When you bring a date home, setting the right mood with some smooth grooves is an integral part of sealing the deal. It’s not however, a common pre-interview tactic. Speaking for both of us Adam said, “I don’t know if its the publicists at Comedy Central [or here in LA] but [the on hold music was] very sexy. Some Harry Potter looking for Hermione type shit.” He then asked the publicist if she could get hold of that “sensual blend” for him. Presumably for personal use, but if he wants to get unprofessional I’m no prude.
If you haven’t seen Workaholics, Adam DeVine is probably most familiar for his role in the teen a capella movie ‘Pitch Perfect.’ Those two roles don’t have much in common and he’s still a little surprised by the crossover fans. “It’s kind of weird…suddenly having an eleven year old girl come up to you [does little girl voice] ‘Are you Adaaam?’ And I’m like ‘How do you know me? Your parents should be arrested. You’re not supposed to be watching Workaholics.’”
His Comedy Central show isn’t R rated (a UK 18), but that is a direction he’d like to take the show. “The thing is, we’re naked and smoking weed often. So I don’t know what we have to do.” At which point we concluded that it’s probably going to need a few more naked women. As Adam says, “they let male nudity slide because it’s hilarious. But female nudity – nope. If it gets the loins burning, it’s a hard R.” It’s those damn double standards. Yet again. “I hate it. I hate it, man.”
There was some concern that Workaholics’ less than family-friendly content could hinder him getting other roles. But so far he’s not suffered any negative backlash with recent parts on Community, Arrested Development and Super Fun Night. Not to mention a recurring role on the multi-award winning Modern Family. “I was surprised when [the Modern Family producers] came to me and said ‘We want you to play this really sensitive, nice guy who’s maybe too nice.’” Especially because as he describes it, his role in Pitch Perfect “was this crazy egomaniac douchebag, and then Adam in Workaholics is, well, a crazy egomaniac party animal.”
Even allowing for this recent diversification, he doesn’t think he’ll be getting a cameo on Downton Abbey any time soon. But if he got a chance to be on the ITV show he says he’d be “the lost Crawley brother with the rightful claim to Downton” who went down on the Titanic and “somehow just surfed the iceberg all the way [to Downton].”
It’s a wonderful image, and it works even better in Adam’s British accent. Which he’s the first to admit isn’t the best. “I auditioned for Saturday Night Live five or six years ago and they wanted me to do some impressions. And I was like ‘Ello I’m from Britt-en.’ One of the reasons I can’t do an accent is because I can’t do it without stating the country I’m from.” Which he confesses, sort of defeats the purpose of doing the accent.
Last year he won a Teen Choice award for Best Villain (Pitch Perfect), but he’s pretty pissed that they still haven’t sent him his surfboard. I encouraged him to use his half million (“590.8 – but who’s counting?”) followers to launch a social media campaign on his behalf. He demurs, but he is impressed with social media’s capacity to bring him minor material wealth. “I went and bought this new coffee machine – a Keurig – and it broke right away, so I took photos of it and I was like ‘This is my Keurig graveyard.’ And within ten minutes Keurig contacted me and were like ‘Please don’t do that. And we’ll send you a new Keurig and all the coffee you can handle.’ So that’s why to me having so many fans is cool. Because now when my life sucks I can get on the internet and be a psychopathic douchebag maniac about it and I get free stuff. Which I think is the goal in everyone’s life.”
A couple of days ago Miley Cyrus asked on Twitter when Workaholics was coming back. When I ask how he feels this affects the credibility of the show, he tells me that he’s unsure, but he does believe that like it or not, she’s quite possibly the “voice of a generation.”
Although from a purely personal perspective he’s enjoying the circularity of it all. Back when he and co-writers Blake Anderson and Anders Holm were writing Season 2 of Workaholics and they needed a break, “we would crank [Miley’s] ‘Party In The USA’ full blast and just bump and grind to it…and then we were ready to get back to work.”
With the recent production line of made-for-TMZ stars the Disney channel has produced, this got us speculating about who would be the next one to go off the reservation. But in the end he doesn’t think it really matters. “In like 30 years, you guys won’t have a member of Parliament who doesn’t have dick photos out there. And that’ll be a platform that you stand on when you’re running for office. ‘You’ve seen the dick pics, you know what I’m working with. Now let me swing my bat.’ I think that’s where we’re going as a society and personally I’m looking forward to it.”
Workaholics is on Comedy Central Friday’s at 11pm
