‘The Power of Valerie Cherish’ Helped Cast The Comeback

In the world of The Comeback, Valerie Cherish may sometimes feel that it’s hard to get noticed in Hollywood, but in our world, everyone in Hollywood really wants to meet Valerie Cherish. One of the many pleasures of watching the third season of the excoriating HBO series, starring Lisa Kudrow and co-written by Kudrow and Michael Patrick King, is enjoying the appearances from familiar TV and comedy faces who are clearly so excited to get to meet Cherish, even if their characters are not. Some are playing crewmembers, like Benito Skinner or the theater director Jack O’Brien; some are antagonists, like Andrew Scott’s studio executive; some, like Jane Fonda and Fran Drescher, are playing themselves. If it sounds like everyone in Hollywood (and especially every gay man) was begging to be on the series, casting director Allison Jones doesn’t deny it. “I don’t think there was a single person who didn’t want to be on the show,” she says. “And I’m sorry to people we couldn’t get on the show, who were fancy, funny, great people there just weren’t enough parts for.”

Jones is a veteran casting director who has worked on everything from Barbie to The Office to, as she jokes, her fair share of not-so-well-remembered sitcoms like How’s That?! and Room and Bored, in addition to the second and third seasons of The Comeback. She broke down what it was like to fill out Valerie’s universe in her last go-around and the tricky business of casting a sitcom within a send-up of a sitcom.

“When I started out in sitcoms, it was like the voice of God was the head of the network, which is who Andrew Scott is playing,” Jones says, referencing Brandon Wallick, the mastermind behind How’s That?! who seems to combine the slickness of a Hollywood executive with the amorality of a tech one. “Though being Irish, I don’t know how much of that he’s had to go through in the American system. But he captured really well how they try to be so warm and then they just … eff you over.”

Though How’s That?! is meant to be a test case for AI writing, it’s nominally being written by a married pair of showrunners, played by Abbi Jacobson and John Early, both doing variations on righteous-and-over-it TV writers. “We had a lot of fun with this one,” Jones says. “We had so many different interpretations, and John and Abbi were just the most unlikely married couple. Abbi captured the could-care-less vibe beautifully, and they both just kept improvising and going with the scenes in the audition. John’s petulance was hilarious.” Jones says she and King had discussed, at one point, populating the show’s universe with unknown actors but then realized that the tonal difficulty of The Comeback required heavy-hitters in TV and comedy to pull it off. That Early and Jacobson even agreed to audition speaks to the appeal of being on The Comeback: “Normally that level actor would not,” Jones says, adding that “you could pick a whole other version of this series with all the good people who auditioned.”

According to Jones, who’s “done more sitcoms than Valerie Cherish,” casting How’s That?! felt like casting any sitcom in the 1990s. (Jones got her start on Golden Girls.) “I was totally familiar with the challenge of casting absolutely gorgeous, not-that-interesting people,” she says. The challenge with The Comeback, however, was that the gorgeous young things on Valerie’s latest sitcom — here, Brittany O’Grady and Zane Phillips — had to be funny and human outside of it. Jones gave actors two scenes to read each, one within How’s That?! and one out of it. “Zane, with his unbelievable good looks and the fact that he could act, stood out,” Jones says. “And Brittany, the same thing, and someone who could play a b-i-t-c-h on the show and then be the sweetest thing in the world outside of it, the way Malin Akerman was previously.”

Valerie’s role as an executive producer on How’s That?! gets put to the test in a tense confrontation with a younger costume designer, played by Overcompensating’s Benito Skinner, who keeps trying to put her in dowdy outfits that resemble those in Maude or even Valerie’s own series Mrs. Hatt. Jones taped a lot of men of different ages for the role, but “Benito was just the funniest and most believable,” she says. “He got the newer generational, all-about-himself quality of it.” (The scene was sharp enough to inspire a whole treatise from Hilton Als about new and old Hollywood.) Jones also notes that the scene references a bit of her and King’s own history working together: “The show we met on was called The Five Mrs. Buchanans, and those kinds of outfits were exactly what you would end up in if you were a woman over 50.”

This season also sees Jane’s (Laura Silverman) role of documenting everything Valerie does partially assumed by a younger generation: Ella Stiller, daughter of Ben, as Valerie’s social-media consultant, Patience. “The hardest thing to do onscreen is to do nothing,” Jones says, and Stiller’s ability to channel a resting Gen-Z energy was crucial for the role. “They didn’t want her character to do much of anything except be a very convincing Gen Z. You needed someone who was there but wasn’t.” It was crucial, she adds, for Patience to seem skilled about the mechanics of making a good social video even as she was disinterested in everything else. “There was just something about her face,” Jones says.

Stiller isn’t the only notable comedic progeny playing a new-generation Comeback character: Kudrow’s son, Julian Stern, is How’s That?!’s resident IT guy, who turns out to be a pretty good writer as well. Jones can’t take credit for that, though. Stern’s casting was Kudrow’s suggestion — “I was like, well it’s him,” she told the Hollywood Reporter — though Jones also felt he was the right choice for the part. “Sometimes that happens and it’s not good,” Jones says, “but he’s talented and funny and instinctively real.”

For Valerie’s brief run doing Chicago, before she has a breakdown because it’s simply too difficult, Jones helped fill the cast of the fictional production with actual theater stars, including Timothy Hughes, who choreographed for the show, and the dancer and Cats star Robbie Fairchild, who plays a weary assistant director. “Everybody I knew who knew theater called me and said, ‘How did you get Robbie Fairchild?’” Jones says, adding that the theater people were just as eager to be involved as anyone else. “They didn’t have to audition, but they were willing.”

In a traditional sitcom taping, of which Jones has watched many, a comedian warms up the crowd before filming and between shots. Making The Comeback, however, Jones realized that one of the most difficult roles to fill would be one that’s largely fallen by the wayside in the 2020s. “It’s very impressive,” Jones says of the skills required of a sitcom hype man, “and it’s very hard to find good ones.” Eventually, she landed on Edgar Blackmon, a Second City alum. “That was really hard,” Jones says, “because people his age had no idea what a warm-up comic would do. When Edgar came in, he was able to do one of the table reads and really sell it. It was a no-brainer.”

In her travails around Hollywood, Valerie occasionally runs into real stars playing themselves, like when she tries to get a photo with SAG president Fran Drescher on a picket line or asks if Jane Fonda will do a video for her socials. (Fonda just turns to the camera and says, “Vote.”) “Michael Patrick had those people in mind,” Jones says, “and we were lucky, because you couldn’t do the same scenes without them. And he knows a lot of people! I believe Lisa and he both know Jane Fonda.” Jones compares that experience to working on Curb Your Enthusiasm, for which she also cast numerous “as themselves” roles, giving her an eye for spotting celebrities capable of playing more heightened and comedic versions of their own personas. “On this one, I don’t think we had anybody we couldn’t get,” Jones says. “That’s also the power of Valerie Cherish.”

It helped, Jones adds, that people were interested in the timely subject matter. “We weren’t allowed to say anything about AI in the audition process, but some people figured it out from the sides,” Jones says, comparing the experience to Valerie luring James Burrows — whom Jones has worked with on “so many sitcoms; he’s still the same guy” — to direct the How’s That?! pilot by revealing the secret that it would have AI involved. “That was the hook that we weren’t allowed to say,” Jones says, “and we pretty much kept it secret until the show started airing.”

In the season’s penultimate episode, as news reports around How’s That?!’s AI use spiral around Hollywood, we get a brief glimpse at the long-suffering Jane’s partner, played by lesbian icon Clea DuVall. “Often, the discussion was, Do we go with somebody famous?” Jones says. “And it turns out the reason they’re known and they work a lot is because they’re so good.”

Jones didn’t cast the first season of The Comeback so she can’t take credit, but she enjoys watching actual casting director Marla Garlin, with whom she has collaborated in the past, play Sharon Case, the casting director for Valerie’s sitcoms. “Marla happens to be a very good friend, so it was delightful to see her,” Jones says. In past seasons, Garlin had only a few lines, but Jones would tease her about how the role expanded this season. “I’d tell her, ‘You have a lot of lines, Marla — you better be scared,’” Jones says, laughing. “And she had a pratfall!”