Griffin Newman & Valorie Curry On Amazon’s ‘The Tick’ [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

Dot and Arthur both experience this incredibly traumatic event when they’re very young. Arthur saw it first hand, which I think adds another level of shock to the whole circumstance. His brain sort of unraveled after that. That was diagnosed a bunch of different ways, medicated a bunch of different ways, institutionalized in a bunch of different places. So he spent his life being told what he won’t be capable of doing, you know, being told the problems that he has. Dot had to sort of step up to the plate and become somewhat of a mother to him in the process. But a lot of her job is trying to support him but also within reason. You know, you need to know your limitations. There’s this thing our mom on the show says, which is, “what’s good is great.” You don’t need to aim for great, if your good, that’s good enough. And I think this show is the arc of Arthur figuring out how he can become great and having to convince everyone around him that he knows what he’s doing and that he’s not going to die in the process.

With Dot, as Griffin said, she comes from that same traumatic event but she didn’t have the luxury of falling apart because it’s something that our mother couldn’t handle so Dot had to step up to the plate and be the one to take care of Arthur when he started to become ill. She became a medical professional to be able to take care of him. In that way, she’s really spent her entire adult life anchoring her life around him and putting, not just grief, but her ambitions on the back burner. So for her, this season is really a journey of self discovery, in that, her life has been defined by Arthur needing her and if he possibly doesn’t need her anymore, what is she living for and what has she avoided dealing with, which maybe she doesn’t want to look at.

Griffin: The answer for me is that scene we have together in the car in the pilot and we also – Valorie got cast before I did and she very graciously flew out when I was close to getting the role to do a screen test with me, which I think was a big part of selling them on the idea that I wouldn’t ruin the show is the fact that they got to see the two of us together and they bought the sibling relationship we have. But we have this scene in the pilot where after she’s picked me up from local jail and is trying to get me down to earth and keep me grounded, it’s a weird answer, but it’s fun to do a scene that’s that dramatic and dense in terms of the emotions on a show like this that has so many elements that are light, fun, and exciting, it’s fun to be able to dig into something like that and feel like you are establishing a real emotional core that, hopefully, viewers will be able to use to invest in this whole story.

Valorie: It’s surprising, I would say the same thing because that was one of the first scenes I read – she’s only in a couple of scenes in the pilot – I expected them to want something different. Because those scenes I read, all of Dot’s scenes could be read a number of ways. They could be very sarcastic, it could be that very dry and snarky character, and when they gave us permission to play the scene in a really honest empathetic way, all of a sudden it came to life, and the relationship came to life because you understood the history between these two people. And to have permission to do that on a show like this was really wonderful and freeing.

Griffin: We kept on saying, ‘We can’t believe they’re letting us do this on a comedy,’ like after every take. This show is like a sampler platter. You get all of these different amazing flavors that hopefully add up together to something greater than the parts.