I feel like anyone who’s gone on a date, anyone who is an adult over the age of like 20, has had that experience and I think that’s what why people related to it. What I loved about that episode too was it didn’t feel like a dated episode about a Tinder app. It felt like this could be any sort of social media like going on numerous dates like in a big metropolitan area. It felt almost timeless in a way.
You’re talking about episode four, [“First Date”]. Yeah. I was on five.
Doh, yeah, yeah. Sorry.
[“First Date” is when] he’s on the app. Yeah. Well, I mean what he realizes is that even before these apps and everything it’s really about the idea of just the exhaustion of trying to find someone [similar to the person] he had this connection with. He just doesn’t really connect with any of these people and then he meets someone he does connect with and she’s unavailable and then I think he starts wondering, you know, the scary scenario: “Is the reason I feel this connection because she’s unavailable?”
Yeah. Absolutely. You’re right. That was episode four. Sorry. They’re all meshing together I guess.
I have an unfair advantage. That’s why I’m so familiar with the material.
Very true. But in that episode, episode four, you’re in the scenes where you’re in the same and you’ve got what, is it five or six different actresses he’s going on a date with?
Oh, no. There’s way more. It’s so many. It’s like in a rap star’s montage. There’s a lot, yeah, I can’t even remember. I’m doing casting, and people are like “Wow, they’re really getting a big chance here.” It does seem kinda crazy, like if that didn’t work, the whole episode’s garbage! We’re just way too sure of ourselves. Because it seems like it could be confusing. It might not work , but I guess we get these ideas and we kinda hope we can cast the right collaborators to execute them. And you know, Eric Wareheim directed that episode and I think he did such a fantastic job and our editor on that one did a really killer job. It just works.
As an actor was it confusing to track where you were in the episode at all? Was that sort of logistically more challenging than you thought it might be?
It was hard, it was very hard. You’re filming more scenes that kind of remember an energy that you have with a certain romantic interest. And you have to do that with way more people and I’m trying to kind of keep a consistency in the relationship and the rapport between all these different women. It’s not easy, and it was a really fun challenge. To me what I love about “Master of None” is I get acting challenges that I feel like [no-one] but myself and Alan and Eric my brother would think I could pull off.
Did you know Italian before you did the first two episodes?
No, I learned it over the year. So I took about three weeks of intensive Italian, and I flew to Italy for two months, and I worked on culture and arts, and everything that you can’t get here. I was fluent here by myself. I did what the character did. I kind of … evolved in a way. I’d get ideas and, all those places in the episode are places that I actually worked and learned how to be confident.
So wait, when you were in Italy for two months, was Netflix like “Hey are you coming back?”
Well they asked for a date, you know, to start writing the second season, and me and Alan said “Hey, we’ve gotta refill our notebook here. We don’t want to rush back into this. We don’t wanna just like show up, we need to refill the notebook.” And I told them I was going to Italy for a few months. I was saying like “Look, I’m technically working on the show now, trying to make it authentic and make it a richer program in the future.” And I think what I did paid off. Those episodes would not be what they were if I didn’t do that.
“Master of None” season two is currently available for streaming on Netflix.
