​​Jack: All right, Joe, how are you doing today?

Joe: Excellent. How about yourself?

Hey, I’m an 8 out of 10 so far. Always room for improvement, but still pretty good.

Yeah, very good.

I appreciate you taking the time. I’m Jack Farmer with Wrestling INC. I know you’re a big gamer, Joe. So my first question, just to get things started right off the bat is, did you feel a lot of pressure taking on a role like Sweet Tooth, one of the most iconic gaming characters in history?

No, at first I was like [fist pumps]…And you celebrate. And then I was like, oh man, if we mess this up. Because I’ve got a direct line, I’m going to hear it directly from the people if it ain’t right. The people with the opinions.You know those people, you’re probably one of them.

I got a couple.

Yeah, being in the gaming space, I knew if we were going to do this, we better do it right. Yeah, you definitely feel the pressure, but I think it was more internal pressure than external.

Did you feel, as you were doing this, any need to meet the source material, do your own thing? How did you figure out that balance? Because the physicality of Sweet Tooth, from what I’ve seen here, and how you play that role, you don’t see Sweet Tooth in the game very often out of his car. How did you figure out how you were going to portray that?

I think a lot of it was, obviously, I have a very innate understanding of all the different manifestations of Sweet Tooth through all the different games. And taking a lot of that, a lot of the edginess of the Sweet Tooth from [Twisted Metal] Black. And just trying to bring all the best aspects together and put into this character. Especially it having an expanded mythology, you learn more about the backstory of Needles Kane, and what produces a man like Sweet Tooth. I think all of those aspects went into the development of the character.

You definitely have a great balance. And this whole show, from what I’ve seen, has a great balance of being action, but fun, a little scary at different times. Must have been really fun to get to work on that and do all those different things. What was it like? I want to talk more about the character here, because obviously I’m with Wrestling Inc.; I know Samoa Joe on TV, that I’ve seen on AEW and in the past, and other places. But this was a character that it wasn’t just you in this, not only were you trying to take on the character of Sweet Tooth, but you were working with the voice, Will Arnett. Did you guys have any one-on-one time where you would discuss how you were going to portray this? Did you guys take it separately and meld together this situation? How did you approach that?

No, we definitely spoke before production began. Got together and tried to figure out what this character’s going to represent, get into the mind of how chaotic he is and how much his mood shifts back and forth. And I did a lot of studying of what Will does, of listening to BoJack Horseman, going back to Lego Batman. Just trying to catch inflection and tone and trying to keep that in the back of my head as I’m doing the character. And I think it’s that collaboration that made it all work out.