Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Fire up your griddle because Casual is back! If you’re waiting to dig into the new season 3 episodes, we talked to Tommy Dewey, Michaela Watkins, Tara Lynne Barr and showrunner Zander Lehmann about some very spoilery things! But for those that have already consumed the first three episodes of the season, available now on Hulu, we got some answers on who we’ll meet throughout the season, why Alex has his biggest meltdown yet, and of course, the waffles.
The season opens with a pretty big surprise in the first episode, as Alex and Valerie move on with life after their father’s chosen passing…only to discover he’s not quite Valerie’s father after all.
“I read it and I was like, ‘Oh my God. That’s so big!” Watkins recalled. “I just didn’t know what that meant for the rest of the season. What I love about our show is that it’s such a natural human response where, for me, sometimes when something is so big emotionally, I have this amazing ability to be like, ‘Oh, that didn’t really just happen, right? I’m going to go to Trader Joe’s and finish shopping.’ My brain just has this thing like, ‘Yeah, let’s put that on pause for a while,’ until I could catch up to it. I think the show does that too, where there is this huge revelation and then my character goes off and does other things. But we very much come back to it. The writers don’t feel like, ‘We have to pay this off for the audience right away’.’ They just do what is very human and very natural.”
And that’s not to say the characters ignore it completely. In episode two, Valerie and Alex take a jaunt around Burbank, visiting important landmarks in their childhood and trying to make sense of what they just learned, in an episode directed by Carrie Brownstein, that Lehmann calls, “one of my favorite ones that I’ve written.” He goes on to describe it as “Linklater-y” and said, “It’s two characters in this very specific moment in their life in one night, trying to deal with that and what it means about their relationship. This season we play around with this idea that Alex and Valerie were living together and then they broke up and in a way they are like a couple of exes who are trying to figure out how to be ok with each other. Obviously it’s not sexual romantic love, but there’s a love there and I think we’re trying to really get into what that sibling love looks like and why these people are so close and how they get each other and no one else gets them. I think a lot of that goes back to their upbringing and their family and that whole episode is about putting the demons of your past and your family to rest, spreading those ashes and being free. They get there at the end of the episode and then there’s the moment where Alex hears there’s a half brother and it’s like all this work was for naught and he’s got to deal with it all over again.” As far as that other half brother goes, Lehmann promises, “We have not met him yet but we will, we will probably meet him at some point down the line.”
The way Watkins has come to understand this sibling relationship, arguably one of the most unique in any TV show these days, is that, “We’ve always understood that their relationship is something like, ‘Imagine if this is your soul mate.’ Not in a sexual way. So I sort of adapt all the things that you want from your primary partner and intimate relationship, removing the sexual components of it. I’ve had male best friends when I was younger; not now, I’m definitely more well adjusted than Valerie, but let’s be honest, we all are. But I could draw on experiences, [that] they’re not the appropriate person like your husband, but you sort of have a relationship similar to that. I think that’s just the beauty of this show, it really isolates that relationship and it traps the very real feeling that you can have. These are two people who have had a neglected upbringing with their parents who were really bad at parenting, and they had each other and she raised him a bit. It’s very confusing and cloudy what their relationship is to each other. But when you find out this revelation in the first episode, the impact is neither of them would be who they are if it wasn’t for each other.”
For Valerie, that means a lot more figuring out who she really even is. Season three specifically focuses on her appearance: the way she looks, the clothes she wears, and the fact that she’s very much thinking of how other people, from her therapy patients to her family to potential partners, perceive her. It all starts to really bubble up in episode four, but Watkins admitted, “I love the way it was handled.” After her character spent enough time in “kindergarten teacher clothes,” she huddled with the wardrobe department, executive producer Jason Reitman, and Lehmann, and they decided, “We’ve got to give her somewhere to go. This is a woman who has not really focused on this part of her life for a really long time.” But the best part about it all? One of her besties, Lake Bell, was directing the episode where Valerie tries out some new wardrobe options. “Fun fact: Lake is my fashion consigliere,” Watkins confessed. “I run so many things by her before I put them on my body. She’s just like, ‘No, you can’t wear that.’ So the fact that she was directing the episode where my character starts to transition into normal people clothes was really, really fun.”
While Valerie is busy confronting her relationship with clothes, Alex is confronting his very own with…apps. The character is a dating app creator, but it’s the everyday apps such as Lyft and Postmates that both Alex and Dewey are addicted to. “I use food ordering apps an obscene amount, in a way that makes me hate myself,” Dewey confessed. So you’d think his character Alex would be able to relate a bit more to the millennials known for having their phone glued to their hand at all times, but such is not the case. “Alex has to go back to work and you’re talking specifically about the tech space and the app space, Alex is on the old end of that. He goes to work at this company that’s full of millennials that he just can’t connect with, and seeing the millennial world through his point of view I think is really funny. He does not play well with others to begin with, but especially not the young hotshots that don’t take him seriously. Alex has his biggest meltdown of the series in this season when he can’t figure out how to fix a young person’s computer. As always, it’s not about the computer, it’s about everything else that’s going on, but it boils over in this one instance.” Dewey has also made some big changes IRL when it comes to technology. “I just shut down the cloud, I’m no longer comfortable sharing things with the cloud,” he stated.
Speaking of millennials, there’s a lot in store for Valerie’s daughter, Laura, this season too. Even though she’s one of the most interesting and wittiest teen characters around, Lehmann explained, “It’s really tough, honestly she’s hard to write for. We’re lucky that Tara is the actress that she is because in the hands of a lesser actress, a lot of the stuff just wouldn’t work at all. We’re trying to get a 17-year-old girl into an adult world and have it feel believable and real but also have it be interesting and challenge her. At times, you sort of forget that she’s 17, but this season, you watch Laura struggle to find direction and find a mentor and find a reason to live and a passion.”
“I think a lot of it is her looking around at her family dynamic and taking into consideration the history that their family has,” Barr offered. “She’s just yearning for that sort of loving, affectionate, warm family life that she’s never experienced; a family life that’s free of dysfunction and codependence and any sort of bitterness.” This is demonstrated by a pretty stupid and selfish move that Laura makes with a new friend, and while Barr fully understood the decision her character was making, she said, “I hope audiences understand where she is coming from. I certainly did when I read it. I think she’s just reaching out for something that she doesn’t even quite know herself.”
“I don’t know how Zander figured out how to write this character because she’s such an enigma,” the actress said. “Every season, I’ve made little discoveries about her because she is so multifaceted in a way that I’ve really never seen before in a teenage girl character. The first season was getting to know her a little bit and getting to know what made her tick. The second season you learn even more. And the third season now is heartbreaking to me as somebody who’s still learning this character. Her relationships with her romantic partners and her relationship with her mom and learning new things about her and her grandmother. It’s all a learning experience and I never for one second deluded myself into thinking that I 100% understood this character. She’s very confounding. Zander and our writing staff did a bang-up job with her because she is just a tough nut to crack.”
Don’t worry, Laura’s not the only nut this season. As always, Casual welcomes a slew of talented, interesting, and just slightly attractive guest stars to the mix for season three. Most notably, Chace Crawford shows up for a storyline in a role we’ve really never seen him in before. “We tried to cast this role and we read a bunch of people and no one got it,” Lehmann explained. “This was actually to Lake Bell’s credit, she was directing the episodes and was like, ‘I just worked with Chace on my movie, he’s great, he can totally do this.’ I think we were all a little skeptical, and ultimately we couldn’t find anyone to do it and she was like, ‘Trust me, he’s good.’ He came in and he was doing this thing I don’t think we’ve ever seen him do. He’s playing this character and was so committed to it and truly was really good and really funny and plays this clueless LA hot guy kind of perfectly. He comes back for more episodes and I will say, he was a joy, a total joy and Lake was dead on, he totally got it.”
Watkins, his main scene partner, echoes the sentiment, saying, “I’ll be honest, I never watched Gossip Girl so I didn’t know who Chace Crawford was. But I knew that I was lucky to work with him. He seems very beloved. But what I’m sure a lot of people may not know, because of Gossip Girl, is that he is an extremely hilarious person. He is so funny.” So much so, he had Dewey worrying about job security! “I was hoping he was just a super handsome guy and couldn’t act and wasn’t funny and I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Dewey said. “He’s very good and very funny so I’m like, shit. Should I look for another job?”
Dewey’s got nothing to worry about, as long as his character keeps showing up to therapy with his therapist played by Katie Aselton. “She’s so great and understated in all the right ways and feels so natural. She keeps coming back because I think we love her so much and she and I have this really easy rapport. We just kinda fall into it where the first couple takes always are useable and then it’s just a matter of trying some different things. I think we both have the same sort of comedic sensibility and are on the same wavelength. I love working with her, she pops in several times this year.” And it was all due to a chance encounter, as Lehmann recalled. “I met Katie at a bar one night and I was like, you’d be perfect for this. She’s friends with Michaela in real life and I thought it’d be great to have them be friends in the show. She straddles the line between ethical and unethical as a therapist treating Alex. I think she’s really funny too, I wish I had more to do with her, honestly. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to guest stars. We just have a lot of people who are willing to buy in and do the role that we write. We’ve been really lucky to get these people and it makes the show feel fresh in a show that could very easily not feel fresh.”
“In the same way I’m a pig in shit with our directors, it’s the same with these guest stars,” Dewey said. “We’ve created this sandbox where really good people will come and play with us for a couple weeks.” This season he gets to mix it up with Jamie Chung, Maya Erskine of Man Seeking Woman and Insecure, and “the great Judy Greer who is my love interest for the back half of the season.” Eliza Coupe returns as Emmy for a charming interaction with Alex, as does Kyle Bornheimer as Jack.
“I think it speaks to the design of the show,” Dewey continued. “We want to bring on characters with 3 dimensions who can play in multiple episodes. You use them in one, maybe you put them on a shelf, and then a season later you take them off the shelf and use them again. I think the character design of the show is thorough and specific and it lets you reuse people, so I think [the actors] think it’s worth my time to come do that.”
And that covers it all! Oh just kidding, we still have the waffles to discuss! And Dewey didn’t hold back when it comes to discussing his process for waffle consumption on the show. “I don’t like the spit thing, the whole idea of doing the spit bucket, it kinda grosses me out. It took me years to learn but I eat very conservatively and in my coverage I really eat. We basically have a kitchen running half the year on the show. And that’s props department, so they are back there cooking hundreds of waffles. Because if you think about the number of takes you do, and you never know how many you’re gonna end up doing, and you think about all the different angles, all the different coverage. I mean, these poor souls are making so many waffles, but as a result they’ve gotten so good at it, the waffles are really good. By the way, we double down, there is tons of waffle stuff this year, we’re just leaning into it. I’ve probably eaten 50 waffles on the show. So, not crazy. Somewhere around 50 with some nice ice cream. Some ice cream gets involved this year, there’s a very kinky nachos scene that I don’t want to spoil, but things get kinda hot around a plate of nachos.” As if we needed another reason to watch this show…
