After Steph Curry’s Olympic gold win, Adam Pally remains in awe of his ‘Mr. Throwback’ co-star
Early on, Adam Pally realized he and Steph Curry just look funny together.
“Dan Aykroyd says you’re always looking for the number 10 in a comedy duo,” Pally says. “Literally, like, one tall one and one short, round one.”
Like Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy, could Pally and Curry be the next odd couple in comedy? They’re actively hoping so with their new series, “Mr. Throwback.” All six episodes were released Thursday on Peacock, auspiciously timed to a weekend where Curry dominated in France and led Team USA to a gold medal in men’s basketball.
Pally, the journeying funnyman from many sitcoms, including “The Mindy Project” and the “Sonic the Hedgehog” world, is zooming from a hotel room in Paris, where the night before he was flipping out watching his new pal defeat Serbia at the Olympics. He was so invested in the basketball drama that his wife joked he was having a cardiac event, and he says he “almost broke Don Lemon’s hand” and “screamed at Willie Geist to stand up in the fourth quarter.”
LeBron James directed the offense and Stephen Curry delivered late three pointers to seal the U.S. win over France to clinch an Olympic gold medal.
Becoming friends with Curry has made watching him play this whole year much more intense, so that “lately I am in that state of cardiac tension,” Pally says, “because I care even more. I want him to win even more.”
The 42-year-old comedian still can’t believe he’s friends with one of the greatest NBA players on the court today. They hit it off a few years ago when Curry was hosting the couples game show “About Last Night” with his wife, Ayesha. Pally and his wife, Daniella, were contestants, as were David Caspe — creator of the Pally-starring ABC sitcom “Happy Endings” — and his wife, Casey Wilson.
Curry has a way of disarming people who are naturally intimidated by him with an easy self-awareness and humor, and Caspe and Pally learned that the four-time NBA champion was, in fact, funny. They also learned that Curry — through his production company, Unanimous Media — wanted to develop a new comedy series. He gave the duo a blank slate, and they came back with a mockumentary-style show based around a heightened version of Curry, with Pally playing his childhood basketball teammate whose life hasn’t turned out nearly so well.
The format — with its roving cameras and constant cutaway interviews — seemed like a natural choice for an athlete in the era of “30 for 30” and “The Last Dance.” (Curry already has his own documentary on Apple TV+, “Underrated.”) Practically, too, the interviews allow for a lot of secondhand stories without having to actually depict them. That, and Pally is a big fan of the faux documentary comedies by Christopher Guest (“Waiting for Guffman” being his favorite).
Stephen Curry stars as a version of himself, alongside Adam Pally and Ego Nwodim, in Peacock’s new mockumentary comedy, which is as much as we can say about the plot.
There is, of course, a long history of famous ballers trying their luck on the big screen — from Michael Jordan and LeBron James in the “Space Jam” films to Shaquille O’Neal in “Kazaam” or Kevin Garnett in “Uncut Gems” — and plenty of examples where the result wasn’t a slam dunk.
“I will cut some slack to the previous generations, and say they haven’t had cameras in their face like we have,” Pally says. Curry is comfortable in front of a camera — thanks to his father, Dell Curry, a former NBA player — and says he’s been exposed to it since he was young. “So I think that’s an advantage for Stephen, is that he doesn’t get caught like some people when they see a camera, where they look right into it and their whole spirit and demeanor will change.”
“Mr. Throwback” was built around the amusing visual of Curry, a smiling, dominating superstar, doting on Pally’s schlubby, divorced sad sack character, Danny Grossman, who was once the star of their junior high basketball team but now runs a vintage sports memorabilia store in Chicago (where most of the series was shot). Danny is pathetic, alone and deeply in debt to the Polish mob, so he re-enters Curry’s life to steal a priceless game jersey to pay the debt and, when caught, makes up a whopper about his teenage daughter, Charlie (Layla Scalisi), having a terminal illness.
Being the hyper-nice guy he is, Curry’s friendship becomes lavish, and Danny’s lie snowballs into absurdity.
But like Guest‘s movies, “Mr. Throwback” is really a team sport, and Caspe cast two breakout comedians — Ego Nwodim and Ayden Mayeri — in roles alongside Pally and Curry.
For the past six seasons, Nwodim has been making her mark on “Saturday Night Live” (her “Lisa from Temecula” character famously broke her castmates and guest host Pedro Pascal). A gifted improviser in venues like the podcast “Comedy Bang! Bang!”, Nwodim often plays wild, unhinged characters, but as Kimberly — the chief executive of Curry’s fictional company, Curry Up and Wait — she’s the straight person amid the silliness, severe and intolerant of B.S.
“There’s a misconception that being a straight person can’t be fun and funny,” says Nwodim, 36, from her home in Brooklyn. “I think that’s its own skill, and oftentimes, in some ways, a harder skill to have and demonstrate is being funny while being the straight person. Sometimes people don’t consider that in the same light that they would consider the unusual person or the hot mess.”
Nwodim can’t help being funny no matter the role; during our Zoom call she goes on tangents about the etymology of words and colloquialisms and confesses to having a browser tab problem — her iPhone currently has 498 tabs open. She was also recently in Paris, where the highlight of her Olympics whirlwind was partying with athletes at the Team USA house and meeting Snoop Dogg.
She’s never acted in a mockumentary before, but says that in her daily life with friends she’s always pretended like she was in a docuseries — turning to an invisible camera and giving a confessional contradicting something she just told someone.
“Something’s wrong with me,” she says when I ask why she does that. “I think it’s because of watching a lot of ‘Real World’ growing up.”
Nwodim is stoked for the upcoming 50th season of “SNL,” which she thinks will have an electric energy. “There are going to be lots of people roaming through the halls at 8H and that’s going to be exciting,” she says. “It feels like it’s going to be one big party of a season.”
Another delight in “Mr. Throwback” is Mayeri, playing Danny’s ex-wife, Sam, who finds herself in cahoots with his big lie and enjoying having Curry bankroll her fantasies. One of Mayeri’s more recent parts was in “I Love That For You,” the gone-too-soon Showtime series with Vanessa Bayer — which ironically also hinges on a character lying about a terminal illness.
“Right away I was like, is this gonna be weird that this is my lane now?” Mayeri laughs.
When the Oakland native first heard about the part, she thought: “Oh, an ex-wife on a TV comedy — am I gonna be just scolding him the whole time?” she admits. “And then I read the script, and my character is such a little rascal, and is funny, and she gets in on all the nonsense, that I was like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever read.’”
Despite the loose, spontaneous feel of the show, very little was improvised. The reference-packed scripts were finely tuned in a writers’ room led by “Happy Endings” alumni (and brothers) Daniel and Matthew Libman, although Pally says he and Caspe like to create a playful environment on set where everything is game.
Also, most of the cast have an improv background; even Curry participated in a Chicago improv show several years ago, something his coach Steve Kerr orchestrated when the Golden State Warriors were in a slump. The same is true of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, who plays Danny’s estranged father on “Mr. Throwback.” Letts has held his own on stage with legendary Chicago improvisers T.J. Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi (the latter appears in the series), and he gets in some of the show’s funniest lines — particularly one about the dramatic need to take a bowel movement.
Pally is still in disbelief at his new friendship with Letts and how, “when a review comes out that he doesn’t really agree with, I get a vile text message written by the guy that wrote ‘August: Osage County.’”
Letts also lends the series real dramatic gravitas, part of a gambit Pally and the writers organically made in blending the absurdly farcical with an earnest arc about generational addiction, heartbreak and forgiveness. Pally attributes that streak of seriousness to the fact that he and his cohort are all older now, all with growing families and battle scars from life.
After he wraps a new season of the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy series “FUBAR” this summer, he’s hoping to go straight into making a second chapter of “Mr. Throwback” with his gold medalist buddy.
“I don’t know what reality I’m in,” Pally says, “but I sure do like it.”
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