‘The Chair Company’ Is Tim Robinson’s World, but His Co-Stars Are Thrilled to Live in It

Lake Bell, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Joseph Tudisco tell IndieWire about the experience of joining a singular TV comedy that only gets weirder by the page.

Anyone cynical enough to spout the old adage that “there’s nothing new under the sun” has clearly never seen “The Chair Company.” Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s mind-bending HBO comedy builds off the comedic tropes they established in “I Think You Should Leave” — bizarre fake companies and the loyalty and ire they inspire, the ways that unspoken social rules and norms sometimes present as indecipherable codes, and the obsessions and outbursts of middle-aged men who would otherwise be invisible — and expand them into something infinitely more complex.

“The Chair Company” manages to be a zany workplace comedy, a domestic family drama, and an edge-of-your-seat weekly mystery series at the same time, elegantly balancing the three components without ever letting one feel out of place. The success is partially a testament to the incredible supporting cast that Kanin and Robinson assembled to surround him. From fellow comedy writers and “I Think You Should Leave” veterans to dramatic actors and celebrity impersonators, the show contains a galaxy of characters who can turn even the smallest interactions into something memorable.

Stars Lake Bell, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Joseph Tudisco recently spoke to IndieWire about the singular experience of working on “The Chair Company.” They all made it clear that the project was like nothing they had ever encountered before, but they jumped at the chance to come along for the ride.

“I immediately was like, ‘Where do I sign? How do I get to be a part of this?,'” Bell said. “Because I think I can intuit that, given it’s the brainchild of Tim and Zach, I understood that tonally it would be sort of a new flavor of comedic subversion that I had not really seen. And so I think when you finally read something that feels so unique, especially as a creator myself, as a writer myself, I was like, ‘I want to be a part of this party.'”

“My first reaction when I read the script is who thought of me?,” Phillips added with a laugh. “Because I tend to be very specific. People don’t think outside of the box when it comes to me. My people are the one who have to go, ‘Hey, what about Lou? He can do comedy. He’s done things like this before. He’s been a bad guy,’ whatever. And for someone to have thought of me for that role, obviously they’re a genius, but I still don’t know who it is.”

None of they key players went in colder than Tudisco, whose deceptively warm performance as sometimes-mobster Mike Santini holds a large chunk of the show together. While the other actors had seen “I Think You Should Leave” and were familiar with Robinson’s brand of comedy, Tudisco was a newbie. That created some surprises once he arrived on set, but it led him to approach the casting process in a more straightforward manner that helped him find the pathos of the character.

“I did a little research when I booked it. So I saw the type of humor he had,” Tudisco said. “I’ve been through things where this character, in some manner, or shape, or form has appeared in my life. So I had all those elements and I didn’t preordain anything. Whatever the moment was, I tried to exist in it using myself as the character.”

But as it turns out, Tudisco wasn’t that far behind anyone else. Because no matter how much you knew about Robinson and Kanin’s prior work, there was no way to fully wrap your mind around the mad genius of the show. Phillips, who fills show’s main villain role as smarmy architectural firm CEO Jeff Levjman, explained that he sometimes didn’t know the intended tone of scenes after he had shot them.

“I don’t think I have been more fluid in a role than I have in this one because you never know what you’re going to get. And just reading the scripts, I couldn’t always figure out what the tone was going to be,” Phillips said. “There are a lot of really wonderful comedies out there these days that capture their tone perfectly and I wasn’t exactly sure what we were shooting for. And even on set, a lot of times having directed a lot for television and written and whatnot, I’d come home and my wife went, ‘Well, how’d it go?’ And I’d go, ‘I have no idea.'”

He continued, “We would approach scenes in two or three different ways, we would re-block, we would rethink, we would improv. And at the end of the day, I would never know which nuggets Tim and Zach were going to gravitate toward. I always left feeling like we had done really, really good work. I just never knew what the shape of things was going to be.”

Bell echoed some of those sentiments, though she had a bit more clarity about her own purpose within the show. She explained that as Barb Trosper, a suburban mom and entrepreneur whose husband Ron (Robinson) gets sucked into a vast chair-related conspiracy, her role was primarily to be a dramatic foil to the craziness. That prompted her to approach Barb as if the show were a true drama, allowing her to reflect the chaos that Ron is constantly bringing into their otherwise normal lives.

“I like how you’re just asking that so gently,” Bell said with a laugh when asked about finding the balance between the human drama and the absurdity. “Yeah, it’s absurd. I do feel like my character, Barb, is integral to grounding us as viewers. Even I recognize very much what my job is, to complement and service the absurdity. So I think Barb often is kind of what everyone else is, how the general population would react to certain things. And yet there’s a patience, there’s a consistency and patience and sobriety to Barb that I also recognize is essential to make it work.”

Bell also explained that even the briefest roles were cast with intentionality, with Kanin and Robinson using small roles as opportunities to experiment with casting actors from unusual backgrounds.

“There was this one thing I talk about in the flashback Barb and Ron are at a Christmas party. And I show up on the day and I think, OK, I know that there’s this one little scene where Ron is talking to this guy who’s talking his ear off and Ron’s looking at me like, ‘Oh, my God,'” she said. “And they cast a gentleman who only, and he’s never been on camera, he only is a Curly impersonator. He does Curly from The Three Stooges and he only does Curly. Also, where do you hire this person?”

Bell was unable to answer some follow-up questions about whether this impersonator was part of a trio of Three Stooges impersonators or if you have to separately find a freelance Moe and Larry in order to book him for a gig. But she continued the story, which illustrated the attention to detail that goes into every scene of “The Chair Company” and leaves its stars utterly unprepared for whatever madness might happen on set on a given day.

“So he’s doing Curly as this person who’s talking Ron’s ear off and that on the page was just like some random dude, could have been a day player,” she said. “And they would have him turn up his Curly and then turn down his Curly and they were like seeing, ‘OK, let’s try it with full Curly and then like half Curly and then turn completely Curly off.’ He actually couldn’t even speak. The guy, he was so sweet. He just was like, ‘I don’t know how to do this without being Curly.'”

All of the actors stressed that the madcap experience was made possible by the openness and creative generosity of Kanin and Robinson, whose unhinged onscreen persona is a far cry from the professional approach he takes on set.

“On a personal note, I think we started off very slow and I wouldn’t say guarded, but not quite sure where we would go with this dynamic. And it developed to be… he gave a lot,” Tudisco said. “He never demanded a lot from me. He let me be what my choices were and a little bit here, a little bit there. It was tweaked and whatnot, but pretty much just letting me run with who Mike Santini was in my mind. And I guess pretty much so it was accepted by them. So that’s how that went. But in general, working with Tim is just wonderful. We really developed a wonderful relationship. He’s very generous, very gracious, very supportive through the whole run.

“The Chair Company” has already been renewed for Season 2, and the stars made it clear that they still barely understand what happened in Season 1, let alone what’s coming next. But they’re all just as curious as the rest of us about where the show could go from here.

“Zero. Nada. Nothing,” Phillips said when asked if he knows anything about what’s next for Jeff. “They don’t tell me bupkis. Tim and Zach really play their cards close to the vest. I don’t think any of us involved, Joe or Lake, I don’t know if any of us know really where it’s going or what the end game is. I think as they exhibited in Season 1, they’re willing to go anywhere. And I literally joked with Zach at the premiere party. I said, ‘OK, loving the show, man. Don’t kill me, OK?’ And Zach just paused. I thought, ‘Oh, great. Oh, wonderful. That’s on the table.'”

“The Chair Company” Season 1 is now streaming on HBO Max.