When Cody Heller began dating Dan Harmon, the outré creator of the television shows Community and Rick and Morty, they made a pact: This time would be different. The freshly minted couple made a commitment to “total honesty”—especially when it came to sex. They consumed and critiqued porn together and confessed their deepest, darkest sexual kinks. “One of the things that came out of that was Dan telling me that he had a sex doll,” Heller recalls.
Heller initially brushed it off. As a sexually curious and open-minded person herself, who was she to judge? But the thought of the doll haunted her. “I found myself thinking about her a lot. Whereas Dan saw it as an ‘it’ and an object, I saw her as a person,” she says. “I found myself applying a personality to her, humanizing her, and feeling jealous, asking myself: Do I live up to her? Am I as pretty as her? What does she look like? What is she like? I became obsessed with this doll, and it was taking up a lot of my mental space.”
One day, she noticed a sprinkling of glitter on his shirt. “I was like, What is that?” she remembers. “And it turns out it was from the doll, which raised so many questions. Was the doll sleeping in bed with him? What was going on? What do I have to offer? He had a sex doll so he didn’t need me for sex, and then I wondered if I was a smart enough or good enough person to be with Dan, who I idolized at the beginning of the relationship because he was so much more successful than me.”
If that weren’t enough, she’d just parted ways with her longtime writing partner to strike out on her own. The flood of emotions gave her an idea: a spec script where she befriends the doll—who can talk—and eventually becomes her conscience, confidante and writing partner all rolled into one. “She’s the voice in my head telling me I’m not good enough,” explains Heller.
She ended up really digging the script she wrote, so the next step was presenting it to Dan. “I gave it to him to read and he loved it, and was so supportive,” she says, before chuckling. “Eventually, he did wind up getting rid of the sex doll. I didn’t mean to shame him about it… and we started living together so he didn’t really need the sex doll anymore, because he could use me as his sex doll.”
After receiving the green light from Quibi, the $2 billion “quick bites” video app that shows content in 10-minute bursts, the next step was finding the right actors to play “Cody” and “Dan” in Dummy. Enter Anna Kendrick, the Oscar-nominated star of stage and screen, who expressed interest in the scripts. She then met Heller for dinner and it turned into “a four-and-a-half-hour love session.” Kendrick not only bought into the character but became a producing partner on the project.
Next came “Dan.” With Kendrick’s window of availability coming to a close—she shoehorned the 18-day shoot between two big movie projects—Heller and her team was scrambling to find their guy. One night, incredibly stoned in a hotel room, Heller dozed off to Law & Order: SVU (as one does). “I woke up in the middle of the night suddenly and saw Donal Logue on SVU, and was like, That’s him!” Meredith Hagner voices the sex doll, Barbara, while Joel McHale, Rob Corddry and Chris Parnell play a trio of douchey Hollywood agents.
Since the show explored a young woman coming to terms with her own insecurities, both personal and professional, Heller made sure that many of the department heads on set were women—including the director (Tricia Brock), the cinematographer (Catherine Goldschmidt), the production designer (Beauchamp Fontaine) and the composer (Mandy Hoffman).
The sex dolls provided plenty of on-set entertainment too. “It was so fun to make a show where we would have meetings and the prop mistress would go, OK, so these are the dirty vaginas and these are the clean vaginas. Would you like me to dirty this one up a bit? Such a fun, silly, delightful process,” she offers, adding, “The shoot was the best 18 days of my life. We had such a magical time together.”
While we won’t spoil how the show—premiering on April 20—ends, it does beg the question: Why did the real Dan Harmon get a sex doll? And what happened to it?
“This is going to get a little graphic,” Heller warns. “He has a foot fetish, and so he had this little mannequin leg—but his dog chewed up his mannequin leg. They didn’t have the mannequin leg he liked anymore, so he came upon this sex doll online and thought, That could work for me. In real life, he didn’t use the doll to have sex with her, but I did fictionalize that part, because I thought it was more dramatic and fun.”
Cody Heller, creator of Dummy
Sela ShiloniWhen the two got engaged and moved in together, Harmon put the sex doll out to pasture. “He had his assistant bring it to some garbage dump and get rid of it. So, she’s in a garbage dump somewhere in a coffin-box,” says Heller. And, even though she never laid eyes on the real doll, she thought, “A part of me is going to miss her.”
With Dummy dropping next week on Quibi, a mobile content app intended for “the in-between moments” when you’re out and about and consumed on your phone, Heller is still confident that the show will one day make it to a bigger screen; after all, there’s a clause in all Quibi contracts wherein the rights revert back to the makers in two years time. “So in two years, me and the studio and Anna will own it, so we’ll turn it into a movie or do whatever we want with it,” she says.
Plus, a show about a sex doll could be rather timely given the nationwide shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19: “Right now, during quarantine, I’m curious if there are men quarantined by themselves thinking, Well, I guess I’m going to finally go for it and get that sex doll I’ve always been wanting.”
