Room for improv-ment
US star Denis Leary speaks to DQ about making Fox’s military sitcom Going Dutch, discusses the power of improvisation and reveals the secret to successful comedy.
Sitting in a London hotel, Denis Leary is in a reflective mood after returning to the city he identifies as the place where his career began more than three decades ago.
It was in the early 90s that he first performed a one-man show in the capital, where his son was also born in 1990. He also first met then-unknown British stars Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and Eddie Izzard in London, and joined them at the Edinburgh Fringe, forging friendships that continue to this day.
“It’s really weird. We all got famous and stayed famous,” Leary tells DQ. Since then, he has gone on to build a screen career that has included movies The Sandlot Kids, Demolition Man, The Thomas Crown Affair, Draft Day and The Amazing Spider-Man, as well as lending his voice to sabre-toothed tiger Diego in the animated Ice Age franchise.
On TV, he is notable for creating and starring FX’s firefighter dramedy Rescue Me – a project set up with screenwriter Peter Tolan. He also developed medical comedy Sirens for USA Network, and appeared in The Moodys, Animal Kingdom and 2024 Netflix series No Good Deed.
“There’s a certain amount of luck involved in that,” he says of his long run in Hollywood, “but if you’re lucky enough to still be working [years later], it’s weird. It isn’t the same thing as when you’re young and you get famous. As you get older, it’s just your job, and you want to just keep doing interesting work. It’s interesting now to see younger people that you work with who are famous, because sometimes they ask you for advice.”
When he first started out in the business, Leary was working with stars like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro and “fucking Dustin Hoffman,” he exclaims. “That was crazy for me.” He had watched those screen icons in the movies when he was a young boy. “And now I’m like an old guy, obviously not on their level,” he says. “Eddie and I were doing some talkshow, we were both guests, and all of our catch-up was just telling some stories about other people and their kids like two old guys. It’s so fucking funny.”
Leary is still working as an actor, but is now also collecting numerous writing and producing credits through his company Amoeba, which is where he first became involved in his latest project, Fox military comedy Going Dutch – a show he was initially not planning to star in.
“I’m glad I did, though, because I really enjoyed playing it. It was so much fun,” he says. “The cast was so good. I loved it.”
Debuting in the US in January, the series centres on Colonel Patrick Quinn (Leary) who, after an unfiltered rant, is reassigned to Garrison Stroopsdorf, a military base in the Netherlands that is described as the least important army base in the world – one boasting no strategic purpose, guns or weapons but instead offering luxury amenities including a Michelin star-level commissary, a bowling alley and the US Army’s only fromagerie.
When Quinn arrives to instil a new sense of professionalism and discipline – and prove he still has what it takes as a leader – he comes up against Captain Maggie Quinn (Taylor Misiak), the base’s former commanding officer and his estranged daughter. Community star Danny Pudi plays XO Major Abraham Shah, Quinn’s loyal second-in-command, while Laci Mosley is Master Sergeant Dana Conway and Hal Cumpston is the hapless Corporal Elias Papadakis.
RELATED CONTENT
Out of Control
In Fox comedy Animal Control, star Joel McHale shares the spotlight with a host of furry and feathered co-stars. DQ speaks to the former Community man about making the series and finding the secret recipe for sitcom success.
Remade Abroad: Accused
Showrunner Howard Gordon, star Michael Chiklis, director Marlee Matlin and the team behind US drama Accused outline how they have adapted Jimmy McGovern’s British anthology series to tackle themes of race, power, identity and truth.
The Next level
A super-intelligent computer threatens to start a global catastrophe in Fox thriller Next. Showrunner Manny Coto reveals how his own experiences led him to create a drama rooted in real science.
Meanwhile, British comic and actor Catherine Tate adopts a Dutch accent to play Katja Vanderhoff, the owner of the local brothel and a potential love interest for Leary’s Quinn.
Produced by Fox Entertainment Studios, Going Dutch is written, showrun and executive produced by Joel Church-Cooper, with Leary and his son Jack Leary also exec producing through Amoeba. The series is distributed by Fox Entertainment Global and has already been picked up by Talpa TV for viewers in the Netherlands.
Filmed at a disused military base in Ireland – where Leary has familial links – the show is described as a single-camera sitcom, differentiating it from the multi-cam projects commonly filmed in front of a live studio audience. Yet with actors often improvising on set, Going Dutch was actually shot using two or three cameras at a time to ensure every moment was captured from multiple angles.
“Sometimes you can’t with action scenes, and with really intimate dramatic scenes you don’t necessarily want to shoot multiple cameras, but I like to shoot, for comedy’s sake, with at least two cameras, maybe three at a time,” Leary says. “If you’re gonna improvise, that means you’ve got everything. You’ve got two closeups and you’ve got a two-shot so you don’t lose anything.”
The actor says he also doesn’t like multiple takes of the same scene. Instead, the rehearsal is committed to film, and then there might be one or two more takes before moving forward. “We like to keep moving through the day, and the actors are really good about it,” he says.
That didn’t mean the cast didn’t need to know their lines. “Joel definitely wants to shoot a version of the scripted stuff, but be ready [to improvise],” Leary says. “Also, in breaks, we’re gonna be talking about tomorrow’s scenes. So if you say, ‘I have an idea for tomorrow,’ Joel’s writing that down. And the next morning when we come into work, he’ll want us to do the scene as scripted in rehearsal, but he also wants to wait ’til the cameras are rolling to throw in that idea you mentioned yesterday, or to just let us go. It’s like a basketball game.”
The fast pace meant six or seven pages of the script (and improvisations) could be filmed every day, with each episode recorded within five days. “But the cast is so good. They were locked in, so it’s not that hard to do,” Leary adds. “Some of the action days would take a little bit longer.”
With so much footage recorded, a lot of it off-script, naturally there was a lot of film to wade through in the edit – a stage Leary likens to a “second creative process.” Church-Cooper and Jack Leary would sit in with the editors, and Leary senior would only join in as a “third eye” once episodes were taking shape. “Honestly, if the actors have done their job, it’s all gold. They’re really good,” he says.
In many scripted television circles, improvisation can be frowned upon. But with former stand-up comedian Leary involved, it’s unsurprising that off-the-cuff lines and roleplay were actively encouraged while the cameras were rolling. Before moving into stand-up, however, Leary was a theatre actor and clearly remembers working in an environment where “the playwright is God and you’re not allowed to improvise.”
“I also write,” he says, “but what are you hiring actors for, especially in comedy, if not to let them make it better? Let them be part of the process. Every good movie or thing I’ve been a part of has the actors bringing something to them. I’m certainly nowhere near a good enough writer to think I wouldn’t want them to improvise.
“Some actors don’t like to improvise, and that’s fair too, but specifically on this project, we’re looking for the actors who can open up and improvise.”
If it wasn’t already clear, Leary is effusive about his “fucking great” Going Dutch co-stars, and says he recognised the calibre of the ensemble’s improv skills after just a handful of scenes. “The first day of shooting was me and Taylor arguing in the conference room,” Leary recalls. “At the end of the first take, maybe in the middle of the second take, I was like, ‘Alright, this girl’s even better than I thought she was. I have to bring my A game.’ When I went to the monitor, Joe and Jack were like, ‘Oh my God, she’s even fucking better than we thought she was.’”
He continues: “Danny we took for granted because he’s Danny, but he also comes in at the end of that first scene. Later that first day, we shot a thing with Hal. So within the first four hours before we went to lunch, we were like, ‘Fucking Taylor’s great, fucking Hal’s great.’ Danny, of course, is a given, which is unfair to him, but that’s true. The next day was a big thing with Laci, so we got to see Lacey working with me and Danny and Taylor.”
Then there’s “fucking Catherine Tate – talk about taking somebody for granted,” Leary says. “She’s so fucking good. As a producer, we don’t know if the audience is going to love it. You just don’t know until they see it, but certainly in a comedy, we have the ammunition, we have the bomb, the flame throwers, all of them are really good. I just feel like if they [viewers] like the show, we can go forever. Fucking Taylor, Catherine and Laci, just the female characters are fucking insane.”
Yet even with a stellar roster of on-screen talent, comedies can be a hard sell for an audience, particularly in a streaming era where viewers can turn off within minutes, let alone give up 30 minutes of their time each week to allow a show to bed in for a seven- or eight-season run.
Through the characters and the show’s “heart,” Leary believes Going Dutch can firmly establish itself in Fox’s comedy line-up, where it currently forms a Thursday evening double-header with Joel McHale’s Animal Control.
“Well, they have to want to watch, it can’t just be funny, right? It’s got to be funny from character and from the situation, so even if it’s an evil, nasty, edgy, heart-of-stone character, they [viewers] have to want to watch that person every week, over multiple episodes,” Leary says. “The key is the casting, and the writing, of course. But you don’t fucking know. You really don’t know until about three or four episodes into the first season of shooting if it’s really going to work.”
On the back of a strong start for the show on Fox, with an average of around one million overnight viewers across its first nine episodes, Leary is hopeful he will be returning to Garrison Stroopsdorf again soon.
“Well, we have a plan,” he says of a potential second season. “We had a general game plan of season two anyways, before we did season one. There’s a lot of really funny stuff [to come] in season two.”
tagged in: Denis Leary, Fox, Fox Entertainment Global, Fox Entertainment Studios, Going Dutch, Joel Church-Cooper