The Big Picture

Ex-Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry is the manic, driving force behind most of the crazy events of Jon Hurwitz' & Hayden Schlossberg's Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, playing an obnoxiously xenophobic government agent determined to put the innocent twosome in prison forever. We got to sit down and talk with him at a roundtable interview about the film, his life story, his Daily Show dreams and the definitive answer to the great poo-poo/ca-ca debate.

Watch Corddry and the cast at the premiere of Harold & Kumar 2.

Did you base Ron Fox on anyone in particular?
There’s definitely, at least in his lilt – I’m not going to say he’s definitely based on George Bush, because it’s not, but there’s something about George Bush – Bush is from Connecticut but he talks with a Texas swagger, and I imagine that this guy is probably from New Hampshire and yet he’s got a little cowboy in him. I definitely watched The Fugitive and watched Tommy Lee Jones’ character – “Your fugitive’s name is Dr. Richard Kimble!” But there’s no one real person that this character is based on because that would be terrifying.

How is it playing someone so ridiculously racist?
It’s fun! It’s fun to be able to have permission to be as horrible as you can. I married a Jew, so I can make fun of Jews to my wife. This movie is not racist, and therefore my character can be as racist as we can conceive of. It was really fun to try to think of… “if that, then what else? If he would do this, then what else would he do?”

I have so little to say about if there are actual relevant things happening in this movie, because as far as I was concerned, I was in a cartoon, but the sad thing about why this movie is funny is that people are not used to two leading men who aren’t white, or two leading men who aren’t black, or a white-black combo. That was, at one time, pretty crazy. So it’s great that these guys aren’t playing stereotypes, and their ethnicity has very little to do with the arc of the movie, and yet it has everything to do with it. I think our culture kind of interprets it that way, because we have very little experience with that. It’s fun, it’s really fun.

That cartooniness is most evidenced by Fox jumping out of the plane with a gun.
Jon and Hayden were like “yeah, we don’t know, because we don’t see you jump out of the plane, but we think you just jump out of the plane to catch them, like you’re gonna catch them or you’re gonna die.” I thought “No, my character jumps out of that plane thinking that perhaps he can fly.” What’s to stop him from being able to fly? He might be a superhero. And maybe he is, you never see him hit the ground.

How much were you allowed to improv?
It was a very collaborative process. They would do what they called a “serious take.” A serious take of this material is the definition of irony. Then we would do a “ridiculous take,” which kind of cancels – it’s like a double negative. They didn’t have a lot of money, so we only really had four or five takes. They would make sure they got what they had to get, and then we could fuck around, basically.

Did you actually wipe yourself with the Bill of Rights?
Did I actually wipe my own feces? No, but I would have, because I’m a committed actor. No, but the prop guys actually did have a series of different kinds of poo. You know that your life is surreal when you’re having arguments over what kind of poo will work the best. “Oh, I think the more mustardy is the more realistic,” you know? There was literally one where it’s a log. How would I pull that out? That only happens when there is nothing between the biology and the water in the toilet, that’s not gonna work. So we opted for, you know, your traditional skidmark.

How was shooting on location?
Shreveport, Louisiana? Ooh, yeah. I don’t think I ate anything that wasn’t fried for about a month and a half. For weekends, because you can’t spend a weekend in Shreveport because there’s enough guns around to be able to kill yourself pretty easily, so I would just drive. I would get a book called Road Food, it’s my Bible, and I just would drive to different barbecue places in the South. “I’ve got eight more hours to the next barbecue joint,” and I would just eat pulled pork up and down the South. It was awesome.