Spooky season just got animated. Netflix is dropping ‘Haunted Hotel,’ a brand new adult comedy series that checks in just in time for fall chills and laughs. Tomatometer-Approved Critic and Celebrity Interviewer, Patrick Beatty, sat down with creator Matt Roller, along with stars Eliza Coupe and Jimmi Simpson, to talk about building this haunted hideaway where comedy meets creepy.
Patrick: When you’re dealing with animation and you’re working with talent, or you’re yourself working on a character, is it more influential to see the actual art and the animation as opposed to looking at the character in the script, or does it depend on which story it is?
Matt Roller: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I mean, it’s very circular, but, you know, in the typical production process, the animation and especially the color animation come much later in the process. But later in the season, as we started to like, get animation back because you get episode by episode, we saw how they were like making the characters move and like, oh, they’re giving us all these weird gestures. That helped change the writing, too. Yeah, it all feeds back on itself.
Patrick: Eliza, was there anything that you have you seen any of, like the scene so far, any of the episodes where a joke came out and you were like “Wait, I didn’t think that was going to land as well as it did”?
Eliza Coupe: I think for me, it’s always when we have to do all the grunting and all the running and panting sounds. You’re like, “Is that going to sound okay?” as you’re standing in a booth, just panting.
Patrick: I feel like a lot of the jokes come from the editing, too. Not just in the delivery, but how they end up shaping it for the whole overall story. If you were to have any type of side hustle, Jimmi, for your character in The Haunted Hotel, what do you think you would end up being?
Jimmi Simpson: It would be probably about like dicing or slicing or some kind of food prep that needs sharp blades, doing exactly what Abadon would like to be done. You would find fascination in the precision of cooking.
Eliza Coupe: Like Abadon, all of a sudden, guest spots on the bear.
Jimmi Simpson: Amen, Amen. That’s a great chainsaw massacre.
Patrick: Which of you would actually make a horrible hotel manager?
Eliza Coupe: I micromanage every one of my life, so. Yeah. No, I’d be fine.
Jimmi Simpson: Yeah, I would do relations. I’m just not organizing anything.
Patrick: If you could put a classic monster character that you can put into this, who would it be?
Matt Roller: Ooh, it’s hard to think of. You know, I’m thinking of, like, the universal.
Jimmi Simpson: I’m thinking monsters of, like, the creature from the Black Lagoon to have, because there’s so much. Not just that character, but how that costume was built, all that stuff. That’d be cool.
Patrick: What is your favorite hotel amenity that you can’t go without anytime you check in?
Matt Roller: I like the bed. Yeah, the bed would. Yeah. If I weren’t there, that’d be kind of problematic.
Jimmi Simpson: It’s the blackout curtains. Oh, yeah. Those are great. I mean, when you have off for work that has a night shoot, if you don’t have that, you know, I don’t sleep.
Eliza Coupe: I like water, good water, bottled water. They put, like, little bottles in hotels.
Haunted Hotel is streaming this week, just in time for spooky season, only on Netflix. For more celebrity interviews, make sure to check out See It or Skip It Fridays on News4Utah+.
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