Actress/comedian Aisha Tyler plays Lana Kane on FX's ARCHER.
The half hour animated comedy Archer has made quite a splash since it’s debut last month on FX. Created by Adam Reed and starring the voices of H. Jon Benjamin (as spy Sterling Archer), Judy Greer (as Cheryl and Carol), Jessica Walter (as Archer’s mother Malory) and Aisha Tyler as Archer’s fellow agent/ex-girlfriend Lana Kane, Archer is a hyper-look at the spy business but really is about the zany and wacky things the characters do, say and experience in every half hour. With espionage, global crises and bitter and angry spies all trying to outdo one another, Archer is a hilarious find and audiences are responding as it was just announced Monday that FX is renewing the series for a second season.
To find out more about the ins and outs of Archer, I participated on a press call with other journalists and star Aisha Tyler, who shared how she is able to say some of the outrageous lines, how her animated breasts seem to be getting bigger and what she would say if a feature film animated version of the series were to happen.
Jim Halterman: I want to know just kind of in general, how do you get some of these lines out without just busting up, like, “My vulva is smoother than a veal cutlet.” How do you say that line?
Aisha Tyler: I was just talking to somebody about this, and I was saying that this show is in some ways just a series of out of body experiences because I feel so much kind of confusion and joy every time I go into the sound booth to record this stuff because it’s just such extraordinary language that I’ve never been able to use in television. My background is in standup comedy where I’m very free to choose the words and ideas that I express, but when I’m acting, obviously, and especially when you’re doing network television, there are a lot of constraints, and so this show is just a joy to do. I laugh constantly. I’m incredibly undisciplined. I fall all over the place. I spit into the microphone. I cackle. Luckily for me Adam Reed is as much of a doof as I am, and so we kind of just crack each other up, and the session takes too long and the sound recordist in the booth is tapping his watch, and we don’t care. We just lay on our backs like turtles and wave our legs in the air. It’s a joy. It’s a joy to make the show.
Lana Kane is a sassy spy and former girlfriend of Archer.
JH: You’re so good at comedy, but I’ve also seen some of your dramatic work, like I saw the movie .45that I thought you were so good in it. I wanted to know which, I guess, muscle is more difficult for you, drama or comedy? Which one is a little tougher for you to get into?
AI: That’s a really good question. I’ll say two things about it. Comedy is the muscle that I’ve trained probably the longest and the most intensively. It’s how I got started in entertainment, and because I do standup and that’s really my own…I’m on stage for an hour plus at a time, and it’s just me, and there are no lights and no do-overs. It’s very strenuous, but it’s the muscle that’s most well trained. I love doing drama, and when I started I was very lucky. I did an episode of Nip/Tuck several years ago that was just an extraordinary role, and I was really fortunate to get it, and I was able to do something that I was really proud of with the role, and I started to get a lot of drama offers. A lot of people are like, are you leaving comedy behind to do drama? And to me the transition’s been very natural and easy. I enjoy drama. It uses different parts of my brain. I think if you look at some of the most celebrated dramatic actors right now, they came out of really strong and big, broad comedic backgrounds and Tom Hanks is a perfect example. Everybody thinks about him as being this Oscar-winning actor with this incredible gravitas, but his first job on television Bosom Buddies…for me I enjoy the challenge of drama because it’s a little bit outside of my wheelhouse. I really love it. It’s a different set of problems to solve, but comedy is definitely tougher.
The ARCHER cast of characters
Question: What did you love about Lana, and is the sketch, is how she looks after you, or did you see the sketch first?
AI: They created Lana’s look before they hired me. I think they definitely had an idea in their head. Whether they were thinking about me when they drew her, I don’t know because she does look like me, but they created just mad genius and…I suppose. It’s her personality that I love. I love that she’s a beautiful person and she’s obviously a sexual person, but I don’t think that she’s precious with it, and that’s what I like about her. It’s just an aspect of who she is. She’s never trying to be cute. She obviously knows that occasionally her sexuality is a weapon, but unlike Archer, who I think is a slave to his look, I think Lana is so badass that she would be attractive even if she wasn’t as stacked as she is, and by the way, she gets more and more stacked every episode. She’s getting extraordinarily top-heavy. At some point she’s just going to tip over onto her back, never be able to get up again, and just her lungs will crush under the weight of her chest like a lame horse. We’ll have to shoot her, but I think she lives in her head, and she’s a surgeon, and then she’s a surgeon who’s stacked, which I love.
Question: Do you think you could get away with doing a live-action version of her?
AI: If I had a penny for every fan that has already written me and asked me dress up like Lana, so…good Lord, people. There’s porn on the Internet. It’s free. Don’t look at me. I don’t know. Adam and I have talked a lot about this, and Adam feels pretty strongly that part of the joy and the compulsion of the show is that it’s animated. It allows us I think to be a little bit edgier and crazier than we could be if we were a live-action show. Somehow some of these ridiculous things feel a little less ridiculous and a little less barbed coming out of a cartoon mouth.
Question: As an actress, how do you prepare for you role in Archer, and is your method different from a live-action series?
AI: Well, I could tell you the truth which is I don’t prepare at all. I just kind of show up and see what happens, but I also say because, my process is, at least my comedic process definitely has a lot of its roots in my comedy, my standup background, and luckily for me this is such a well-written show and the lines are so fun to say that I don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what my internal process is or what my character is thinking. I feel like she’s really strongly drawn. Adam and I spent some time really crafting her in the early episodes, and so I know how she thinks and feels, and so my main goal is just to try to say the line in the funniest way possible. One nice thing about doing animation is you get to go in and do the line over and over again until you say it the funniest possible way you think you can, and then we play sometimes. We change words around. I ad lib. Adam says we’ve done it, now go nuts. What would you say here? What would Lana say, and so we really get to play a lot, and a lot of it I like it to just be organic and in the moment versus when you’re doing live action and you’ve got to hit a mark and you’ve got to react to the other actor’s lines and how they’re looking at you. Those things can constrain in some ways how you perform and deliver lines. We just try to get in there and just be funny, and we’ve got the luxury of time. We don’t have 200 people waiting to light the next scene, so we just go until something great happens. Sometimes it happens right away, and sometimes we just hammer at it until we either get something awesome or Adam gives up on me. Most of the time we find really fun ways to deliver the lines, and we’ve got the freedom just to go nuts until it happens.
Question: What’s the one thing you want people to take away from watching this show?
AI: That Archer is the funniest…show on TV. That’s what I want them to take away, and that it deserves to be a cult hit and be on the air for many, many years and then finally explode into the film world with an X-Files-like, but more successful than the first X-Files film feature.
Question: So you would like to do a feature then?
AI: I would love to do that. I’ve already told Adam that we have to do a feature…and then do a big badass, like, twisted Bond, like just an upside-down, crazy, booze-addled Bond super-epic. Think about how much more epic Bond could be if you didn’t have to pay to blow things up? You could just draw explosions. It just would be, like, just two and a half hours of explosions, and then it could be in 3D. I’m getting so excited talking about it.
A marathon of four Archer episodes airs Thursday night on FX from 10pm-midnight ET/PT. Episodes airing are “Diversity Hire,” “Honeypot,” “Mole Hunt” and “Training Day.”
