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When Zach Woods was first cast as Gabe on Season 6 of The Office, he found a comment online where someone described his face as a “combination of sadness and food poisoning.” And that was before he had even appeared in an episode. “I was like, buckle up, here we go!” he recalls thinking at the time.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Woods breaks down how he went from the “abject terror” of joining one of his favorite comedy shows to channeling some of the tech world’s biggest weirdos as Jared on HBO’s Silicon Valley. He also discusses co-creating and starring as the deeply awkward fictional NPR host Lauren Caspian in his new stop-motion animated Peacock show In the Know opposite live-action celebrities like Mike Tyson, Hugh Laurie, Nicole Byer, and others.
“The thing about Lauren is he‘s so uncomfortably close to me in a way that I really, really wish weren’t true,” Woods tells me of his character, who looks a bit like This American Life’s Ira Glass but also evokes podcast hosts like Malcolm Gladwell, Ezra Klein, and The Daily’s Michael Barbaro. (The series begins with Lauren practicing his active listening “hmms” shirtless in the mirror.) If he wasn’t an actor, Woods says he would want to be Fresh Air host Terry Gross.