Thomas Lennon: The Mr. Skin Interview

How do actual police react to Reno 911?
Most police stations have a guy they call Dangle. I've been hearing that from a lot of different cops. Cops really do love the show in kind of a weird way, like they're obsessed with it. Mostly because they find it very, very realistic. Just the stuff we say to each other. There's an awful reality to the stuff that we say to each other, like about CPT (Colored People's Time) and things like that that most people wouldn't talk about. It really has struck a chord with these dudes. It's weird to do the show because we're around so many real cops all the time, 'cause we shoot in a real station with a real jail, so there's a very strange line. On our set, there's the fake cops and three times as many real cops also hanging around.

What about criminals?
I did get a shout out once from the jail from a guy who had seen the show, but the real fan base seems to be on the law-enforcement side.

Has the fact that your character is gay engendered any particular response?
I haven't heard from any gay cops yet; they seem to keep a low profile. But the gay community does seem to like Dangle pretty well. We were nominated for a GLAAD award this year, and I was asked to be in this year's West Hollywood Pride Parade, which I was looking forward to, but I was in Vienna at the time. Next year I plan to ride a sheriff's bike along the parade route and write tickets for various infractions. I think it's nice to see a gay character on TV who's not just on the show because he's gay. Dangle's gayness isn't a punch line. Other than the shorts he wears, he's a pretty macho guy.

Did you do research with the real Cops show?
Not for even five seconds. We had one tape, which was Cops-Too Hot For TV that we watched like one time. It's not actually that hot. You mostly get to see a lot of guys with no pants on. If you like a dude on PCP with his balls out and all sunburned, then you want Cops-Too Hot for TV.

Speaking of male nudity, there seems to be a lot of it on Reno.
We do a tremendous amount of male nudity, yeah (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3). I guess we've just got a lot of males around. I end up naked on the show quite a bit. Ben Garant, more often than not, has to run around with his stuff taped up there.

So the johnsons are under wraps?
They actually are. They almost always are. Female nudity, I don't know how funny that is. Kerri Kenney (Picture: 1 - 2) with her clothes off isn't actually funny. It's kinda hot. We have to put her in grandma underwear. We actually tried to find Kerri Kenney on Mr. Skin. It lists her. She made our assistant get a membership just so we could find naked pictures of her, but it turns out they don't actually have any, there's just a category heading.

Does she have nudity in her past?
I've seen some, and I've been nude with her, and I could probably supply some (Picture: 1 - 2).

The show seems very improvised. How does that work?
We do a bunch of 3x5 cards and put those on the wall. That's really it. We hardly ever even rehearse. It often turns out that when we rehearse it often kills it, so what we do is we usually just have the big idea written down and then we just shoot it. We never really do it that many times, because if it's not funny after about three times we just forget it. But I think that is one of the things people respond to in the show, that it doesn't feel stilted and it doesn't feel like people doing rehearsed lines and there's no laugh track. It also makes doing the show really, really hard because we shoot for hours and hours and hours to get down to a couple minutes.

Comedy Central lets you get away with a lot.
It's pretty amazing. In two seasons, they've censored us maybe four or five times. Hardly ever. I don't know if you've seen Officer Junior's tour of the jail, where he's taking the little boys through and telling them how you're going to get skull fucked and they'll fuck your shoulder blades and they'll knock your teeth out for better skull fucking, but they were going to pull that. One executive thought you can't possibly take a bunch of little boys through jail and talk about how they're going to get raped. And then we showed it to the standards people and they thought it was hilarious. It's pretty nice, 'cause their only policy over there is, is it funny or is it not funny? And that's it.

I read you did a pilot about early stag films.
Oh yeah. Ben and I wrote a script called Formosa. It was about two guys getting in on the very ground floor of stag films in the '30s. It was actually a very neat show, L.A. Confidential meets Boogie Nights, sort of. We tend to do projects that don't necessarily make good network television. They're either trying to do reality shows or The Honeymooners.

What are your early memories of influential skin sightings?
My big ones would be, my parents took me to the original production of Equus in London when I was six, which had a naked lady in it (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3), and I remember thinking, "This is fantastic!" Then I saw Hair with Beverly D'Angelo, and that was the first onscreen boobs I saw (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3). I thought, "Holy smokes!" But if Mr. Skin gets some Kerri Kenney stuff, it's not to be missed. Underneath that cop outfit, she's actually packing some heat.

Well, a boy can dream.
Exactly.



All Reno 911! photos courtesy of ComedyCentral.com.