Exclusive Interview: Tom Ellis and Sasheer Zamata Bring Us Behind the Scenes of Netflix’s ‘Exploding Kittens’

Tom Ellis and Sasheer Zamata are the voices behind Netflix’s hilarious (and unhinged) new series, Exploding Kittens.

Based on the best-selling card game Exploding Kittens, the laugh-out-loud series features God (Tom Ellis), who gets fired from heaven and sent to Earth to reconnect with humanity. The catch? He’s trapped in the body of a chubby house cat. As part of his rehabilitation, he moves in with a dysfunctional family and tries to solve their problems, but often ends up distracted by laser pointers. To make things even more complicated, his next-door neighbor, also a cat, turns out to be his nemesis, the Antichrist. This sets the stage for the ultimate battle between good and evil…except Godcat (Ellis) is easily sidetracked by pigeons in the yard, and Devilcat (Sasheer Zamata) prefers napping on laptops.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Tom and Sasheer about Exploding Kittens, the process of bringing this series to life, and more.

PC: Tom, when you’re working on a comedic animated series, it’s all about your vocal performance delivery, and there’s a lot of unexpected physicality when you’re working in voice acting. Were there any new techniques that you developed to convey emotions in this series? How did your prior experiences in animation lend themselves to Exploding Kittens?
Tom: I hadn’t done an awful lot of animation, really not much at all before this. Playing an ongoing character in something was a new experience for me, and it’s very different from live action. You find yourself locked in a tiny little booth with a set of headphones on, pulling ridiculous faces and making ridiculous noises, and just going for it. That’s the biggest difference. You’re really encouraged to go big because this works in this medium, and that’s incredibly liberating.

PC: Sasheer, what I think this series does so brilliantly is that it sits in this space where it’s family-friendly enough for kids but also so appealing for adults. Comedy is really a genre that encourages improvisation. How much of what we see is scripted versus improvised? How has your own background as a comedy writer helped you in knowing how far you could push these lines and interpret the script?
Sasheer: Oh, wow. Thankfully, the show was written by some really, really funny people, so the jokes are already there. When you’re in the booth, there are other writers who are on Zoom or in the room with you as well. They’re able to throw different lines at you to test and see what fits. I guess my improv background is helpful because I’m able to adjust. Even though this is what’s written, I’m able to figure out how to deliver this line in the same world or insane kind of scene, and that’s really fun. This is a very funny show, but it also has a lot of heart. That was cool to see.

PC: It’s one of the best shows I’ve seen all year. One of the benefits of animation as a medium is its accessibility. There’s such great banter and dynamic between your two characters. Did you all record this together? How did the performance of your co-star influence your own? How did you build that chemistry?
Tom: Another new thing for me was finding out that when you do this sort of thing, you actually do it on your own. You don’t interact with the other actors in the scene. We would have a read-through of each episode beforehand on a Zoom call, so you had a sense of how the scene would play out.

But when you go in and record it, it’s just you. There’s a lot of trust in this process. You do different line readings of the same line, so you’ve got lots of different options for when they finally put it all together. It’s a strange experience doing something, not knowing at all how it’s going to turn out, and then watching the scene come together, but it’s very satisfying when it works. It was really pleasing to watch this because I was like, “I hope it’s as funny as I think it’s going to be,” and it was funnier! So that’s always good.

Sasheer: There’s also a talented voice director, Tom Kenny, and the creators Shane [Kosakowski] and Matthew [Inman] are watching this whole process. They’re good about hearing what Tom might do and helping me figure out how to complement that in a scene. So there are other people looking at the bigger picture, even though we’re in a booth all by ourselves, but they know what’s going to fit because they’ve already done the work with the other actor.

PC: This is really a laugh-out-loud series. Do you have a favorite one-liner from one of the episodes?
Tom: I quite like the line about icing and the muffin.

Sasheer: Oh yeah. [laughs] That’s pretty good.

Tom: I like that one.

Sasheer: There’s a scene where Godcat and Devilcat are about to fight each other, and I collect a bunch of meat products to create this transformer-type battle gear. The catch line is: “Meat your maker.” I love a pun.

Make sure to follow Tom (X/Instagram) and Sasheer (X/Instagram). Watch Exploding Kittens on Netflix today.