Alex Moffat, an actor and comedian best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” rarely shouts at deer. But during a tense scene in the new crime comedy “Bad Monkey,” a Key deer, a member of an endangered species native to the Florida Keys, kept entering the frame. In one exasperated moment, Moffat, in character as a disreputable real estate developer, turned to the deer and shouted, “Go back to the woods or whatever!”
The line wasn’t in the script. But it’s definitely in the show.
Developed by Bill Lawrence and debuting Wednesday on Apple TV+, “Bad Monkey” tracks a cop turned health inspector, Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn), who pursues a case involving a severed arm, Medicare fraud, voodoo-adjacent witchcraft and a menacing capuchin. It is based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel of the same title, and as with most Hiaasen tales, it is set in a version of the Sunshine State defined by raw natural beauty and equally raw Florida-man shenanigans.
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Not a lot of shows shoot in Florida — blame the lack of film infrastructure; blame the absence of tax breaks; blame the deer and the gnats and the 99% humidity. Even shows set in the state will typically shoot in North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana or, as in the case of Lawrence’s Florida-centric comedy “Cougar Town,” Los Angeles. This is understandable. When you film in Culver City, California, you rarely need to hire armed alligator wranglers.
Hiaasen, a former Miami Herald columnist, had been burned by Hollywood before. He strongly preferred a Florida shoot, especially for the scenes set in the Keys.
“There’s nowhere in California that looks like that,” Hiaasen said.
Lawrence (“Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking”), who had long had his sights on “Bad Monkey,” made that happen.
“Feeling authentically Florida and a little sweaty and dirty, it really mattered,” he said.
For a longtime Hollywood guy, Lawrence has deep Florida roots. Several family members are largemouth bass fishing guides on the St. Johns River, and his parents spent many years between Central Florida and the Bahamas, where a portion of “Bad Monkey” is set. When his parents forced him to go on fishing trips as a kid, he would typically bring a Hiaasen novel.
“I’m a lifetime fan,” Lawrence said. “I thought he was Florida’s Elmore Leonard.”
While Leonard is a Hollywood staple, writers and directors have rarely cracked Hiaasen. Though the novels are lively, pacey and plot-rich, few projects have retained their dark comedy. Take for example the dutiful 1996 adaptation of Hiaasen’s “Striptease”: “Some of the funniest scenes got cut out,” Hiaasen said.
In his office he keeps boxes of scripts that were never greenlit. (“Being a Norwegian, I live my whole life with minimal expectations,” he said. “So I was never crushed or disappointed.”) When it comes to options these days, he says “No” more often than he says “Yes,” mostly because the offering parties rarely have comedic backgrounds.
“I do want people to be able to laugh,” he said.
Lawrence, who broke out with “Spin City” and “Scrubs,” is known for his comedies. And if his style is less sardonic than Hiaasen’s, Hiaasen didn’t mind. He was further persuaded by Lawrence’s Florida background and his pitch that he saw the book as a series, not a feature — Hiaasen’s novels have a picaresque feel that frustrates film’s three-act structure.
Environment has never been especially important to Lawrence, who used to describe “Scrubs” as being set in “San DiFrangeles.” But he wanted to accurately portray Hiaasen’s Florida. And as Hiaasen’s book has strong ecological leanings — the natural world is very rarely the subject of his satire — it felt important to shoot amid that particular setting.
“We wanted to really capture the nature and the beauty of the state,” Lawrence said. Even the human-made environment cooperated.
“You can just walk in anywhere and it’s authentic,” Tim Galvin, a production designer, said. “It’s not a great challenge to find the place to get oysters.”
“Bad Monkey” is not a documentary. With the exception of Vaughn, who is a decade older than the book’s Yancy, a majority of the actors, including the monkey, are younger and sexier than their literary counterparts. (In the case of Jodie Turner-Smith as the Dragon Queen — an elderly grotesque in the book — much, much sexier.) And because shooting in the Bahamas, a foreign country, presents added difficulties, Miami mostly stands in for Andros Island.
But even Florida had its challenges. “We shut down every eight minutes, because all the storm stuff is real,” Lawrence said. And when the sun shone, production had to pause so the actors could change into fresh shirts (pit stains play havoc with continuity) and wipe away sweat.
“Everyone was always dripping wet,” said Marcos Siega, who directed the pilot.
And yet, that sweat had its upsides. “I act better when it’s happening around me,” said Meredith Hagner, who plays an ostensibly grieving widow. Some days she could feel the makeup literally melting off her face.
“I’d rather be in the elements and have it feel textured and real than I would on a sound stage any day,” she said.
Her co-star Natalie Martinez, who plays a teasing medical examiner, agreed. “You can’t fake humidity,” Martinez, born and raised in Miami, said. “My hair definitely does different things shooting in Miami than it does shooting in L.A.”
Vaughn was even more succinct. As he wrote in an email, “It’s Florida baby, Florida!”
The wildlife was often a hassle. “We had all these rules about where and when we could shoot to protect the animals, and the animals did not have those rules,” Lawrence said. “We were so overrun by animals and creatures of all kind.” Key deer ate most of the landscaping around the house used as Yancy’s home. Birds and iguanas intruded into shots.
But nature also offered gifts. “The color of the water down there is just so unbelievable; you don’t see that anywhere else,” Galvin said. And during an underwater scene at a swimming hole, a manatee joined actress Michelle Monaghan. In the show, this sparks an epiphany within her outlaw character.
Vaughn, in a later video call, had particular praise for the deer. “Beautiful animals,” he said of the deer who joined the shoot to nibble the prop grass. “They were method. They stayed in character.”
Then, of course, there is the monkey of the title, a feisty capuchin played by Crystal, a longtime Hollywood veteran. Lawrence joked about regretting this casting choice.
“The monkey was very badly cast, because Crystal was a very good monkey,” he said. Though Hiaasen visited the set a few times, he never got to meet her — she had already decamped to shoot “The Fabelmans.”
“She’s kind of a little diva,” Hiaasen sighed. “All I ever wanted to do is meet the damn monkey.”
Hiaasen has yet to see the episodes. But the actors seem to feel that the Florida shoot was a success, despite the iguanas, despite the lightning. Even Moffat ultimately was enthusiastic.
“I love that deer,” he said. “It’s probably the best scene partner I’ve ever had, if I’m being honest.”
This article originally appeared in . c.2024 The New York Times Company
