Interview: Talking ‘Kevin’ with Producers Aubrey Plaza, Joe Wengert, and Dan Murphy

Kevin is Prime Video’s animated adult comedy series that follows a cat named Kevin who is displaced from his home after a breakup and is forced to move to a chaotic Astoria pet rescue named Furrever Friends. There, he tries to find his way in the world, surrounded by misfit animals who help him to figure out what he really wants out of life.

The series was created by Aubrey Plaza and writer Joe Wengert and features an all-star cast, including Jason Schwartzman, Whoopi Goldberg, John Waters, Amy Sedaris, and Aubrey Plaza, as well as guest spots by Patti LuPone, Tig Notaro, Cary Elwes, and Nicole Byer.

We spoke with Aubrey Plaza, Joe Wengert, and executive producer Dan Murphy about the origin of the series, the casting process, balancing emotion with humor, and the titular character’s medical abnormality.

First of all, congratulations on the series. I thought it was great.

Dan Murphy: Oh, thank you.

Aubrey Plaza: Thank you.

The show starts from a surprisingly emotional premise, a cat dealing with the fallout of a breakup. What made that idea rich enough to build an entire series around?

Joe Wengert: It’s a show about like cats, but really, it’s a show about that point in your life when you get out of a big relationship and you’re trying to figure out what to do next. And there’s something fun about a cat being in that situation and being like, “Oh, I need to like find my friends. I need to find my place,” as opposed to just like a human man doing it. So, that’s what really attracted us to that.

Pet relationships are so interesting and weird. We were kind of playing house a little with Kevin and Howard. We were treating them like babies. But then sometimes your pet is more like a roommate. I have a dog right now and my dog is my boss. I’m like the assistant for my dog. And so, as we like dug into all those different like relationships, that helped us think of all the stories we could tell about how the sort of people these independent animals are going to try to like link up with, if anybody at all.

The show is star studded and eclectic. Did you have specific actors in mind for the roles in the initial casting?

Aubrey Plaza: I honestly was trying to remember that. Did we? We wrote them kind of in mind, right?

Joe Wengert: Yeah, for some of them we had specific people in mind, and for some of them it changed. I know that for Armando, we were always like, “Well, it will never happen, but dream casting would be a John Waters-type person.” And because Aubrey and Murph had worked with him before at the Spirit Awards, we were able to reach out. That was one that we were very surprised actually came to fruition.

Aubrey Plaza: How did the Whoopi idea come about? That was early on, right?

Joe Wengert: I feel like we talked about a million different people for Cupcake. And then it was your idea to go for Whoopi. And I think we were trying to really think of somebody that like feels like New York to us. Once we cast Jason Schwartzman, then looking at the cats who are his mentor friends, we were trying to think of people that would be interesting for someone like Jason Schwartzman to get tips on living life in New York, and Whoopi Goldberg just seemed right.

Did any of the characters evolve after the casting? Did the actors bring something unique to the characters that made you change the character a little bit?

Joe Wengert: Absolutely. I think the biggest one was John and Armando. We initially had him as such a high-status character in the city that we had him knowing all of these real New York celebrities. We kept writing jokes about people, and he was kind of like, “Why are we saying something mean about Sarah Paulson?” Even though we weren’t. But he was kind of pushing us to go for a deeper layer of emotion with his character. And I feel like it brought us to a really cool place that was way better than some disposable jokes.

Dan Murphy: Yeah, I remember he was a little more arrogant. He kind of had a big head. But like John just plays him with so much like humanity, and I think that kind of informed where he would get to with his arc at the end of the season. He has this really emotional arc about his abandonment issues. But I think served us better the way he evolved.

Joe Wengert: We had it with Kevin as well. I think cats sometimes seem like they know everything. So, when we started, he was just a little bit more of a shithead. He was a little meaner. But then Jason brought such a vulnerability to him that played really well. So, then we really leaned into that, which kind of became the heart of the show.

A lot of adult animation can lean into cynicism, but there’s a lot of heart in the series. Can you talk about balancing that emotion with the humor?

Joe Wengert: Were just finding, as we were writing scripts and making animatics and having table reads, the episodes that ended without a warmth or like a lesson or a little bit of growth were not having the same impact on us. And even if the joke at the end was really, really funny, you were kind of left sort of wanting something more. Also, this is a show about cats. I know when the trailer first came out, people were like, “A cat lost on the streets? I don’t think I can handle this.” There are even higher stakes for people when you’re dealing with animals. So, as crazy as these characters are, as we were getting into the writing process, it just became really important for us to figure out, “Well, what do they want and what do they need? And what are their challenges on an emotional level?” In a way that was surprising to me.

Dan Murphy: We talked from the very beginning about one of our inspirations for the tone of the show was the Golden Girls, about how they all live together. And that show is a great example of how all episode long, they’re just saying these really funny and savage things about each other, but yet at the end of the episode, you never question that they love each other and that there’s so much emotion, which I think is why so many people still love that show 40 years later. So, I think that was kind of a guiding thing for us, too. We always want to know that the characters love each other at the end of the day.

Aubrey Plaza: There’s so much animation where there’s 70 million jokes per second and moves really, really fast. And I think we really wanted to slow down and give it a more grounded pace, but obviously still have an insane style of humor. Finding that balance was important to us.

How was Amazon work with? Did they have any notes for you, or did they pretty much leave you alone?

Joe Wengert: They were great. They really trusted us in terms of comedy, but they really encouraged us to keep the characters like in a reality, because it is such a real version of a story that’s in the show. They also really pushed us. We had a lot of episodes where they were out on the streets, and they wanted us to invest more in Forever Friends and in the rescue, and make this really feel like a home base. And I feel like that provided us with like some of our better, better.

Dan Murphy: Yeah, I always felt like our execs, two of whom had been with us since we started this in 2020, were always right there with us. They really cared about the show as much as we did. They weren’t like, “Just make it funny.” They really were invested in the characters and the stories. They would always push the emotion of it that maybe we had missed, which helped us in the end.

Who was responsible for the character designs?

Joe Wengert: A perfectly named person named Daniel Katz, who we met through our friends at Titmouse. Every one of his designs, I think you’re kind of laughing a little bit, but also you care about them. So, he was really important. He did the designs for Armando and Judy and Cupcake as well. I feel like he just did a great job of really capturing the characters. And it really does look like the real Kevin, too.

Dan Murphy: I love that the characters are kind of imperfect. Armando is a beautiful cat, but he has these quirky things about him that you love. At the end of the day, even though they’re all kind of like a little bizarre looking, but you still care about them. 

Just one more question for you, and it’s something I never thought I’d ask in an interview, but what was the motivation behind the prolapsed butthole?

Joe Wengert: Real life.

Aubrey Plaza: Real life, Jeff.

Joe Wengert: It was an absolutely real thing. We adopted two cats, Kevin and Howard, and we got them from this mob wife, we think, in Howard Beach. They just separated them from their mother too soon, so we had to teach them how to drink water. And then Howard was just always looking for milk. So, he was really doing that. I feel like there have been people that have watched the show who have been like, “These people are sick. This is too far.” But we’re like, “It really happened.”

Aubrey Plaza: I know. I thought about that too. People think we just made it up and that we just can’t let it go. He was sucking on his butthole.

Joe Wengert: We named Kevin after a friend of ours in the comedy scene, which is a thing that you do when you’re a young person. You think that’s funny. But then there was a period where the cat was having medical complications from his prolapsed butthole.

We were poor, but we found this vet who did this experimental surgery to save his life. And we were able to hook the vet up with Conan tickets, because you [Aubrey] were interning at NBC at that point. It was this traumatic thing that then our real friend Kevin was like, “Is the cat that’s named after me going to die?”

Aubrey Plaza: It was going to be a voodoo doll situation where whatever happened to the cat was going to happen to him.

Joe Wengert: We named him after our friend but didn’t tell our friend. And then he found out through the grapevine and like at a Christmas party, he was like, “Did you name your cat after me? And we were like, “Yeah.”

He’s got to be happy now that the rest of the world knows that a cat with a prolapsed butthole was named after him.

Joe Wengert: I think he is happy that we didn’t put his last name in the show.

Well, congratulations again. Thanks for taking the time, and Aubrey, congratulations on the pregnancy.

Aubrey Plaza: Thank you.

Joe Wengert: Thank you.

Dan Murphy: We really appreciate it.

Aubrey Plaza: Bye, Jeff.

Kevin is currently available to stream on Prime Video.