Arrested Development: Adam DeVine explains his cameo

Spoiler alert! Don’t keep reading unless you’ve seen the fourth season premiere of Arrested Development.

The fourth season of Arrested Development has a lot of surprises (ostriches! more ostriches!) and a lot of cameos (John K——-!) (Dan H—–!) and one of the first is Adam DeVine — who shows up in the premiere behind the desk at an airport, (unhelpfully) trying to help Jason Bateman’s Michael book a flight. But DeVine isn’t alone: He’s joined by his Workaholics co-stars and -creators Blake Anderson and Anders Holm in a spin on their slacker-corporate trio.

It was an intentional bit of showbiz cross-pollination, DeVine says: Arrested creator Mitch Hurwitz was actually on their Comedy Central show back in season two. “He had some down time in-between figuring out what he was going to do with Arrested Development and some other projects and he was like, ‘I’d love to come help in any way,'” DeVine explains. “And we were like, ‘Do you act?’ And he was like, ‘No, not really.’ And we were like, ‘Well we want to give you a part!’

They did — as “Cool Eric” — and then thought that would be the end of it. “And then he contacted us probably about a year later and was like, ‘Hey I want to give you guys a little cameo on Arrested Development, I think that’d be fun for the fans.’ And we flipped out.”

DeVine says that shooting for the cameo took just a day — coincidentally one of the very first days of production. But the set’s chaos was controlled, appropriate for the show’s high-octane absurdity. “It wasn’t chaotic in like lights were falling over and they weren’t able to get the shots. It was just that things moved very quickly.”

The pace was appropriate for DeVine, who prefers to keep moving. Plus, he says, “It’s cool that I’m sort of starting to be pigeonholed in these really dumb characters.”

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