The Verge: Jorma Taccone

Since co-creating the sketch comedy group The Lonely Island with childhood friends Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone hasn't strayed far from his collaborators. The three were hired together by Saturday Night Live four years ago, and writers Taccone and Schaffer crafted many of the digital shorts that made Samberg a star. Taccone himself acted in the group's feature film effort, Hot Rod, and his profile was raised further when he co-starred with Samberg in the trio's "Jizz in My Pants" (the first video off The Lonely Island's debut album, Incredibad), but as Chaka in the Will Ferrell comedy Land of the Lost, he's finally striking out on his own.

We spoke to Taccone about his primitive Lost character, his facility for made-up languages, and the audition that almost landed him a spot in SNL's cast.

So Land of the Lost is your biggest role yet, even though you're buried under a lot of makeup.

Yeah, if anyone recognizes me, I will be so embarrassed -- that means that I'm the ugliest dude on the planet. They had the teeth made [for Chaka], and I was at the table read and I put them in. And the teeth look so real that several people would go over during the table read and be like, "Oh, that's so sweet! They hired, like, this really ugly dude to play this monkey character!"

Were your sides all in Pakuni, the language your character speaks?

In the script, every time it would come to Chaka's lines, it would just say, "Chaka grunts." "Chaka jibbers." "Chaka makes gestures." And it actually remained that way the entire run of the movie -- my lines never got put into the actual script! Every time I talk to someone it's being translated through Holly [played by Anna Friel], so based on what her translations were, I would go back to the Pakuni dictionary they had given me and I would come up with what I was saying.

The Pakuni dictionary? Is that something assembled online by some devoted fans?

It's funny, in the original series, [creators] Sid and Marty Kroft wanted to get Saturday morning placement for the show, and to get a certain time slot, I think the show had to be considered educational. So they hired this woman from UCLA to create a Pakuni language that has, like, 400 words and its own sense of grammar so that they could say that they were teaching kids a language. Also, there's a small, small community of people who role-play this sort of thing online, so the dictionary I was using had actually been added onto by people who were playing Pakuni in their role-playing games. So when it came time to do the movie and come up with what I was saying, I would look through it and think, "Well, how do I say this?" Or, "Wait, how do I say the word 'rape'? That's not in here." [laughs]

Do you speak other languages?

I can sort of speak Spanish.

Are you better at Pakuni than Spanish?

I'd say I'm sort of equal.

Do you feel like Land of the Lost is a property that's well known to people our age?

Hilariously, I talked to several people about the role who said, "Oh, yeah, every Saturday we watched that and then we would act it out, and whoever was the shortest person had to be Chaka. And everyone hated playing Chaka." So yeah, hearing that was a bummer. After I got the role, people would be like, "Oh, you're playing a little monkey? That's perfect!"

You, Andy, and Akiva were initially recommended for Saturday Night Live by Jimmy Fallon when you wrote material for him at the MTV Movie Awards.

That's what's amazing: the fact that four years later, Andy's hosting the MTV Awards. To go from us splitting a paycheck of a thousand dollars a week and basically being considered one writer, to Andy being the host of the show, is crazy.

You originally auditioned to be a cast member on SNL, right? What went down?

Andy was offered the audition first, and he was actually going up for his second audition when I got the offer to audition for the show. It's kind of like...that would have been amazing [to be hired as a performer], but that wasn't as much my dream as it was Andy's. Andy wanted to be on SNL since he was, like, five. Also, we hadn't really come from an improv background, so I didn't have a whole host of individual characters to draw from -- we'd just been making little films in LA. So I basically had to write an audition in four days, but I went out and did it and was super excited to have done it.

Would you have any interest now in being promoted to a cast member?

I've loved being a writer, and I've gotten to direct some stuff on the show now, which is awesome. I've sort of settled into that, and I've also gotten to act in things other than the show. So, at this point, I would say that's not an aspiration of mine. I really like the show a lot, but I don't have much desire to be on it. And I'm not insulting it -- like, I fucking love the show and I love all the performers on it, but I've really enjoyed getting to do what I get to do on the show, which is writing and directing stuff.

You've directed some of the digital shorts this year.

Yeah, me and [Akiva] actually did almost all of them. The ones I've done on my own have been the MacGrubers -- well, those aren't digital shorts, but they're short filmed pieces on the show. And then I did some of the other digital shorts like Business Meeting and Sloths, where half of it was this bizarre animation thing I made on Final Cut that takes for-fucking-ever.

It's notorious that at SNL, you can write a sketch, everyone will love it, sets will be built, and it will be cut after dress rehearsal. Do digital shorts go through the same process, or are they fairly assured of making it on the air after they get greenlit?

The advantage we've had with the digital shorts...well, originally, when we first got to the show, we realized early on that live sketches were not our strong point and that we would love to try to do some pretaped stuff because that's what we'd been doing for years in LA. So we went out and shot stuff on our own on Mondays and Tuesdays and we would bring it back to the show. [When we were making our first few], we didn't even have a camera of our own. Bill Hader's wife Maggie worked at AFI, and we would go borrow a video camera from her and shoot it and make it on our little iMacs in the office.

I'm sure that changed after the Lazy Sunday digital short blew up.

Because we went and did the digital shorts on our own, I think a lot of trust was built as far as us kind of knowing what we're doing. It's not like they don't have notes for us, but we kind of get to come up with what we want to do and then we go out and shoot it. It's been amazing -- all the stuff that we used to do for no budget, we now have a full crew, lighting, all that stuff. Most of the time that makes it better, although sometimes we go without any of that stuff. But it's just been a huge, huge advantage to have that trust and have them believe in what we're doing. ♦