Coming back from a lengthy hiatus, Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell’s new season is looking to be its most memorable yet. We had the privilege of talking with Matt Servitto, the show’s’ resident ruler of Hades, regarding the evolution of the series, exploring Hell’s mythos in pop culture, and what makes Satan tick. Matt Servitto: (laughs) Please, put down that I laughed. Any different messages? I think the message is in the title: You’re going to hell! I think this season is definitely a more polished season. I feel like it’s taken us a few seasons to find our sea legs. I think initially with the show there was talk of going a traditional sitcom length. 22 minutes. We even kind of shot them that way in season one and then cut them down to the traditional Adult Swim length. So in the first season everything was kind of overwritten because they were written for longer episodes. Some of it was kind of hard to follow because they had to cut out a lot of comedy; a lot of funny stuff. A lot of that has ended up places like DVDs and outtakes. There are some episodes that are just really–you know rather than a more traditional kind of comedy that Adult Swim does, it’s just a smarter season. Every episode has a beginning, middle, and an end while packing in so much. There’s a lot of interesting characters. There are callbacks to situations that we’ve been doing for three seasons. You kind of know the characters now. You know, Henry Zebrowski said to me, “Traditionally with Adult Swim shows it takes a season or two to set the rules for the audience and define the parameters of what the story is and what the characters do because every show of theirs has such a ridiculous premise. The audience needs to get behind the premise, and once they have it and know what the ground rules are, then you can start moving the show outward.” Even just the special effects and production department work is continually getting better and more surprising, too! It’s always been great but it’s impressive to see what you guys come up with. You know we’ve been working on the show on and off. We’re only in season three but I honest to God think my audition for the show was over five years ago. The technology keeps getting ahead of us and the stuff that used to be super expensive, complicated, and the stuff that only a major studio could do is becoming more and more affordable. So naturally things are looking better along with that. I also think there’s a bit of an intentional look of like an old ’60s science fiction thing. Now it’s just very polished and we’re totally aware of what we’re capable of doing in post. The only down side of that is that we’re doing more and more green screen. In the first season we would build practical elements to scenes, but now they’ll just put a green screen and they’ll be nothing. So I miss that. They still put in some practical elements, but it gets harder and harder. It all looks so great in post where we can get the world we want with a green screen. But I sometimes can be like, “Where are we? What’s going on here again?” and miss the old days. You’ve got to also remember that the creators came from the animation world so directing live-action was very new to them. But by this season they know exactly what they want and how to shoot it. Satan is so often in a position of control on this show. Would you like to see him somehow be put into a position of subservience instead and get to play things a little more powerless? Maybe he gets dethroned as Satan? But those are always my favorite because when you’re playing all-powerful–it’s always been my dilemma with superhero movies, so many of these characters are invincible. Once you introduce invincibility in any piece of storytelling it kind of loses my interest. It ends and begins all stories if someone can’t die. What are we doing? I think it sort of takes every interesting story in human history and throws it out the window. So the best stories are always people that are fallible and can rise up from that failure, so I’m happy that this season you’ll see a wide range of emotions from Satan. Off that note, the show has done such an effective job at fleshing out Hell and building its own mythos. We got a glimpse of Heaven in last year’s finale but would you like to see more of the show’s take on that? This year I think we do something with the snake, apple, and Adam and Eve story, so there’s some of that. The beauty is that there’s just so much to pull from. We’re always like, “So we’re obviously going to keep this thing going, right?” We sit on set and come up with like five seasons worth of stories because it’s a never-ending–you know, people are obsessed with the idea of Hell, the idea of eternal damnation. It lends itself to so many stories. I feel like we’ve just begun to scratch the surface. Last season also introduced a number of classic monsters and demons into the show like witches, Cerberus, even Krampus, but with your own sort of slant on each of them. What sort of traditional monster would you like to see dealt with in the series next? In regards to things like monsters and pop culture mythology, I’m always amazed at things like Cerberus and Krampus that they put in the show. I was only sort of familiar with them beforehand and then read up. But oh my God, what amazing stories! It’s all about stories and myths about the Devil and how he reveals himself on Earth. Those are some of my favorite episodes too, when Satan has to go to Earth and we see whether he looks like himself or if he’s disguised as some sort of creature. The main thing that I think is sort of missing from the show is the introduction of women. A lot of time has been spent on the idea that the ring of Hell that we’re spending time in is almost like a fraternity. They introduced the idea at one point that the women were on another side of Hell, but that’s part of Hell, that you don’t get to be with women! Of course so many of the awful people throughout history have been men, so it lends itself to that area. Besides, men don’t have a monopoly on the concept of being evil. We did one which I definitely want to keep under wraps, but we do another that’s a big homage to the traditional three-camera sitcom. I know that we do a science fiction thing a little bit–without giving away too much, we might see visitors from another planet… Amazing, because I was going to bring up the idea of aliens or even just looking at Hell on other planets. Wonderful. Everyone on the show is also just so musically inclined–like we did that High School Musical episode–but we talk about doing something like a rock opera or musical theater, since that’s so many people’s idea of what hell is–just non-stop singing! Boy, Banshee was such a great ride. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve never done something quite like Banshee. I know it all sounds cliche, but it was just a great four-year cocaine trip. It was always amped up and aerobic, and the way it was to watch the show was the same way we shot it. Very guerilla filmmaking. We shot the show in nine days, which everyone said is insane and that we’d need 12 or 13 days, and we knew that and it just pushed us harder. Initially, a show like this wouldn’t have been on my radar as a television watcher. So many people told me that, but it absolutely grows on you and gets under your skin. But onto that last season, clearly my character still had more of a story left and that wasn’t finished. But I wish we had maybe just ONE more season to go out on. If we had gone back and done another more traditional season. In the fourth season we took some risks and tried some things. At times it didn’t work, but when it did, it was amazing. But I always had big respect for the writing and wanting to do ambitious things like a big time jump or immediately killing off a main character. Then we spend the entire rest of the season on this murder mystery. Lastly, are there any particular episodes from this upcoming season that you’re excited for people to see? Yeah, there was one particular episode that was just the smartest thing to me–the sitcom one–but again I don’t want to spoil too much. I will say though that it’s the one day that my kids have come to visit on set. I’ve kept pushing them away, but when they finally came it was when we were taping the sitcom part of the episode. Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell season 3 premieres on Adult Swim on October 23rd at 11:30pm
