have to be more creative to come up with stories. And so it’s almost like self-editing, like that kind of stuff.
Uhlarik: It’s so funny. That’s a great question. Because there’s so many times in the room where we’ll get to something and we’re like, “Well, we can’t possibly do that”. And then we’ll take a beat but like, “So let’s figure out how to do it” Like we were trying to figure out in one season… the best, craziest fight scene we could, and we kept trying to top it. And then someone just adds a bit with “What if we just put a Post-It and say, Hulu didn’t give us enough budget?”, and we laughed and we’re like, “No, let’s f**king do that.”
Bycel: And Hulu, by the way is… I mean, we have a whole episode where they go to Hululand. Hulu has been amazing. We make fun of them all the time, and they’re the best partner.
McMahan: Hululand, I’m glad you brought up because, thematically, there’s this weird thing where our sense of humor is things that feel like we were made to do it but nobody asked us to do it. Hulu has never asked us to bring them up all the time. We just loved when The Simpsons made fun of FOX. And so we were like, “We’re gonna be the only people ever to mention Hulu in a show”, you know? And then it’s like, our movie references are always out of date, because we’ll never be on cutting edge.
Bycel: What do you mean, no one’s talking about Daylight?
McMahan: but at the same time it’s like, Nope, we have all these products we mentioned in the show. They’re not paying us to be mentioned in the show. We’re doing it because it’s funny to us. That a show so vulgar would then reference KFC, where some KFC executive would have like a biscuit drop out of their mouth if they saw that episode.
Bycel: We’re dying to sell out
McMahan: Nobody’s taking the Solar Opposites money. They’re like “What’s this? This looks like Rick and Morty, we must not pay these people anything.”
Can you talk about how the Christmas episode came about?
McMahan: We only had eight episodes that season. We had a blast writing it and I was like, “you know, we have two more weeks of writers room”. So I called Hulu. And I was like “I think we can write a Christmas special”. And they were like “You know what? We’ll extend your for an entire other episode’s budget”—that is a big ask. And I was like “Alright guys, we got to do a really good Christmas episode”. So what I want to do is parody a Christmas movie I’ve never seen, just based on the trailer. So then we wrote the Christmas episode and I refused to watch Jingle All the Way.
Bycel: He’s still never seen it.
McMahan: The writers’ assistant kept being like “That’s not what happens”. And I’m like… “It feels like it could have happened”.
Q: So has anybody in the office given you a Turbo Man figure?
McMahan: Yes. Why, what movie’s that from?
Bycel: We got Turbo Man figures
McMahan: Somebody gave us Turbo Man figures. Just the tone of a Christmas special is so fun. I think I could write 100 Christmas specials, because it’s so freeing, because the format’s there.
Bycel: We love this one … the Halloween special that we’re doing, and we bring back an amazing sort of classic Halloweeny scary movie character that no one’s talked about, nobody cares about, but it’s great, and we actually got the same person to do the voice so it’s gonna be super fun. We already have one for next year that’s going to be so much fun. We love doing specials.
Can you talk about the guest cast?
McMahan: Nobody ever asked us to hire Tiffany Haddish as a blue glowing orb. She’s so funny in the show. That, in fourth season, we give her even more.
Bycel: She has a whole episode
McMahan: I’ve never seen somebody show up, as famous and talented as she is, and give 100% to the most ridiculous role.
Uhlarik: I mean, that’s kind of like the benefit of our show too. We’re like, “Let’s play drama writers”. Then we write a drama and then they give us Christina Hendricks. We’re like Oh and Sterling K Brown and Oh …
McMahan: and Alfred Molina, and just so many amazing …
Bycel: We have Sutton Foster. The idea of having the Sutton Foster, Broadway sweetheart, be the mean, evil nun, …
McMahan: but then on top of that my eight year old plays the Pupa, and I created that role for him when we were first developing it, because he had just been born. And then, once a season, we backup all of his lines, and I take him into the studio with a box of candy.
Bycel: What does he get afterwards, though?
McMahan: Because he always gets a soft serve ice cream on the way home, which is awesome. And I’m like, I would have loved to have done this with my dad growing up. I’m sure he’ll turn it on me and be angry about it in the future for some reason because like, you know, he is my son. … This show is TV nerds, loving what they do, getting to do things with no rules—we’ve never gotten to do before—and that’s why you can never predict what’s going to happen in the show, because we’re being crazy. We’re having so much fun with it.
Is there ever an idea that’s been thrown out that you absolutely cannot use?
McMahan: There’s one thing we’ve never used that we keep talking about. We want to do a thing where they go on Family Feud, but nobody can decide who the dad is. They’re like “I feel like I have the most dad energy of the bunch”. And then every time we write it, it just turns into this vortex where we like put it on the backburner. I feel like this is the perfect venue for it, not us having to figure out how to write it.
It sounds like the show could go forever. If they came to you with a Rick and Morty-style 100-episode deal, would you take it?
McMahan: Oh, easy! Because the more rail we have, the more deep-seeded stuff we can think… I’m such a fan of the comic and the show Invincible. They do the most—you guys haven’t gotten there yet unless you read the comics—but Kirkland will seed stuff so early that like 50-60 issues later will suddenly become the biggest thing. And I love that type of storytelling. And that’s long form, you have to know [or] believe that you’re gonna get to keep doing it. If we knew we had 100 episodes of Solar, the first thing we would do is figure out what would happen every 20 episodes, and then start filling in all this fun but have a master plan.
Bycel: We’ve already done that. Like we cast Sutton Foster two years ago, knowing that she would end up being evil.
McMahan: We have our three or four seasons figured out.
Do you have an end game in mind?
McMahan: Right now? I do. I don’t want to say it. But I’m always open to finding out there was something better than I thought it was gonna be? Because we have this amazing team of writers, and Joe. And what ends up happening is somebody smarter and funnier than me in the room puts together a different puzzle piece and you’re like “Oh my god, that’s an amazing idea.”
Bycel: One of the things that we did this year, which I’m surprised more people haven’t been pissed off about, is on Hululand, we did this whole thing where everyone got big and got out. We got a glimpse of that. It was a dream. And then also in the 99 Ships we got a glimpse of what it looks like when the Pupa terraforms—two huge things that will still… we wanted to give it a little glimpse knowing that that’s not going to come for years. The real version of that is not going to come for years.
McMahan: For me, I want to be surprised myself and I also want to see how the Solar family grows into more of a strong family. None of this matters unless we have heart, right? And the more heart they’re finding, it feels good as it’s growing. Like Oh my God, thank God they like each other. You know what I mean? And watching that grow, and watching how the show remains ridiculous, that’s the balance. That’s the only hard thing about the show, not letting the characters kind of emulate each other and just be crazy all the time, like actually grow as emotional characters. And that’s probably what the end game is gonna be, is like the biggest heart with the biggest comedy, but Hulu has to pick us up for 100 more episodes.
Stars Thomas Middleditch (“Terry”), Mary Mack (“Jesse”) & Sean Giambrone (“Yumyulack”)
So what can you tease about season four?
Middleditch: I don’t know what..
Giambrone: I know nothing.
Mack: I don’t know if we can…
Middleditch: Well, Korvo and Terry continue their relationship, and you can take that as how you want.
Mack: We’re halfway through recording, and I forgot what happened already. Too many medications. It’s a surprise for me when I watch ’em. I’m like “Oh yeah”
Giambrone: I don’t remember… I’m trying to think where season three left things off…
Q: I can’t tell if this is a bit
Middleditch: It’s genuine. It’s bizarre how much gets retained because you just go into a booth and like you yell and talk really fast. An then you go home and then you’re like, “Okay, what did I just do?”
Q: There’s an Office motif going on and season four, if that triggers anything.
Middleditch: You know what? Even if I remembered I’d be so scared of saying the wrong thing that I don’t know.
Mack: I think I have to study before the panel.
Middleditch: I’m gonna leave all spoiler questions to the producers and to the writers.
Do you always stick to the script, or do you go off?
Mack: Yeah, they let us… you give them a few, and then you get to improv.
Middleditch: Yeah, you never want to like totally go too wild with it because the scripts are so good. It’s more about finding a line or a little sequence or a reaction or something like that. I mean, I’ve definitely on occasion… you go a little wild and then you see what they chose a year later when they’ve animated it.
Mack: I’ve been trying to come up with new swear words. That’s been a goal of mine… a little more interesting in my swearing.
Giambrone: A couple of those came in season three… It was a creative but not super harsh swear word and I was like, “It seems like it could be a Mary one”.
Mack: I’m working on it. Sean, you said you don’t like to do as much improv, you just like to…
Giambrone: I stick to the words usually…
Middleditch: to the letter
Giambrone: …and to the punctuation. Yeah, I just pretty much say what’s on the page.
Mack: You’re a writer’s dream, Sean. I try to change a few of the words… I’m the worst.
Do you see an end point for these characters?
Mack: I’m always so scared because there could be other Shlorpians out there coming back to sabotage everything and anything could happen. I mean, Sean could get written off the show. I’ve heard rumblings.
Giambrone: I don’t know about season four because I’m not in it.
Mack: We like to pick on Sean, if you can’t tell. He’s the youngest and easiest to pick on. He’s actually the nicest one.
Can you talk about that family dynamic between your characters—sometimes you are fighting and arguing, while other times you seem like a more normal family?
Middleditch: Yeah. I mean, these guys definitely are at each other’s throats in a way, I suppose, or maybe you’re at her throat
Mack: Yeah, sibling rivalry
Giambrone: Although she like slit my throat in season…
Middleditch: Look, everybody’s killing everybody.
Giambrone: We remind each [other] to be nice to each other because we will go kill each other sometimes. But there is like a serious love there. It seems like the writers always put a lot of good to heart into each episode. I know you were saying that there’s a lot of group hugs this season.
Middleditch: Yeah, this was kind of like the season of family bonding… Korvo and Terry are like husband and wife, sort of… they’re like coworkers / friends / lovers.
Q: Are they married or not?
Middleditch: I think it’s supposed to be intentionally ambiguous. … I think it’s like a Shlorpian custom that’s just maybe what friends will do, or what their version of family unit will do. I think it’s also undefined. I don’t know, I think it’s funnier that way.
Is there a strong Shlorpian Bible?
Middleditch: If there is, it’s being written or made up on the spot.
Mack: There are several manuals we’re supposed to be reading, but nobody ever is, like he has the whole Pupa manual, and Terry never follows it.
Some of the characters have human names, and some have alien names. Why is that?
Giambrone: I think that’s so telling of their characters, kind of like who wants to stay more true to Shlorpian way and the more Earth ways? But Yumyulack seems like he’s converting to maybe wanting to be more popular and cool, and be more human even though he doesn’t think he does.
Middleditch: I actually don’t know if Terry is a selected human name. Or if it’s like a humanized shortened version of like Terrangulu or something like that. I feel like Korvo has called me by my full name at one point but I can’t remember what it was. Maybe it was just Terence.
Do you ever go back to the writer to say “What does this mean?”
Middleditch: No, I blindly follow. I don’t make waves man. I go in, I say the lines.
Have you ever pitched any ideas?
Middleditch: I pitched a couple of voices as like random characters, because occasionally after you do your session, you might get asked to do a line as another voice or whatever. And it’s always like some voice that I’m like “I’m not that good at that, but here’s here’s a couple of ones that I am if you want like ideas for characters”… But, no, they’re doing such a good job of it. I just watch the show as a fan, like straight up. I like it. And if there’s enough time, [it] happens where I forget what happened. So, yeah, I basically watch it for the first time it feels like
Mack: I watch the show and forget that I’m in the show. I think that’s a good show.
Is there ever anything they give you that you’re like, “Oh, no, I just I can’t do that.”?
Mack: Probably me more so than you guys because I’m known for clean comedy. And now I’m like doing so many swears … and I have friends who are Mormons and they’ll come up to me like “We love [it]”, and I’m like “What? You’re gonna go to Hell”. It’s amazing to me… some parents let their little kids watch. What I’m saying is “Stop watching!” But yeah, I’m kind of nervous to say some things though.
Giambrone: There were some words that I looked … I learned a new vocabulary on certain physical activities that were written about, and I was like “Whoa! I didn’t know what I was talking about.” There are certain ones. Yeah, we did swear probably more in this one, which was kind of fun, to be honest.
Did any of you get to hang out with Tiffany Haddish?
Mack: I’m so sad. She’s done rom-com shows my friends have done and I’ve never even gotten to see her before.
Middleditch: Yeah, haven’t bumped into her once. We get shuttled in at different times to never lay eyes on each other. Everyone in their own little cocoon… I noticed she didn’t make it down to Comic-Con.
Mack: I guess she just doesn’t care as much as we do…. She’s only in 40 movies this year.
Q: So you never get to record together
Middleditch: Not really. There was like a promo thing that we all did at one point for season one but no, the machine gets going and then…
Mack: Scheduling would be really hard, and you don’t want people to sit through your effort, and everything you’re trying…
Middleditch: Yeah, you’re doing one line a bunch of different ways trying to get it right. The other person would just have to sit there and wait for you, which would be kind of a misuse of time. It’s actually, strangely, more efficient to do it everybody on their own.
A SINISTER HALLOWEEN SCARY OPPOSITES SOLAR SPECIAL premieres October 3 on Hulu. The rest of Season Three is available now, and Season Four will debut some time in 2023.
