Casper Kelly breaks down Cristin Milioti’s performance, the surprising influences behind BUDDY, its strange characters and what a sequel could explore.
If there’s one thing that Buddy director Casper Kelly knows what to do, it’s subverting the expectations of viewers. Kelly did this with Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks, a satire of old television show intros that got incredibly gruesome and out of hand. That little segment put Kelly on the map, garnering millions of views and hundreds of haunting memories from the early 2010s. Now, Kelly makes his return to theaters, following 2018’s Mandy, with Buddy, a chilling horror satire of children’s entertainment.
Buddy follows a group of kids who find themselves in the “magical land” of Buddy, a big, talking, orange unicorn who likes to teach and dance. However, not everything as it seems when one of the kids decides to go against Buddy’s word, initiating a search that uncovers much more sinister doings. When Buddy’s true self begins to show, the children trapped in this colorful prison must find a way to escape. Meanwhile, in the real world, a mother discovers that her daughter’s missing and is forced to venture into Buddy’s hell.
I had the chance to speak with Buddy director Casper Kelly about getting The Penguin‘s Cristin Milioti on board, some of Buddy‘s unusual moments, a potential callback to Too Many Cooks, and more.
Watch the full interview!
When it was announced that Milioti would be joining Kelly’s cartoonishly creepy film, many were surprised to see her take up the opportunity. Given how her role in The Penguin as Sofia Falcone captivated audiences, Kelly knew that Milioti would easily adjust to the shifts in tone throughout Buddy.
“That’s a great question, and I think that’s what she responded to in the script,” Kelly began. “There is a element that is sort of Spielbergian, or Goonies or Wizard of Oz, in addition to the horror. In terms of threading those genres, it wasn’t hard.”
“She’s just a great actor and it was just a matter of working it out with her, but it didn’t take a lot. Her choices were so interesting, and every take was different and had different layers. It made it so hard to pick the right take because they were all so great. I kind of want to do, on the Blu-ray, have an extras where I just show you a bunch of other takes she did, and how great they are.”
Casper Kelly Has Always Wanted to Write for Black Mirror
Although most know Milioti from The Penguin now, there was another series that many also adored Milioti’s performance in: Netflix’s Black Mirror. In the USS Callister-centric episodes, Milioti played Nanette and her digital clone, two characters who went through similar circumstances after being trapped in different worlds.
During our conversation, Kelly mentioned that he tried to write for Black Mirror previously in the past. “I have tried to get to write an episode of Black Mirror for so long, but I just cannot get a meeting over there. That’s always been a dream of mine. So, for you to say that, it makes me feel very good.”
Kelly also divulged a bit into his creative process for the inspiration of Buddy‘s narrative setup.
“I do watch things, and it just becomes a big soup in my unconscious,” Kelly said.
“It’s sort of like making a soup. Maybe some of the oregano in the soup was from watching Black Mirror. Usually the idea process is not thinking about other media, but just sort of creating it new.”
Speaking more on the autonomy of characters, Buddy is surprisingly full of characters who aren’t controlled by this psychopathic unicorn, like Strappy, voiced by Patton Oswalt. Kelly touched on giving those characters more urgency amidst Buddy’s rampage.
“You bring up an interesting point, which happens a lot in sort of abusive situations of other figures,” Kelly mentioned. “Are they enablers or are they also victims or some combination of the two? Yeah, that’s a really good observation.”
With how many characters in Buddy represent other icons in children’s media, Kelly wanted to insert many more references to other franchises as well. Viewers could easily spot the Thomas the Train Engine and Dora the Explorer inspirations, but there were many more shows Kelly wanted to pull from.
“I was interested maybe in putting in some Teletubbies or maybe that ’70s Sid and Marty Krofft stuff, but it didn’t feel right and I didn’t really have the space,” Kelly added. “Maybe for a sequel!”
Clint Howard’s Bizarre BUDDY Scene Almost Got Cut
Kelly has a way of introducing weirdly nice, moments in Buddy.
One in particular stood out to fans in the trailer, which sees a bloody puppet, voiced by Clint Howard, appearing for a split second. However, in the film, these scenes surprisingly add a brief moment of calm in between the carnage. Surprisngly, Kelly mentioned that these scenes were close to not appearing in the final cut.
“That scene was almost on the chopping block several times,” Kelly recalled. “It was one of the producers, J. D. Lifshitz, he just loved that scene, so he always helped me protect it.”
“It was a delight to do that scene and scary to thread that needle, but also the actor we had in there [Clint Howard], I thought, one in particular, he brought so much to it, so much, in a way, heart to it. I love that he was a child actor from long ago as well. He’s a great actor, but he was also a child actor in the ’60s, so it just fit perfectly.”
Too Many Cooks Helped Shape BUDDY’s Subversive Storytelling
Another moment that subverts viewers’ expectation is a later sequence in Buddy, which gets into all sorts of spoilers. However, that sequence is reminiscent of a previous sequence Kelly had in Too Many Cooks. That sequence saw one of its cast members breaking out of the loop, running through the sets, and eventually being caught. However, Buddy plays with that setup differently.
Looking back on these two sequences, Kelly described what it was like to have Buddy‘s sequence be the inverse of that. “It’s nice to be able to, when you’re doing multiple works, to mix up the feeling of the ending and the resolution, whether it’s a happy ending or a sad ending or a bittersweet ending,” Kelly began.
“I think that is important to surprise the audience, thinking about the ending and what is the audience expecting and then try to do something different. I love world building and it’s fun to set up things and to set up questions that I don’t answer. But I think it’s important to have the answers myself, but I don’t always give them to the audience because I think it’s a joy as an audience member myself to speculate and have theories. That’s part of the joy of movies and TV to me.”
Casper Kelly Wants a BUDDY Sequel to Deepen the Mystery
That said, Buddy does leave viewers with an open-ended resolution given some of the things it potentially sets up. When asked about the unravelling ending and the genres he’d want to subvert next, Kelly promised to save the surprises.
“It’s a hard question to answer,” Kelly said. “I think I’m attracted to answering, if I do a sequel, I would answer some questions, but ask more and extend the mystery. I don’t like movies that answer everything or tell you every little thing of the backstory.”
“As far as what other worlds, I probably shouldn’t say that. I want to surprise people, but it’s a good question. I like where you’re going!”
Buddy releases in theaters on August 28.
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Chris Gallardo
Christopher Gallardo is a New York City-based freelance entertainment writer and critic. He is currently writing for Tell-Tale TV, Nerdtropolis, Popternative and Eulalie Magazine with previous contributions to The Hollywood Handle and CoveredGeekly. He has been featured other sites including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Direct, Collider, IGN, and much more. He is also a massive fan of animated shows and movies, ranging from Princess Mononoke to Invincible and Arcane, as well as a big Greek mythology fan who loves Percy Jackson, God of War, and the Hades games. You can find him on X and Instagram (@chrisagwrites)!
