Exclusive Interview: Luke Del Tredici and Dan Goor Talk Killing It Season 1, the Casting Process, and More

Luke Del Tredici and Dan Goor are acclaimed producers and writers who have worked on beloved projects including Brooklyn Nine-Nine, 30 Rock, and Parks and Recreation.

This spring, they’ve teamed up again for their must-see new series Killing It. The laugh-out-loud series is about class, capitalism, and one man’s quest to achieve the American dream. And also about hunting really big snakes.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Luke and Dan about Killing It.

PC: Luke, I wanted to start with you. Could you share the inspiration behind Killing It?
Luke: Absolutely. To some degree, it’s a thing that’s really happening. It’s wild. We talked to people about it after reading articles. For the past decade, Florida has been having this problem with pythons. So they’ve been holding these state-sponsored contests to see who could eliminate the most pythons in the Everglades. I thought it was shocking when I read about it. You’d tell people and they were shocked. Everyone was always interested. It stuck in my mind as a really vivid and bizarre world for a show.

PC: The series tackles timely themes of race, class, and capitalism with humor. Dan, how were you both able to not only strike that balance but also perfect it?
Dan: Oh, that’s very nice of you to say. I don’t know if we…

Luke: No, no. We perfected it. He’s right. [laughs]

Dan: How? I guess God-given talent. [laughs] We spent a lot of time talking about all of these ideas. There’s a lot of work behind it. We have a really talented set of writers that we work with. All of these writers and the execs that we deal with at Peacock and at the studio are really smart. The end result that you see on the screen is something that we’ve all really worked very hard on and really thought a lot about. Unless you don’t like it, in which case, that was an accident that weirdly happened and it was not purposeful.

Luke: Yeah. I’d say to that end, there was a lot of trial and error too. When you’re mixing and matching tones like this and pushing into weird territory, you’re creatively free. With the staff, we were like, “Let’s try things.” We’ll write things and then we’ll hear it at a table read and be like, “Okay, that was too far. That’s either too dramatic or it’s feeling a little heavy or that bit of comedy feels odd in this moment.” You pull back. And then there are times when you shoot something and it feels wrong. You pull back. It’s constantly evolving and changing. There is no perfecting. You’re sort of honing in on what seems to work for people. But there are no secrets. Sometimes it’s just like, “Let’s see how it feels.”

PC: Luke, why do you think the comedy genre is a perfect medium for us to start these conversations?
Luke: They’re really interesting topics. As you said, it’s about class, capitalism, and race. It’s a lot of people’s struggles. But also nobody at the end of the day wants to come home and watch a TV show where people struggle and are sad. So the question for us is: How do you make a show about big weighty themes that may be interesting things to say that tackle relatable issues about hardships in the world but also isn’t a miserable slog that nobody wants to sit and devote their time to? To me, the answer is comedy. You add jokes. You make it first and foremost something that people will enjoy enough that they’ll commit ten hours of their time to watch.

PC: As you were writing these characters, did you have these particular actors in mind? What was that casting process like?
Dan: Craig [Robinson] was there from day one, from before we had the original idea. The very start of this process was that we had worked with Craig on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, he really wanted to continue working with us, and we wanted to work with him. We had him right from the start.

Luke: We wrote a bunch of episodes without everyone cast. But then you go back and change things.

Dan: Yeah, you go back and you hone things.

Luke: Claudia [O’Doherty], for instance. I will say when we wrote that character…

Dan: She wasn’t Australian.

Luke: As we were thinking about it, I’d known Claudia. I loved her on the show Love. She’s really funny. From the beginning, I was like, “Oh, Claudia O’Doherty would be perfect in this. We need to find an American version of Claudia O’Doherty because she’s such a specific presence.” We were struggling with that. At some point, we were like, “Maybe we should make the character Australian and use Claudia.” That required us to go back and rewrite certain things because we didn’t want to just randomly drop an Australian in nor did we want to force Claudia into doing—what I’m sure would have been totally passable—a ridiculous American accent. But a lot of it is, you cast people, and then, you’ll see as the season goes on, we get better at writing the characters as we got to know the actors better. I think that’s a real strength of ours as writers. You don’t cast people and try to force them to become the characters you’ve written. You cast people and you change your characters so they fit the people you’ve cast.

Make sure to follow Luke (Twitter/Instagram). Watch the first season of Killing It on Peacock today.

Photo Credit: Jesse Grant (Luke) and Alberto Rodriguez (Dan)/Peacock