The Good Place had such a fun alternative vocabulary. Are there any Good Place-isms that still sneak into your head?Bell: There were so many alternat
The Good Place had such a fun alternative vocabulary. Are there any Good Place-isms that still sneak into your head?
Bell: There were so many alternative phrases that The Good Place invented that stuck—not just for us, but for everyone. People still come up to me and say—
Danson: “What the fork?”
Bell: And “mother forking shirt balls.”
Danson: I love that most people that come up to me are 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-year-old boys and girls who have just discovered it. Every generation comes up, and they really do watch it because it’s entertaining. It’s about something. It’s silly. It has fart humor. It’s a lesson in ethics. No one talks to me about anything else more than they do about The Good Place.
Bell: I’m very proud to be part of it. Out of the blue, I got this voicemail that says, “Hey Kristen, it’s Mike Schur. I have this project I’m thinking of, and I don’t know why, but I feel like it’s for you. Can you call me back?” And I was so giddy. It was supposed to be a normal one-hour meeting, and I think we spoke for like two and a half hours about the concept and how much I liked it. I said yes before I read anything just because I wanted to work for him so badly.
Danson: When he told me the plot, there was like 45 minutes of him talking. Literally, I’m not exaggerating. He told me the entire beat-by-beat first season, including the surprise ending. And I wasn’t 100% sure what I was hearing, but I wanted to be part of it. His brain was so imaginative.
Do you think you’d get into the Good Place?
Danson: Well, maybe the novel Good Place, the one we fixed.
Bell: I’m going to try. I’ll tell you that much.
Danson: When you watched the final episode, didn’t you really think: This is the way the universe should work? It really felt like, yeah, this is right.
Ted, your character on A Man on the Inside was inspired by a real man from the Chilean documentary The Mole Agent. Are there traits from this real person that shaped your performance as Charles?
Danson: The character is loosely based on a real person in Santiago. The heart and soul and kindness and gentle sweetness was what we wanted the entire show to have. My character had to be changed. The innocence filtered through me was different, but [he has] the excitement about having purpose again in a community. I get to be a private investigator and be really bad at it.
Bell: Charles says his opinion even when it’s pushed back against, and that’s what I love so much about the original documentary and what you guys carried into the show. In the original documentary, it’s about a man who is hired to go into a nursing facility to figure out if this woman’s jewelry is being pilfered. He comes in, looks for crimes and finds none, but leaves saying the crime is that these people are forgotten. He has the courage to say that, and I think that’s part of what makes your show so handsome.
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