When Zach Woods was first cast as Gabe on Season 6 of The Office, he found a comment online where someone described his face as a “combination of sadness and food poisoning.” And that was before he had even appeared in an episode. “I was like, buckle up, here we go!” he recalls thinking at the time.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Woods breaks down how he went from the “abject terror” of joining one of his favorite comedy shows to channeling some of the tech world’s biggest weirdos as Jared on HBO’s Silicon Valley. He also discusses co-creating and starring as the deeply awkward fictional NPR host Lauren Caspian in his new stop-motion animated Peacock show In the Know opposite live-action celebrities like Mike Tyson, Hugh Laurie, Nicole Byer, and others.
“The thing about Lauren is he‘s so uncomfortably close to me in a way that I really, really wish weren’t true,” Woods tells me of his character, who looks a bit like This American Life’s Ira Glass but also evokes podcast hosts like Malcolm Gladwell, Ezra Klein, and The Daily’s Michael Barbaro. (The series begins with Lauren practicing his active listening “hmms” shirtless in the mirror.) If he wasn’t an actor, Woods says he would want to be Fresh Air host Terry Gross.
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So what exactly does he have in common with his character? “Smug, moral self-satisfaction that is not backed up by your actual life,” Woods answers. Also, “venal self-involvement.”
One of the early inspirations for In the Know came shortly after George Floyd was murdered by police officers in 2020. Woods was walking through the wealthy Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles when he spotted a “Defund the Police” sign on someone’s front lawn directly next to a sign for ADT security that warned of armed guards.
“I was like, Jesus Christ!” he marvels now. “‘Defund the police… but also we have armed mercenaries to protect our Audi SUV.’ It’s just like, come on.”
He found a kindred spirit in his old Silicon Valley boss Mike Judge, who co-created In the Know with Woods and Brandon Gardner. When Judge does satire, Woods says, “it’s both totally unsparing and cutting, but it’s also kind of warm.” Instead of the point of view being “from on high looking down, it’s lateral.”
“Instead of, ‘Aren’t these people assholes?’ it’s like, ‘Aren’t we all such assholes?’ And that actually is more my worldview,” Woods explains. “I don’t think I’m better than the people who are virtue signaling. I’m probably one of them more often than not. And so we wanted to try to understand the core needs, wounds, desires that motivate people to act in these kind of cringey ways.”
Of course, the risk of making earnest liberals the target of the show’s punchlines is that they would end up with a show that appeals mostly to a right-wing audience. What if these self-serious progressives aren’t willing to laugh at themselves?
“Certainly the purpose of the show was not to just be like the workplace comedy of the January 6th insurrectionists,” Woods says with a laugh. “But I think because there’s such factionalism, and people are so dug in politically and in terms of their identity, I do feel like there isn’t that much self-ridicule happening across the political divide.”
“What we wanted to do is show people who have many different contradictory aspects,” he adds. “And I think the more we can experience ourselves and each other that way, as being not just one thing, but a lot of different things all at once, then my hope would be that if we could do that more than we would have more of an appreciation for our own ridiculousness, and more empathy for other people.”
At that moment, Woods stops himself with one more self-deprecating realization: “Now I’m starting to sound like Lauren, describing the utopia on the other side of my 20-minute stop-motion comedy.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
