How Broken Lizard Won Brian Cox Over With ‘Super Troopers’

Individually, they’re Erik Stolhanske, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Jay Chandrasekhar, and Paul Soter. Together, they’re Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe that’s brought us such hit comedies as Super Troopers, Club Dread, and Beerfest.

I recently caught up with the group, which has been performing together for 30 years after assembling at Colgate University, to discuss their latest film Quasi —currently streaming on Hulu— and the magic behind their cult classics, not to mention how they won over Succession’s Brian Cox.

Their new film, Quasi, tells the story of an ill-fated hunchback desiring love but finding himself in the middle of a murderous feud between the Pope and the king of France when each orders the hunchback to kill the other. What makes this movie unique for the group, and helps add a lot of levity to the project, is that each of the Broken Lizards play two different characters.

The script for Quasi was written back when the five were a sketch group wanting to be like Monty Python.

There’s an epic narration to start Quasi from Brian Cox, who worked with Broken Lizard in Super Troopers and Super Troopers 2.

“For a while, it was my voice that was in the narration and then everyone thought it was inadequate,” Heffernan, who directed the film, said with a laugh. “We thought we needed somebody who has a little gravitas, so we said why not reach out to Brian, he’s having quite a run himself.

“So anyways, we emailed him. Never heard back from him, I thought he was icing me, and then we got a call from his agent and his agent said, ‘I heard from Brian, he got your email and he will do anything you want.’ … It turns out he was excited to do it.

“He was in Brooklyn and we were [in LA], so we did kind of a remote recording session with him one morning and it was a blast. I hadn’t talked to him in a little while and he’s such a good guy. He’s still a little bit ornery in a fun way and we got him in the booth and he did it. I feel like it adds so much weight to the start of the movie just because of who he is.”

So why is the legendary, and seemingly crotchety, actor always down to work with Broken Lizard? It goes back to Broken Lizard’s brake-out film, 2001’s Super Troopers.

“We originally approached Bill Murray’s agent (for Super Troopers),” Chandrasekhar recalled. “I originally called his agent at CAA and she’s like, ‘How much time do you have?’ And I was like, ‘Well we’re shooting in June’ and she goes, ‘Alright, well, what’s the offer?’ And we offered him like 100 grand or something, an embarrassingly small number to him and she goes, ‘Yeah, I’ll take your little offer to him but the problem is, I don’t have his phone number.

“‘He calls in from a payphone and if I’m not at my desk, to take that call, he may not call back for three more months, so you’re welcome to wait, but first of all, he’s going to say no to the money and second of all, I’m probably not going to be at my desk.’

“So we moved on. And Brian, through our casting agent had read the script on his own and he called up and said he wanted to play the part because in the beginning of his career he imagined that he would be a young Jerry Lewis, he thought that was the way his career was going to go. Then he ended up playing Hannibal Lecter (1986’s Manhunter) and he just went into the dark side.”

Lemme had his work cut out for him with the title role in Quasi. The actor had to contort his face and hunch over in every scene.

“My mouth and jaw hurt quite a bit, certainly for the first week, and then it was like a well-oiled baseball mitt, all stretched out,” Steve stated.

“The problem with my back and my hips, this is the problem with working with your best friends, is that I told Kevin… there’s a scene and it’s a really big actiony chase scene, like a foot chase where Quasi is being chased by all the guards and I told him a few (minutes) into that, ‘My back and my hips are really starting to go.’

“And he could not have cared less. He was like, ‘Yeah, alright. We’re going again.’ That day we actually had a two-hour time slot, we had all the time in the world and Kevin was just going to keep running the scene because we didn’t have to be anywhere for two hours. And he wore my back out… I had to go to the doctor because of shooting Quasi for this particular day.

Kevin responded that he had a very expensive camera cart that they had to run with Steve and that they had to use it. “Suck it up, man,” he joked.

Stolhankse shed some light on how the actors choose their roles.

Every guy is drawn to a certain type [of role] but as a sketch comedy group, what we try to do… We started with Super Troopers, everybody was kind of already organically in that role that they naturally gravitated towards, but we tried to go 180 with that with Club Dread, where everyone was trying to do an opposite role,” Erik said.

“For example, Kevin was Farva, kind of the oaf and the jerk in Super Troopers and he played like a really nice, romantic lead in Club Dread. So we try to play opposite roles, just because it’s fun and you can stretch yourself a little bit as an actor.”

During a time of increased sensitivity, the group isn’t worried about offending people.

“It is us s***ing on each other the way that friends s*** on each other,” Soter, who revealed that the script for Super Troopers 3 is currently being written with hopes for the group to begin filming around the end of the year, said. “So I think it tends to resemble the good-natured way that you s*** on your friends, the people that you love the most. I think that allows us to not come off mean, insensitive.”