Scheer, Kroll, Rannazzisi, and Lajoie in their San Francisco hotel.
Now in its second season, FX's comedy The League follows a group of fantasy football-obsessed guys and the loved ones they neglect. Four of the cast members—Paul Scheer (Andre), Nick Kroll (Ruxin), Steve Rannazzisi (Kevin), and Jon Lajoie (Taco)—are currently on tour with their stand-up comedy show, The League Live. I caught up with them in San Francisco, along with series co-creator Jackie Marcus Schaffer, for a chat.
Warning: Some foul language follows, including a heated discussion of the phrase "bone out."
TV.com: Let's start with the origin of The League. Where'd the idea come from?
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: The origin of the show is a funny story actually. Jeff and I—he's my husband and the co-creator of the show—were on vacation in the French Alps, and it was a Christmas dinner, and he kept running outside and telling me he had a stomach ache. He didn't have a stomach ache: He was in the Superbowl of two fantasy leagues that year. He's in sometimes five fantasy leagues, and these were the two really important ones that he actually gives a shit about. So after a while, I went to go check on him. And when I went outside, I saw this man, this grown man, stomping his feet in the snow, freezing his ass off with no jacket on, screaming, yelling. And the thing is, one, there was nothing he could do to affect the outcome of what was going to happen. Line-ups were set. He just had to know. So there was absolutely no reason for him to be outside. And two, this was pre-Skype, so these calls were costing an absolute fortune. I was watching it, and it was pathetic and it was hilarious. A few weeks later I thought to myself, I'm not the only person who would find that funny, and that's a good idea for a TV show. Basically, I'd never written anything before, and Jeff encouraged me to sit down and work it through. He would work on it with me, and that's how the show came to be.
And how did the rest of you come on board?
Nick Kroll: We all sat down and met and auditioned, but it was clear that they were trying to do something that a lot of us naturally gravitate toward, which is having a little more control—not necessarily over story in any way, but just over the way a character would say and phrase something. The cool thing about Jeff and Jackie's process is they leave so much to us as to making it sound like real people sound. And what is on the page isn't always what feels most natural or funny in the moment, and yet, they're so clear about exactly what everything is going to be that you never feel like you're lost. But I think they tried to find people who would be able to do that.
Paul Scheer: I think we all came out of this background where we've all worked on shows that were just kind of confining to a certain degree. This is like the perfect combination, where Jeff and Jackie are working at every angle—they direct and produce the show and write the show. And then we can come in. It's collaborative. When you do a sitcom, you're kind of stuck with the words on the page, how you have to say them.
Nick Kroll: All of us had been burned or just not enjoyed the process of being on bigger-budget shows where we had less say. ... So I think we all came at this as the perfect opportunity to sort of feel like we had some ownership over what we were doing.
Jon Lajoie: Just on set, to hear the directors say, "What do you think?" To hear that from directors is—it's a completely different thing.
Nick Kroll: It's a discussion. The whole thing is a discussion, which I think makes it more fun for us to do.
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: And their digressions are what makes the show, we think, successful.
Now that you're done filming Season 2 and you're doing this comedy tour, are you sick of each other yet?
Paul Scheer: We shot our entire second season in 50 days. That's 13 episodes, 13 half-hour episodes, six and a half hours.
Steve Rannazzisi: Maybe each of us with a day or two off in those 50 days.
Paul Scheer: That's normally the time it takes to shoot a movie, roughly. And that's only an hour and a half, two hours. I feel like we lucked out, because we worked together pretty intensely, but we had fun. I think that part of the way the show is structured, too, it's not so confining. It's like hanging out.
Steve Rannazzisi: We had planned week vacations. We had two of them that were strategically planned that kept us from killing ourselves or each other. We came back, and we were like, "Oh, I remember you. I think I like you. There's something redeeming about you." So that was good.
What is that filming process like?
Nick Kroll: In order to get a show done in 50 days, we shoot in a very staggered process. We shoot so much so quickly that we don't remember—I don't remember anything I've said or anything. So when we watch the episodes, it's this exciting thing, like we're watching it for the first time.
How do you keep track of what's going on when you're filming so many episodes in one day?
Nick Kroll: That's Jeff and Jackie.
Steve Rannazzisi: Yeah. We just go, "What's going on? Why am I pissed about this?"
Paul Scheer: I thought it was a great acting exercise in a sense, because I felt like, especially in this season, we're all kind of into our characters. It's sort of like, what is this character doing right now? I felt like I didn't have to keep track of larger things. OK, well this is the scene, and this is what my character is doing right now.
Nick Kroll: You just are like, this is how my character would react honestly in this moment, whether you know what's going to happen later in the episode or what has already happened. This season we all, almost from the start, knew exactly what our characters would do and who would say something. Sometimes there's a pitch, a funny line that Paul comes up with that's right for Steve to say, or for my character to say. You just react honestly.
Paul Scheer: I think that's a shorthand that we all have, that we all developed last season. Every episode just got better and better and better, because it was all of us getting used to how this ensemble works.
So now that you have a better handle on your characters, what's going on with everyone in Season 2?
Steve Rannazzisi: I'm still the commissioner of the league. My main situation this year is the new member of the league, someone that's very close to me, and I'm not exactly thrilled about the fact that this person is now in the league. I have to run my own team this year. It's all completely 100 percent up to me, and I'm petrified, not having someone to lean on.
Paul Scheer: For me, I won last year, so I'm kind of on the top of the world. In the first episode, I renamed "The Shiva" [the league's trophy] to "The Dre." It starts this kind of downward spiral, this worshiping of false idols. You know, I'm kind of celebrating at the altar of myself, so I think that we see this guy who went to the top—there's only one place to go once you hit the top.
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: Andre took so much shit over the course of his entire life from these guys that when he won, he became the most insufferable, unbearable champion who then committed horrible heresy by renaming the trophy and making a statue of himself. And we're gonna see him pay for that for 13 episodes.
Nick Kroll: It seems to be the crux of the season that Ruxin gets everything he wants and then hates it. He's got his beautiful wife and she won't have sex with him. He gets his brother-in-law in the league, and he's just the worst dude in the world. He gets the players he wants, and they don't deliver how he thinks they're going to. He's just stuck in a constant state of frustration and self-doubt, mixed with egotism, snideness. He's the most unlikable character on TV.
Jon Lajoie: Taco's journey is a rough one. Taco has little arcs in every episode. This season, I really think that he's on a journey of some kind of self-discovery. He's expanding his business ventures. Every episode he's got a plan—he's got something figured out, and he goes for it.
Steve Rannazzisi: Jon bones out some of the hottest chicks in Los Angeles.
Everyone: "Bones out"?
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: You know, the thing about this show and this group of guys is, the uniting principle of the show is that they're in this fantasy football league that they all take more seriously than probably anything else in their lives. And Taco's the one character that reminds you that what they're doing is really fucking stupid. Taco's point of view is really odd, and sometimes shockingly and disturbingly accurate. But really, he's a good sort of counterbalance to these guys and their obsession. He takes a step back and is just going one day at a time, and isn't quite as obsessed as the rest of the guys are. We actually also see Taco change. Taco gets bitten by the bug at one point in the season, and it's pretty fun.
Jon Lajoie: It's funny how in a couple scenes, all of the sudden he'll really want to win. He just feels like it. And then in the next scene—
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: He is like a small child with a shiny balloon. He does get distracted easily by other pretty things—usually, as Steve said, by chicks that he's going to bone.
Nick Kroll: Bone out.
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: What's the out? What's coming out?
Steve Rannazzisi: You gotta bone it out. You gotta get that bone out.
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: I've heard "bone."
Steve Rannazzisi: "Dude, I boned this chick out last night."
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: It's like gutting a fish.
Nick Kroll: That would be "debone."
Paul Scheer: I think the overall arc of the whole season is getting the bone out.
How do you appeal to people who have never played fantasy football or aren't even football fans?
Paul Scheer: I feel like, you can watch E.R. and not be a doctor. You can watch Seinfeld and be like, "Well, that's the life of a stand-up comic. I'm not in that world." It's the same thing here. That's the thing that kind of connects these guys, but the majority of the episode isn't about, "Hey, how many yards did he get?" It's really about their lives outside of that. It's the spine that everything hangs off of.
Nick Kroll: Yeah, and fantasy football just becomes a forum for seeing how different types of people react to different situations, whether it's hubris or fear or congratulations or smacktalking. Whatever it is. It all comes through this thing.
Paul Scheer: It gives you a chance to act out. These guys don't have the chance to act out in their real lives.
Jackie Marcus Schaffer: It's exactly that. You need an organizing principle. Even on a basic cable show that doesn't follow the rules of network shows and is semi-improvisational, you still need somewhat of an organizing principle and sort of a hook to give people the context of what they're watching. And in this, we always wanted to show that was about that point in your life when what you want to be doing starts to get just fucking pummeled and squashed by what you're supposed to be doing. And that small piece of your life, what you want to do, just starts to shrink. It shrinks smaller and smaller as you eat more shit every single day, on every possible level of your life—your family, your kids, your job. It sometimes just becomes this journey of how much shit you can eat as one human being all day long, in all the stuff you're supposed to be doing. This is a way to sort of get away from that.
Nick Kroll: I think the people who don't understand fantasy football will find a ton of stuff to relate to, relationship-wise and otherwise. The fantasy football fans will—you get enough fantasy football. But it's not gonna be a show that three-quarters of is stats. Because that's just not interesting. Go watch Sports Center. But there are all these various forms to it that are both relatable to fantasy football and people who have no idea what it is.
The League airs Thursdays at 10:30pm on FX.
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