Kate McKinnon and Emily Lynne describe Heads Will Roll as “a sitcom for the ears,” but that only begins to explain the wonderfully strange world they have created. The Audible comedy series combines the awkward social situations of Curb Your Enthusiasm with the sprawling fantasy setting of Game of Thrones, following evil queens, bards and other eccentric characters whose everyday problems feel surprisingly familiar.
During Comic-Con, McKinnon and Lynne talked about creating the series together, usually while sitting side by side in bed with a laptop, and why their shared sense of humor makes the writing process work. They also discussed building roles for performers like Richard Kind, encouraging the cast like Laurie Metcalf, Jimmy Fallon, Megan Mullally and Carrie Coon to improvise (after the first take) and the one dream guest star who turned them down.
The new season also finds humor in some bigger questions. Through Mortuana (McKinnon) and Jojo (Lynne), the series explores aging, whether having a family determines a woman’s value, navigating relationships and trying to survive in the world as an introvert. As McKinnon and Lynne explain in the interview, the goal was to wrestle with those ideas while still making the whole thing as funny and ridiculous as possible. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full conversation in the video below or on our YouTube channel.
If you were to pitch this to somebody who had never heard of an Audible comedy series, how would you pitch this show to them?
Kate McKinnon: I would say it’s a sitcom for the ears. It’s a sitcom for the ears.
Emily Lynne: That’s a winning line. People kind of know what you’re talking about when you say that.
Kate McKinnon: You can wrap your mind around that. And I would say that it’s a workplace comedy set in an evil queendom, in a fantasy realm. And I would say it’s Curb Your Enthusiasm meets Game of Thrones. And I would say it’s funny.
You guys have a fantastic cast. When you’re writing and planning the characters, are you immediately thinking of who would be good for these parts? And with that, has any potential cast members turned you down?
Kate McKinnon: Well, we had one heartbreak, which was that we wanted Dr. Nowzaradan from My 600 Pound Life to play a doctor in a series, and he did pass.
Emily Lynne: And that was truly devastating.
Kate McKinnon: That was a blow because he’s a very unique character, and we wanted him represented. But other than that, no, everyone just jumped in with enthusiasm and brought amazing things to it, and we were so lucky.
And as we did write Richard Kind’s part, the part of Saul Bunyan for Richard Kind, and had he said no…
Emily Lynne: …we would have canned the project.
Kate McKinnon: We wouldn’t be here right now. so thank you, Richard.
What is your creative process in creating something so unique and elaborate?
Emily Lynne: Well, frankly, it starts in bed. We are in bed, someone’s got a laptop, and that’s it. We don’t part ways.
Kate McKinnon: We have to do it together.
Emily Lynne: We can’t do it over Zoom.
Kate McKinnon: We tried to Zoom. We tried so many times but we had to be together in the room, just lobbing back and forth and deciding together, ‘no, that sucks,’ or ‘oh, that’s good.’
We have a very similar sense of humor and so what tickles one tickles the other, generally. So, we had a lot of fun.
Do you allow certain people to go more off-book, and do you enjoy that, or do you want them to stay more on-script?
Kate McKinnon: We said do it as scripted, but then do whatever you want. The best idea wins, and just say whatever you want. And so much amazing stuff came out of that, as always does.
My favorite thing as a performer is when someone says, “Ok, now just say whatever you want.” I just love that. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
But just the freedom of being able to try anything, and you’re only restricted by the amount of space on a hard drive. It’s not like, ‘we’re losing the light,’ that often hinders filming something.
I want to go back to the writing stage. What was your process in creating the characters, and at the same time trying to create a different world of telling stories?
Emily Lynne: We sat down and we said, ‘what’s happened in the last seven years to us, interpersonally? What horrible little, small things have happened to us?’ And we came up with a ton. And I think the characters came out of those little weird interactions we had.
Kate McKinnon: Just little social problems, just little social situations, and then combine that with what we imagine as a Game of Thrones-esque, gigantic fantasy world. To me, that’s a winning comedic juxtaposition. The mundane and the fantastical, I find, is always fodder for something.
Was there any episode that you guys kind of really wrestled with, took a while to find the voice, but you’re really proud that you pulled off?
Emily Lynne: The bards, we rewrote those bards 4,000 times.
Kate McKinnon: We had trouble with the two women who narrate the show. We had to modulate the nuances of that plot line a bunch of different times.
Emily Lynne: The pacing took a while to figure out.
Kate McKinnon: Because that is an arc that builds over the season, and we did not pace that correctly, and we had to re-record it. But you can re-record it, because it doesn’t cost that much money to re-record it. It’s just, it’s a very forgiving medium.
With this new season, I’m not sure if Mortuana and Jojo really ever learned something. But for this new season, what are the new struggles for this episode?
Kate McKinnon: I think it’s Mortuana’s struggle and Jojo’s, in a way, is about being a woman over 35 in our culture. And Mortuana’s whole arc is about when you turn 40, you are deposed, your uterus is stolen and burned in effigy unless you produce an heir. And so it’s sort of this notion of like, if you’re over 40 and you don’t have children, what is your value?
Emily Lynne: That’s something we’re grappling with.
Kate McKinnon: It’s something any gal in this culture thinks about. And so, we were sort of thinking about that and just questions of, like, what is a good life and what’s the right thing to do? How close to be to other people? Do you want to live in a family, do you want to live apart? How do you survive in culture as an introvert? These are all questions that we think of and we were kind of grappling with those ideas and just wanted to make people laugh as well, obviously.
