The Cast Of ‘Bajillion Dollar Propertie$’ Talk About The Freedom And Limitations Of Working In TV Improv (INTERVIEW)

As I met with a few members of the cast of Seeso’s real-estate/reality show sendup Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ during the ATX TV Fest earlier this month, our first obstacle was finding a spot in the hotel lobby for all of us to sit. Drew Tarver, who plays Baxter Reynolds, suggested we take over the (temporarily) unoccupied concierge desk. While I wasn’t opposed to the idea, it occurred to me that we’d have to stop the interview fairly often to answer questions.

Luckily, some space opened up across the lobby, complete with a table and a couple additional chairs, so Paul F. Tompkins, who plays ringleader Dean Rosedragon, Tawny Newsome, who plays Chelsea Leight-Leigh, Drew Tarver, and myself were all able to claim our respective spots. Like my earlier interview with creator/showrunner Kulap Vilaysack, we discussed the show’s improvisational format, this time focusing on both the freedoms and limitations it allows them as actors.

Who’s the most like their character on the show? Feel free to call out any of your castmates who didn’t make it to the interview.

Tawny: Give me a second…

Drew: Dan? (Dan Adhoot, who plays Amir Yaghoob)

Paul: Dan for sure.

Drew: Dan drives a Porsche on the show, and he also drives a Porsche in real life.

Tawny: He was very clear to point out that the Porsche they got him in the show was much nicer than his Porsche. I think to make him more of an everyman.

Drew: Right, exactly. He’s like, ‘My Porsche sucks.’

Paul: ‘Oh, I wish my Porsche was like that Porsche.’

Tawny: Right. But he’s also buying the Rolex that he wears the copy of in the show, right?

Paul: He’s obsessed with that watch, and I remember when the show was coming back he would say, ‘Hey, the Rose Bowl Daytona is coming back, everybody.’ And [I was] like, ‘I think you’re the only one that knows that your character wears that watch.’

Drew: When he talks about buying watches, we all get like… ‘We turn our comedy off,’ and we get legitimately concerned about his finances. We’re all just like, ‘I don’t know. What do you like about it? Like what do you have to have about it?’ We all become like a father, or like a parental figure for him.

Paul: And he’s, you know, he’s always got a guy. You know what I mean?

Tawny: Yeah, always got a guy.

Paul: So if you need something done, whatever it is, like, ‘Let me hook you up. I know somebody who can help you out with that.’

Tawny: I needed a real estate attorney once in Los Angeles, and he hooked me up with a guy who was in Italy on vacation. And this man [said] ‘Can I call you back like 9 a.m. your time? I’m in Tuscany right now.’

And I was like, ‘Who is this person?’ And then he called me, he was going to charge me $800 an hour. ‘Oh, no thank you, sir.’

It was nice of Dan to hook it up.

Drew: My character on the show has murdered someone, and I have murdered someone in real life. So I guess that’s close, too.

Oh, so you can draw from that, then.

Drew: It’s the only thing I share with my character.

On the flip side then, who’s the least like their character? Or rather, what do you identify most or least with? Obviously murder is off the table now.

Tawny: Ryan’s not stupid. (Ryan Gaul, who plays Andrew Wright)

Paul: Ryan’s very smart, and he plays stupid so well that it’s deceptive sometimes. And so when you’re talking to him in real life, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right. He’s not an imbecile.’

And Tim Baltz I think is not at all as milquetoast as Glenn is.

He has a tendency to play some droll characters. Not just on Bajillion, but in other shows, too.

Paul: Yeah, he’s really good at playing that sort of low status, helpless kind of guy, but Tim is also very adept at playing like really dirt bags. Like every once in a while he’ll do a thing, because we end up improvising a lot together on stage in L.A., and when Tim busts out a character like that. It’s like, ‘Ooh, it’s too real.’

With the mannerisms and the… oh, it’s so gross. But he’s great at it.

What about the Dean Rosedragon pajamas? Do you have a less-nice version of those you change into when you’re out of character?

Paul: The clothes that I wear on the show are a sort of dream version of the clothes that I wear. Like literally a dream. Not ‘Oh I wish,’ but if you fell asleep it’s what people would be wearing in dreams. And there’s been a couple things where, you know, I had to really think ‘Would I wear this in life?’ There’s been a couple wild jackets where it’s [a] maybe, but I think that also doing the show has maybe ruined me for stuff like that. Where it’s now so associated with that character for me that now I feel like I’m putting on a costume.

Tawny: Oh, interesting. Whereas you might have worn it before?

Paul: Yeah.

So you couldn’t pull off an ascot now if you tried?

Paul: No, the ascots actually I’ve started wearing more in real life.

So, given the improv format of the show, and all your characters are constantly in competition with one-another, does that translate into a situation where you’re all vying for the best lines?

Tawny: Ask Mandell (Mandell Maughen, who plays Victoria King). Mandell has a long history of saying something kind of quietly, or maybe we didn’t realize we hear it. And then one of us accidentally, who knows, scoops it up and says it in the next take, and Mandell’s like ‘That one was mine!’

And we’re like, ‘Actually you’re right. That’s my bad. We got too excited.’

Paul: Those group scenes are, I don’t know… it’s hard for me to say because, for the most part, I’m just watching you guys.

Drew: Yeah, you lead them.

Paul: It’s like we have a meeting or something, and I’m the boss. I come in. I make some announcement or something, and then it’s just these guys are idiots who don’t understand the concept. [Like] some high rollers used to say, ‘No, it’s not that.’

But they go on. Those scenes go on for the length of an episode, and then they’re cut down. But we, I mean it’s always fun, but at some point it’s like, ‘Are we still doing this?’

Tawny: Like you’re just watching a box of lizards try to run around.

Drew: Yeah, sometimes we build off of each other really well, and then other times we all have separate things that, we might as well not even be in the same room at the same time. It’s just like, ‘Well I know three things I’m going to say. I’m going to wait for a second.’ It’s really like horrible improv.

It’s really not good training, but you kind of have to [wonder] ‘Do we build off of each other or do we play our character games?’ So there’s many different types of ways I go about it.

Tawny: And the edit saves us so much. So sometimes, unfortunately, the building off each other just can’t make it into the episode. So what tends to make it is one-liners, sound bites. So it does kind of make you get a little selfish, whereas on stage I wouldn’t do that because everyone’s there watching the whole thing.

Drew: You get the context of the whole thing.

Paul: There is a little bit of ‘I want to get my thing in,’ and a little bit of, as you say, friendly competition. But also we kind of don’t want it to end. We’re having fun, you know?

Drew: True.

Tawny: It’s always fun.

So when you see an episode that’s all edited together, and you had a line that didn’t make the final cut, do any of you try and save that line and try to use it later?

Tawny: Like trying to use your cool bit for later?

Yeah. Something you knew was solid gold.

Tawny: I don’t remember. Ever.

Drew: I improvised a thing in like the first or second day of filming about my character having goat panic. Like when he gets scared, he’ll just lock up and fall over like those goat videos. And that was the second day. And I would try to keep putting it in, and it didn’t make it in until the third season.

Tawny: You did it once in the second season, but I don’t think we explained it.

Drew: It’s never explained. I just fall on the floor and I think Andrew goes, “He’s goat panicking!”

And he screams it so loud, [and] there’s no talking head to explain it. But for the most part when I’m watching it, I don’t remember what we’ve done, and I’m also surprised what [makes it] in. ‘Oh, yeah. We did that.’ Because there’s just so much you do, and you’re improvising all day, that you forget.

Paul: Yeah. You do a scene and you move on to another scene, and so it all… it just goes. It’s just jettisoned, you know? And so that’s one of the things that’s fun about watching the show for us being in it is that it’s like it’s all brand new. I’m a fan of the show that I also happen to be in. It is like watching other people.

When I spoke with Kulap, she mentioned how whole scenes get shot, and won’t get used until a season or two later. Does that happen when you watch it later? Does something you’ve said, and since forgotten about, inspire another idea?

Tawny: I don’t know… when I see an older one, I’m like, ‘Oh, I was making some strange choices.’ I feel like we’ve all settled in more to it, so by the time we were shooting the third season I felt like much more comfortable and [that] I knew how to play for this medium. So yeah, I saw one older scene that was shot in like block one or something, and that we put in season two, I think, but I still remember going, ‘Ooh. Wouldn’t have chosen to do that now.’

Drew: When you’re on stage improvising you can say a line, and you’re not in costume or in character, so your whole character can be re-contextualized with one line. You can just say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m 90 years old,’ and you become 90 years old.

But in this show you can’t just say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m 90,’ because you can’t be that in a real show. And I remember Alex Furney was directing one scene in maybe the first season, and we kept dropping bombshells like we were in our 90s, and we weren’t who we said we were. My name is not Baxter…

Paul: This is some real Big Grande stuff.

Drew: That’s my sketch group I’m in. Big Grande. And then Furney came in [and said] ‘Okay, guys. That was really funny but that can’t happen. We can’t do that. We gotta remain who we are because this is a show that needs to continue on.’

So you’re kind of confined a little bit too, but for the most part you can say anything and they just cut out what doesn’t work.

Paul: Exactly.

Drew: I always say I’m 90.

Paul: You’ve been trying to get it into every episode.

Tawny: Every episode. Maybe season five.

Well, if the show stays on long enough, maybe it’ll happen.

Drew: Yes, yes!.

Tawny: Fingers crossed for Season 76.

Drew: Long live Seeso!

So, we ended on a cliffhanger in Season Three. Without getting into spoiler territory, do you guys have any idea where it’s going to go when you pick up next season?

Paul: We have a very good idea of where it’s going to go because already shot that season.

Oh, well there you go.

Tawny: What’s nice about season four, Kulap pointed this out, maybe she told you yesterday, is that she and the editors did such a great job of stitching together a story line out of our 30-minute ramblings on set, that season three was a lot of story gotten out of the way. A lot of exposition about where are they, what are they doing, what’s happening with them. And season four, the freedom to not be so chained to like plot and exposition is there so now the characters can just play.

The worlds that they’ve established in season three can just deepen. Like for my character, the tech-detox thing spirals into like a different kind of obsession, and so you can just deepen into that without constantly explaining like, ‘She’s not on her phone because, you know.’

So I think there’s something like that for every character. Like Amir being broke, and then coming back. Does he get wealthy by the end of three? I don’t remember.

Paul: Well, he says he’s back so many times.

Tawny: He says he’s back so many times. He’s never back. I get so mixed up.

Paul: I can’t wait to find out along with the viewing public.

Drew: We just watched it a week ago and none of us even remember.

Paul: We had a viewing party at Kulap’s house to watch all of season three on Memorial Day. It was a lot of fun. Then by the time the evening rolled around and Kulap had an episode from season four to watch, we had been celebrating and honoring our nation’s fallen dead to such an extent that I can’t tell you a whole lot about that even if I tried.

Tawny: She said, ‘Do you want to watch season four?’ And I think someone shouted, ‘We’re already drunk!’

Well, it’s a spoiler-proof situation.

Tawny: Yeah, we could not spoil it for you.

Does filming seasons back-to-back, like you did with seasons three and four, help you to settle into your characters a little more?

Paul: It’s a luxury because you’re continuing the story and you don’t have to like go back and look at what was I doing, how was I acting in this season, and all that. We were just continuing, and it was great because it was that feeling of being able to develop, and discover, and all that in an unbroken line. And it was so much fun. It was just more time that we got to play together.

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Is it easier than the stop/start process of episodic television?

Paul: It’s so much easier.

Drew: So much.

Paul: It’s a dream to shoot the show because of the reality conceit. You don’t have to spend a lot of time tweaking the technical stuff. The street-cam is rolling the whole time, and it’s just supposed to look like life. You don’t have a lot of those long, long, long delays where they have to set up technical stuff. And because of the improv nature, you don’t have to worry about getting a line exactly. You don’t have to worry about hitting marks exactly. So you’re engaged almost all day long.

The longest amount of time I spent just like sitting around was probably when we were shooting the opening credit stuff, the B-roll and everything. Other than that, I think on average you’d maybe be waiting a half hour before you’re working. Just to be able to be that engaged all day as opposed to, you know, with single camera stuff where you’re up and down all day. Because at the end of those days you’re exhausted because you’re constantly getting amped up, and then you’re just sitting around for hours, and then you have to get amped back up again. And getting back into character and all that stuff.

Tawny: And the tedium of doing the same thing over and over. I find it extremely exhausting, because I’m very lazy and I’ve been an improvisor for so long that I just want to do something and disappear. So it’s really ruined me for regular TV because any time I go and do a guest spot on something single camera, I’m always like just melting into the floor from having to say the same line and do the same head movement, It’s really exhausting.

Has Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ made any of the HGTV-type shows more or less entertaining?

Paul: For me, probably less because I get so mad at those people.

Drew: Yeah.

Paul: I get mad at all of them, because they’re really trying to be that way. I find it irritating.

Tawny: Or when they’re trying to be funny.

Paul: The worst.

Drew: I love Chip and Joanna though, from Fixer Upper.

Tawny: But I can’t handle his sense of humor. It makes me crazy.

Drew: But it’s very endearing. He’ll like get on a tractor and like it will start going crazy and he’ll fall off of it.

Tawny: No, that show is fine. I don’t like his ‘Oh, the old ball and chain.’ She’s like fun and cool, too. I don’t like when he does the ‘my wife’ shit.

Drew: Oh, I love the sexist stuff.

Tawny: That’s peak Drew.

Drew: No, but I really like on those shows, like especially the Fixer Upper ones, or where they take a house and they make it nice. Like I don’t really even respond to the story lines of the people. I just want to watch them make a dump nice. And they don’t really do that on Million Dollar Listing. It’s already amazing. But when they take like a little small house and they’re like ‘We got $30,000 and we’re going to redo the kitchen and the bathroom,’ [That’s] something I can respond to.

Paul: That’s the big difference. There’s the shows where they’re trying to accomplish something, and then there’s the shows where everyone’s just an asshole. And it’s like, ‘Let’s watch these assholes!’

Although there is something you’re all trying to accomplish on your show, which is just to undermine each other and claw your way to the top.

Paul: True.

Tawny: That’s true.

Drew: That is true, yeah.

It’s a different kind of accomplishment.

Drew: That’s true. Break each other down and then remodel each other.

Paul: It’s tough with this kind of comedy too because there’s a certain style that just delights in people being just complete monsters, and people being humiliated. I find that tough to watch because I guess I don’t find that fun, you know? And what I like about our show is that it’s so silly. So even though these people are all very shallow, self-absorbed monsters or whatever, it’s just so goofy that it’s not a bum out.

Tawny: I think about that fire episode. Just you having to put up with the three of us just not understanding fire. These people are idiots and trying to undermine each other. We’re playing little status games within that, but the base premise of it is so stupid and so goofy that it’s kind endearing, I think.

Drew: I always wonder, like our characters are all so dumb and crazy, do people who watch it believe that we could sell a house? Is that believable? I think it is.

Paul: Well when you look at the people who are buying the houses, then yeah.

Drew: That’s true because in the Bajillion-verse, I think that there’s a little bit of a bending of reality.

Tawny: I’ve also met really stupid realtors, so…

Paul: There’s that too.

Seasons 1-3 of Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ are available to stream anytime on Seeso

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