Actress Lake Bell said the hardest part of her job on HBO’s The Chair Company is keeping a straight face during scenes with her on-screen husband Tim Robinson.
Bell, 46, is one of the stars of the eccentric HBO comedy The Chair Company. She told Obsessed: The Podcast host Matt Wilstein that her secret to stifling laughter is to treat the show as if it weren’t a comedy at all.
“Ultimately, when I play the straight woman, I think of it as a drama,” Bell said. “In comedy, I tend to think of it as grave and very serious. And if it’s grave and very serious, then everything else around it can be absolute tornado madness.”
In The Chair Company, Bell plays Barb, the wife of show creator Tim Robinson’s Ron Trosper. After Ron’s chair breaks in an embarrassing on-stage moment at work, he spirals down a chaotic conspiracy theory against the company that manufactured the chair.
Robinson, 44, who became known for his over-the-top and often awkward comedy, is not an easy co-star to suppress a laugh around, but Bell does her best.
“I feel like there is a trust in me with the creative team that they understand that I will stay level and that I will ground it so that Tim can go absolutely off his rocker, and I will be unflappable,” Bell continued. “And that is a fun game to play.”
But even Bell isn’t perfect.
“I have broken. I admit that,” she told Wilstein.
According to Bell, it’s hardest to keep her cool during “simple” scenes, often when it’s just her and Robinson on camera. The hardest scene for Bell to shoot involved the pair lying in bed, with Robinson having just one improvised line.
“He’s just trying to get to sleep, and we’re just people in the world, a married husband and wife, in our bed, and I am normal, and you’re normal,” Bell remembered thinking at the time. “I’m just telling myself, ‘We’re normal people. We’re in this bed, and we’re going to bed.’”
After Robinson got a clean take of his line, producers let him go full tilt. Bell remembers Robinson going “bonkers,” tossing and turning with maximum effort, whirling the duvet off the bed, and wrapping himself up like a burrito.
Bell admits she had to turn away from the camera to hide her reaction to Robinson’s absurdity.
“Tim is a kind of f---ing genius,” Bell said. “I almost feel embarrassed for him, because he’s very humble and doesn’t like that kind of hyperbole... But he’s a genius. He’s an original magic-maker.”
Bell told Wilstein that Robinson’s unique brand of comedy prompted her to submit an audition tape for Barb. There were few things she had seen that were so original in their tone and narrative as the comedy by Robinson and co-creator Zach Kanin.
“I just got very obsessed with getting seen for it,” Bell said.
That same unpredictability has Bell just as excited to return for a second season, which begins filming later this year.
“I don’t know what they’re gonna do for the second season,” Bell admitted. “I couldn’t be more excited about it because it’s like when you go on a rollercoaster, part of the fun of the rollercoaster is that you don’t know what’s coming next.”
Bell told show producers not to give her scripts in advance, so she could experience the show as a viewer as well.
“I feel a little bit like I’m just gonna strap on and jump out of the plane,” she joked.
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