Matt Walsh Talks ‘Veep,’ ‘Ghostbusters’ and UCB’s Move Into Digital

HBO’s Veep won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy last year for the first time, and then a lot of things changed.

Creator and original showrunner Armando Iannucci left the series, new showrunner David Mandel built a brand new writing staff from scratch, and the show relocated production from Baltimore to Hollywood.

So how’s the show holding up midway into Season 4?

“It was a big transition,” says co-star Matt Walsh, “but we never missed a beat.”

Indeed, they didn’t.

The reviews this season have been staggeringly good. Selena Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is as vile as ever. The swearing still rises to the level of poetry. White House press secretary Mike McLintock, played by Walsh, has had the unenviable task this season of simultaneously explaining President Meyer’s evolving strategy on the Nevada recount, managing a Master Cleanse, and trying to adopt a baby.

Walsh sat down with Decider to talk about the Veep season in progress, his role in the upcoming Ghostbusters film, and several other projects he has in the works.

DECIDER: I wanna start with an unanswerable question: Is Veep still a political satire?

Matt Walsh: For me, Veep is a workplace comedy and a satire set in the political world, but unfortunate mishaps for the show are tragedies for the country.

When did you shoot this season?

We shot from September to January.

So that was far enough along to see plenty of weird stuff in the actual presidential campaign. Was that something that came up a lot as you were shooting?

The writers aren’t trying to mirror what’s going on in the real world. They’re trying to create the craziest fiction possible that’s still plausible, but then surprising things started to started to happen in the campaign that mirrored the show. They’re trying to get to the bigger truth about politics, and it keeps coming true.

Do you think your character has gotten better at being the White House press secretary?

I think he has always been good in the press room, but I know that he’s gotten better at organizing things or not making gaffes or keeping the administration out of hot water.

Will this season continue to be primarily about the campaign?

Yeah, the writers are really investigating the repercussions of a tie in the presidential election and what would happen. They dig pretty deep into that.

Do you think the show winning the Emmy last year. Did you think it probably should have won the year before, too?

I feel like the show has gotten better every year. The world is getting better. The machine is humming. I feel like every year we’ve been nominated that that we were as good as any of the other shows.

From the cast’s point of view, did this season feel much different with a new showrunner?

Truthfully, yeah. It was a transition. We took an almost completely British writing staff on a show based in Baltimore and moved it to Los Angeles with 10 or 12 American writers. That is a big transition, and it lies in the unique process of the show. We rehearse in the room with the scripts and then put them down and improvise. It’s very collaborative.

I saw your film A Better You, and it has stuck with me on the issue of how much control people have over their own lives. Is that where you started?

People can delude themselves to what the world is. A lot of what being healthy is about is seeing the world as it, accepting that, and building from there. Brian Huskey plays this self-help guru who is ignoring his own behavior — the way he treats his family and his patients. I have always wondered about people in the world of self-help or psycho what their home lives are like.

How did you put that movie together. I know a lot of the people in the film like Andy Daly and Rob Huebel are UCB people that have worked with you in the past.

This was the second improv movie that I have directed, and I wrote it with Brian Huskey. We spent six months hammering out an outline. Then we called our friends and said, “Hey, you wanna make a hundred dollars a day shooting in July?” We got a little money together and shot it as quickly as we could.

Have day-and-date releases and video on demand in general changed the economics for movies like that, or has it just changed the distribution?

As the way media is distributed has spread to more outlets, there’s a business model to make smaller-budget things that can find an audience. You can find an audience those movies instead of just getting lost after the festivals.

The different scales that the business operates on now has gotten very interesting. You can do an improv show at UCB Franklin for 100 people the same week as you’re filming Ghostbusters. Do you still want to do the smaller projects for the same reasons that you used to?

There’s a certain element of purging ideas. If you carry an idea with you long enough as a writer or an actor — if you see something funny — you want to make something about it. Being in Ghostbusters is a dream come true, but that’s not something I could write or direct at this point. I try to explore things in projects that I can make.

Who will you play in Ghostbusters?

I play a Homeland Security agent along with Michael Williams from The Wire.

Did you see a lot of interesting things on the set, or were you mostly in CGI sort of scenes?

There’s a big finale that was pretty impressive. There’s a huge number of ghosts and extraterrestrials running around that you can’t see, so you’re depending on Paul Feig — the director — telling you what you’re seeing.

You’ve been going to festivals with the Thank You, Del documentary. What is that about?

There’s an improv festival that’s been running in New York for the last 17 years called the Del Close Marathon. People bring improv teams from all over the world. We decided to make a film about it and were really drawn to the source of the festival, which was Del Close. He’s sort of the grandfather of modern-day, longform improv who taught a lot of us in Chicago. He was an inspiration for a lot of people in UCB. We did a lot of research and structured the movie around Del’s influence.

That’s not on streaming yet, right?

No, we’re still taking it to festivals. At some point, it will be on demand where people can find it.

UCB has two theaters in New York and two theaters in L.A., and you’ve got The UCB Show on Seeso. Are there digital projects or other things that you’re doing right now?

We have a production deal with Universal where we’re pitching and creating pilots. We’re trying to develop the theater into sort of an in-house studio.

Has UCB shifted from talent development more to talent discovery as you’ve gotten bigger?

I see what we do as not teaching people how to be funny but how to improvise. Matt Besser and Amy [Poehler] and Ian [Roberts] and I are still doing things at the theater. It’s a great opportunity for us to cultivate the next generation of comedians, so we stay involved in that.

You have a new crop of people every year, but they never really leave. Even some of the more recognizable people still come back every Tuesday or every once in a while.

There’s only so much real estate on the calendar, so some of these veteran performers still have their Monday night improv show. It’s not like a resident company where there’s only 30 people. It’s more of a gathering space.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.