Rob Huebel does a lot of weird stuff on his new series, “Do You Want to See a Dead Body?” But getting naked with Justin Long during the daytime in the middle of a tony Southern California beach community just might take the cake.
Huebel created the show and stars as a version of himself who happens to be an ardent fan of finding corpses in Los Angeles and showing them to his famous friends. These include Adam Scott and Terry Crews, who appear in the pilot episode that was initially filmed for Comedy Central before the off-the-wall comedy series found a home at YouTube Red.
The “Children’s Hospital” alum told TheWrap that a particularly memorable scene to film was one in which he and Long make their way across a nude beach in Malibu and end up getting hassled by a pair of nude-beach bullies. But of course, there are no actual nude beaches in Malibu, meaning that the two stars — not to mention numerous other actors in the the episode — had to strip down on a regular beach, causing considerable confusion to onlookers.
“When we’re shooting that, of course there’s other people around, and there’s kids around, and there’s old people sitting there on the beach, and everyone’s looking at us — and then people start filming it [on their phones],” Huebel said. “We had to send a bunch of production assistants and beg them, ‘Oh, please don’t put Justin Long nude fighting with these other three men on the internet.’ That was weird.”
Huebel’s goal with the show, which started its life as original shorts for Funny or Die, was “to make a show that was totally absurd and aggressively funny.” He also enjoyed getting to “play a total idiot.”
“My friend Owen Burke from Funny or Die, we would just joke about this idea,” the star said of an earlier period in his career. “We were in New York, we would hang out late, go out drinking and then eventually it would get to a point in the night where there would be a lull in the conversation, and I always as a joke just throw that out there, ‘Hey, do you want to go see a dead body?’ And he kept laughing at that and was eventually like, ‘You should shoot that for Funny or Die,’ so that’s where it came from.”
Huebel pointed out that the show was loosely inspired by his fascination with 1980s projects like “Stand by Me” in which kids could head into the woods in search of adventure, not to mention moments from Huebel’s own youth when he and childhood pals would “find Penthouse magazines in these weird forts of teenagers.”
Does he have ideas in mind for future seasons? As long as corpses remain undiscovered, Huebel and his friends are ready to gape at them.
“There’s still so many dead bodies out there in so many different towns — I found a few here in Los Angeles, but what about New York City?” quips the “Big Mouth” voice actor. “I’m sure there’s some dead bodies that haven’t been found. What about Austin, Texas — or San Francisco? I need to go to some of these other towns and take famous people and find more dead bodies.”
(Huebel, who co-stars on “Transparent,” declined to comment on Jeffrey Tambor saying over the weekend that he will not return to the Amazon show after two women accused Tambor of sexual harassment.)
“Do You Want to See a Dead Body?” is currently streaming on YouTube Red.