Nick Frost is no stranger in finding the comedy in the horrifying. While many know him for his breakout performance as the loutish Ed in 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Frost has recently transitioned to behind the scenes, serving as a producer (along with frequent collaborator Simon Pegg) on 2018’s Slaughterhouse Rulez and Truth Seekers — the brand new series premiering October 30 on Amazon, which he co-wrote with Pegg.
Frost’s brilliant ability to blend his uncanny comedic timing with a sense of immense sincerity and charming deviousness has made him a staple in film and television for nearly two decades. In Truth Seekers, all of these traits are on full display as Frost plays Gus, a British broadband installer who also happens to be an amateur ghost hunter who runs the YouTube channel “Truth Seeker.” Gus’ world is turned on its head when he and his new partner Elton John (Samson Kayo, Timewasters), and are oddly dispatched to extremely haunted locations and then stumble upon Astrid (Emma D’Arcy, Wanderlust) — a woman haunted by malevolent entities.
During New York Comic Con’s virtual press session this month, Frost sat in on a roundtable along his fellow cast members — the brilliant Susan Wokoma (Enola Holmes) who play’s Elton’s sister and the legendary Malcolm McDowell (Rob Zombie’s Halloween) who play’s Gus’ dad — to talk about Truth Seekers. In this very funny, candid and honest interview the trio talk about horror and comedy, ghost hunting, and more.
Is the show set where there is a different ghost every episode or is there one main storyline throughout the entire season?
Nick Frost: There are a few monsters of the week in there, but they lead us to where we’re going at the end. So, there’s a reason for every monster. I always loved The X-Files and I always loved the monster of the week, they were always my favorite. I got a little bit of bored of Mulder’s sister going missing. I’m aware that although it’s always fun to have the backstory and how got here, it’s also nice to have a little possessed doll or wheelchairs flying around.
In July 2020 Simon Pegg had a quote about doing horror comedy. To paraphrase he said that “To do it successfully you just have to not make fun of horror. The key to horror comedy is taking the horror completely seriously and the comedy is adjacent to it.” How hard is it as a writer and as actors to not make fun of horror, to do the easy jokes. How hard is it to find that balance?
Nick Frost: As a writer, I just wrote a comedy. I think the trick in writing it and acting it is that all of this is happening right now. It’s not something to be laughed at or sneered at. But, it happens to be funny because human beings are inherently fucking weird and frightening and funny and horny. I think once you make characters real and believable then you can make the “homedy” (laughs). I think I just coined a new phrase by accident guys!
Susan Wokoma: Sick (laughs).
Nick Frost: It sounds like something you’d eat at a Southern dinner, a plate of homedy. Homedy and grits! Obviously with horror there are certain little beats you have in terms of jumps, but you don’t want to rely on one note for it to be horrific. We overwrote the whole series. Some of these episodes were coming in at 40 pages long, and once Jim [Field-Smith] came in and got attached he made the point of “Why don’t we trim a lot of this out and leave the horror time to grow and space to grow.” That’s something I never thought. But when you watch The Shining it’s just growing into your mind even from the beginning with that fucking Bartok overtures, they just drive up to The Overlook. There’s nothing happening there, but you feel terrified it’s fucking brilliant. And then with the comedy, it’s just people being funny and people having a laugh or people being afraid and it’s not like, “Whoa, this ghost has got its bum out!” … which, I’d say look out for that in the second season.
Susan Wokoma: Firstly, it will be my bum out in the second season. What Nick said in terms of how I approach comedy is that you’re always sort of looking for the truth in it. And then that’s kind of what makes it funny because people are funny and weird and horny as Nick said. I’ve only done one horror comedy [Crazyhead] before and that’s how I approached it. It was, it’s just it’s happening. And within that, that’s funny. You could see a ghost and that’d be genuinely funny, but also make you throw up at the same time and that’s funny, but that’s also a natural reaction to seeing a ghost. As long as you play it, truthfully, I think you can do anything. And so, yeah, that’s kind of what I learned on the other show that I did. And then with this, I’ve got more practice.
What kind of ghost-hunting training did you have to do for the show?
Susan Wokoma: I feel like I’ve sort of been in ghost-training all my life. I actually used to go looking for ghosts with my brother at a place called elephant and castle, which sounds quite ghostly, but it’s not, it’s quite a tick in London. Yeah, we were big into that. So I feel like I’ve just been gearing up for the show.
Nick Frost: Like Susan, I have been really my whole life in and around the spirit world. I lost my virginity in a witch’s house and I sort of cut a move on the table when I was at it and it’s never left me, you know? My mum was one of seven sisters from a place called Pembrookshire, and they would always tell me stories about the dead and ghosts, and so I’ve always kind of believed in it. I can feel it around me now if I stop and think.
Malcolm, do you have anything you wanted to add about your experience with the supernatural on the show?
Malcolm McDowell: No, not really. I’m not a great believer in ghosts, sorry. I’ve never really been into that, but I wish I could see those. I would love it. I would love to have a chat or to see something, you know, go through a wall.
How did you and the creators choose locations for the series? Like, was there anything that inspired, any specifics, like places for the show?
Nick Frost: There were certain things we needed, like we needed a hospital, so we found an old abandoned hospital, which was really frightening. Because we live in like England where you know that you’ve got a lot of old dilapidated things, it’s just easy to find places that are really scary. We found an incredible old house that this old woman lived in. It was essentially a Tudor house on the inside and then someone had built another house over it, so it was really higgledy piggledy and just creepy as all hell. There was also like an old abandoned factory, which was great.
I think the creepiest thing was an old abandoned school for deaf children, which had shut in like the ’60s or ’70s. So there was a kind of huge basement, with loads of tunnels, which is great. ‘Cause you get to a point when you’ll sit on your phone and all the crew have moved to another location, and you realize you’re just in a cellar on your own, and it’s kind of a little bit, a little bit creepy.
Samson gets genuinely frightened about things. So he’d kind of come onto set and see some of the locations and he’s be like, ‘Nah, I’m not going in there.’ It was perfect casting, wasn’t it really … I think that the mind is the worst place to be. It’s full of ghosts.
You mentioned how these characters could be absolutely anything. So why did you make them paranormal investigators out of everything that they could be?
Nick Frost: That’s a really good question. We wanted to write a show about the paranormal, and so, you build the characters around what you want the show to be, You know, they could have been tennis coaches, and not me, obviously I can’t run, but, I could have been the boss of the other tennis coaches. It seems, you know, that it’s a genre that’s close to me in terms of a love of the paranormal and the occult and unanswered questions.
And it was something I’d wanted to do for a while, you know, Simon Pegg and I used to go somewhere when we were younger men, younger single men and that was something that we enjoyed, being frightened and terrified. And, and then, The X-Files happened and we felt like it was written purposely for us as I’m sure a lot of fellow X-Files feel. And then me and James [Serafinowicz] started to talk about this character [Gus] and you know, his wife had passed on and he was a very cynical lonely man, but he was great, at his job and had a passion for trying to find her, someone who’s very, centric. It’s kind of funny that he’s kind of digging up all her past work to try and find a way to be back with her. You know, it’s the Gus being a kind of moody shit. It’s a kind of really passionate thing that he’s doing in a way to try and find his dead wife, 20 years is a long time to go being single.
In terms of portraying the characters, did you draw any kinds of characteristics from previous characters you’ve played like Nick, is there any aspect of the character you played in Shaun of the Dead and who you play here?
Nick Frost: I don’t know. I try and put a little bit of myself into every character I play so I suppose in that regard, there is a connection between Gus and Ed and Danny and everyone else I’ve played. I think the thing about acting is for me personally, is I want to be different in everything I do, and that’s not just a different accent or a different voice, it’s a different person. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of that too, I don’t feel like I’ve been the same in anything really.
Susan Wokoma: Oh, I’ve got no range, they’re all the same. I do get cast as loners and weirdos and I embrace that. Privately, I do wonder why. I think that there is something about the other character that I played, Raquel in a horror comedy, that is a loner, that is an outsider, that is socially awkward. But there’s thousands of ways to do that! I do think that there is something about when you’re not kind of embraced by society and how likely you’re going to be to start looking for other answers and other worlds. I think, that’s what, sort of runs through. And I didn’t want to tamper with that, and just be like, Oh, I’ve got to make it, you know, super, super different because ultimately I speak with my voice, but noticing that, Oh, it tends to be the people who aren’t sort of at the center of the TV shows that you watch all the time or the news or in magazines or runways, they tend to be the characters in fiction who go out looking for the ghost or monsters. And I think that’s cool, so I didn’t actually want to tamper with that too much.
What was the most difficult scene to play in the first season?
Nick Frost: I don’t know. There’s a bunch of stuff when I’m working with Samson, when it’s difficult to not laugh, you know. We ate a lot of biscuits in between tapes, that was difficult. No, I mean, I couldn’t say, it’s a really difficult question to ask. There was a scene when my dead wife appears and, having to summon up tears is kind of difficult and I’ve got a little playlist that I listen to before I do the scene. And there’s only one thing on that playlist, and it’s the Welsh people singing the National Anthem from Cardiff Arms Park and I listen to that and it makes me cry. You know, people think, “Oh, it’s just a comedy, it’s just a horror comedy, it’s a sitcom,” but you know, you don’t act any less passionately because it’s a comedy.
Susan Wokoma: I guess getting the balance of comedy and the truth of it. I think with Helen, she is somebody who’s very isolated, very lonely, very troubled, and sort of making sure that she’s funny, but also that you kind of get across the depth of somebody who is, you know, in their early thirties and doesn’t have any friends — there’s pain there. There is actual trauma. So, it’s just maintaining what that is. I think it was hard sometimes, but fun.
Malcolm McDowell: No. Nothing that I can remember, that was difficult. I mean, good God we’re not doing Hamlet.
Do you have a favorite scene?
Malcolm McDowell: I mean, no, not really. I mean, don’t ask me favorite because, you know, Nick can give you all these answers because he’s in every scene. So he has more of an overview of all this. I just come in for, a few days here and there and I came in late, so I was doing episodes, I think they’d already shot. I enjoyed it all. Actually, I didn’t find it difficult, I found it a lot of fun. The only thing that was arduous was the thing with the eyes, you know, that was a bit of a pain in the ass, but it wasn’t even as bad as they made it out to be. They kept going on about the eyes, and I felt like good god, this is going to be quite frightening, but in fact it was absolutely nothing. We’re just talking about digestive biscuits … that’s about it. That is the depths of this character that they’ve come up for me, so it’s just a lot of fun, that’s really it. There’s no secret to it, it’s just have a lot of fun, have fun with it and that’s it. End of story. And honestly, I can say that in every single performance I’ve given, it’s basically the same, just have fun. And everything I’ve done anyway is a comedy, just sometimes I’m playing serial killers, so it makes it even more creepier, you know, but that’s it. I always look for the comedy in every single part, I think I’ve ever played.
Are there any elements from past characters or roles that you’ve played that you saw in the character that you played in this show?
Malcolm McDowell: Well, I suppose it’s my face. Can’t do much about that. Other than that, and I speak English, of course. So there are certain things that I have in common with other parts, but really, I haven’t done anything in England for a while, so actually playing in English, I had to really work on the accent too, which was really weird. I’m sorry that my answers are not very exciting, but, I don’t think that there was anything, you know, you come to new part and you just try and take it from scratch, from the start on whatever it is. I had a lot of fun working with these two, and most of my scenes were with them, so it was lovely. Can’t wait till the next one, if there is one.
Nick, between being a producer, screenwriter and actor on truth seekers, which for you is the most fun part of your work on the series.
Nick Frost: Being an actor was the best fun, being a producer and then a writer too, it felt like I was a grownup. And then having to just get rid of all that and just come on set and act and hang out and have a laugh and find new comedies within something we’d written, and just to hang out with the guys, you know, that’s fun. It’s boring talking about producer shit. Writing’s kind of difficult, but acting is great fun.
Can you tell everybody a little bit about your sources of inspiration for this series?
Nick Frost: I think just being a fan of the paranormal and wanting to write something which was about a man who lost something and was looking for it, not of itself, I guess that. I just wanted to write truthful comedy, with a horror element and play with really good, talented, funny actors. We have a no dicks policy, so it’s nice that we got six fantastic people to do to do that.
Nick, if you could talk a little bit about working with Simon on this particular project?
Nick Frost: I’m bored of it. He came at the right time because we’d shot for like two months, and we were all kind of tired and ready to finish and we had his stuff at the end, so it was like we had a new energy on set and we needed him at that time, it was great to have him. He’s like wearing a pair of really old denims, a pair of old jeans you find in the wash basket, and you think, Oh, I’ll slip it back on. It feels nice to feel that wet denim back on my ass.
Susan Wokoma: Wet?
Nick Frost: Well, when you wear a pair of jeans for a long time, it has a sheen that makes it feel damp most of the time. I wore a pair of jeans for three years once and that’s the vibe I get.
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