For the first time ever, an American is travelling overseas to take part in the British sensation Taskmaster. Best known for his scene-stealing roles in The League, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place, Mantzoukas didn’t wait to be asked. He reached out himself, hoping to join the ranks of comedians competing in increasingly absurd challenges dreamed up by creator Alex Horne and judged by the tyrannically funny Greg Davies.
The result? “A consistently destructive presence,” according to Davies, and a new kind of energy that both thrilled and terrified the show’s creators.
Check out Parade‘s full conversation with Horne, Davies, and Mantzoukas, as well as an exclusive clip of the upcoming season Taskmaster streams on YouTube every Friday beginning May 2.
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Jason is the first American contestant to travel overseas to participate in the show. Was there a different flavor to having Jason on the show?
Greg Davies: I found Jason to be a consistently destructive presence. And it’s something. Until I saw him again, I didn’t realize how triggered I would be by seeing him again. He was a challenge to my authority. He was a challenge to the structure of the entire show.
Jason Mantzoukas: And that’s enough from Greg, I think.
See, he’s even doing it right now!
Greg: I would reluctantly admit that he did bring a certain energy to the show that we’ve not previously dealt with. But we survived. The show’s not been decommissioned, and therefore, it must have been a positive thing.
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Alex, it feels like the show has been getting bigger and bigger. You’ve had premieres in New York for the last two seasons, and you and Greg have been on Late Night With Seth Meyers. Talk to me about your reaction to the show’s profile increasing.
Alex Horne: Yeah, these two trips in New York, because of the show, have been some of the happiest times. We’ve got to go to America, and they give me free cheesecake. So that can only be a good thing.
Greg: It’s sort of tragic, and maybe sweet, that one of the highlights of our 19 seasons is that we travelled to New York and a man in a cheesecake ship recognized us and gave us free cheesecake.
Jason: That’s the saddest story. And how often you tell this story as a part of your personal mythology. You are set. You can afford cheesecake.
Alex: Yeah, but it was free. They saw us on the telly and thought, “Well, give them cheesecake.” That’s what it means to me… the growth of the show. It means I was in New York, on New Year’s Eve and a policeman stopped me with a gun–
Jason: And he was smart to.
Do you plan to make more returns to New York, cheesecake be damned?
Alex: Well, hopefully we are coming back. I think the plan is to keep going because we really enjoy it.
Greg: The Old Town Hall – or actually, The Town Hall it’s called – is a beautiful old theatre. And we were so thrilled. It was full of American fans. And when we went on stage, we thought it would endear us to them to announce that we had an American on the show this time. But they all just started simultaneously chanting, “We don’t want him on!”
Jason: Yeah, which is very long for a chant. “We don’t want him on!” They all started chanting in unison. One thousand people. Pretty impressive.
Alex: In The Old Town Hall.
Jason: Ye Old Town Hall is what it’s actually called. Are you guys announcing any kind of North American tour right now? A 48-city American tour?
Greg: We’re waiting on our management to secure free cheesecake in every city.
Jason: The people booking these shows, now you know you can pay these men in free cheesecake. Get on the phone!
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Jason, you reached out to be on the show. How did that happen?
Jason: Inexplicably, I was a fan – not of Alex or Greg – but of the show in general and many of the comedians who are featured as contestants. These heroes have to put up with these two idiots on a regular basis. I really enjoyed the show and became obsessed with it, in a way, that I wanted to find out if I could do this. So I had my manager reach out to Taskmaster and ask if they would speak to me. I got on Zoom and we knocked it out. Bing, bang, boom. Next thing you know, I was on a flight and I was doing tasks in the house.
Greg: Was it as you imagined?
Jason: It was cool. I will say, as a fan, it was cool to be at the Taskmaster house and be doing stuff inside some of these rooms and these iconic places. People would catch me taking selfies with certain props or elements that felt important to me. Not to tear back the curtain too much, but there is just one bathroom. It’s not cool. It’s a pretty rank situation.
It’s the one we’ve seen on the show?
Alex: Yeah, it’s just the one. There actually is another one, but that’s been turned into a chair. The editor has to sit on that toilet, genuinely, because the house is too small. If there was a real emergency, we could move her. I think legally, you have to have more than one toilet if you’ve got more than 10 people in a building and we haven’t obeyed that rule.
Jason: Oh no, because it’s way more than that. There’s a lot of people for one bathroom. And can I be honest? It can get a little dizzy.
Greg: It would be a nice thing for us to get out there that a lot of people want to visit the Taskmaster house. Particularly around Europe, people have travelled many miles to come and see that house, and it’s a horrible little house. They should stop coming for their sake.
Jason: What a lot of people don’t know is that when the house is not being used for tasks, the shed that’s on the property is a human-sized litter box. And they encourage you to go in that litter box. And then they scoop everything that’s in there out, and they throw it over the fence on the golf course.
Alex: Yeah, we scoop. We scoop and throw.
Greg: Scoop and throw. Simple as that.
Jason: It’s a classic scoop and throw.
How do you go about plotting which tasks are in which episode? Are you plotting out episodes before you film, or do you take all the tasks and figure it out later?
Alex: Exactly the second option. We go, “Okay, that could be Episode 1 or Episode 10.” We like to start with a bang and then end with a bang, but then it’s all done afterwards. We just feel our way through it. We try to make sure it’s balanced the whole way through. There’s no exciting way of saying it. It’s just painstakingly plotted. We never look at points. That’s the most important thing. We never think “Oh, Jason is doing well in this episode, so let’s pull him down a peg”.
Greg: I did think that personally.
Jason: They don’t like to talk about it, but there was clearly a concerted effort to hobble me as much as possible. Make sure this gets in the article. They were very afraid of American dominance.
Greg: Sometimes Jason would do a thing, and Alex would glance at me. Afterwards, he’d say “do it” to me. I made my own decision as to what that meant.
People are very critical of your scoring, Greg.
Greg: I do get an awful lot of grief on the internet and sometimes from more difficult contestants about the inconsistencies within my judgments. But I don’t hear the people of North Korea complaining about the inconsistencies over there. My point is, this is a dictatorship. This is not a democracy, and I’ve been given power. As long as I wield that power, I’ll give points as I see fit.
Jason: No, it’s clear to us that we are at the whim of lunatic.
Jason, do you have any other American comedians you’d like to see on the show?Maybe people who you think would do amazing, or people like your friend Nish Kumar, who respectfully, didn’t always do the greatest.
Jason: I’m pretty sure Nish won. I’m pretty sure he won that season. Here’s what I’ll say. I feel like there are so many American comedians who would do well on this show. The fact that they haven’t been on this show, I can only presume, is based entirely on the producers’ fear that Americans will dominate. I think you need only look no further than the Comedy Bang! Bang! stable of people. Jon Gabrus, Lisa Gilroy, Paul F. Thompkins, Gil Ozeri. I want to see these people mixing it up. I want to see a full-blown American invasion of this show. We’re all coming over on boats.
Greg: Boats?
Jason: Yep!
Alex: Why boat?
Greg: Well, I mean, that’s an 11-day cruise. But I welcome them coming however they want to come.
Alex, there have been very few tasks you’ve repeated over the show. Is there a reason you never redo tasks?
Alex: I just want the comedians to not know what’s in the envelope. I don’t want them to open and go “Oh, that happened in Series 4. I know what to do there.” It’s just got to be fresh every time. And the same for the viewers. It means every time the next one happens, it’s a new twist every single time.
Greg: And I hate to publicly praise Alex. But his capacity for coming up with endlessly inventive and different tasks is, frankly, weird.
Alex: That’s not praise.
Greg: No, I know. The net result is that we get a lot of variety of tasks and it’s incredible for the show. But his capacity to keep generating them…it’s just not right.
Jason: What I’ll say to piggyback off Greg’s compliment, it’s so cool to see Alex be good at something. Inventing these tasks. It’s clearly the thing he’s best at, and he can kind of squeeze it into this comedy show and be comedy adjacent. What he’s good at is thinking up these convoluted little tasks, right? It’s great. It’s so good that he has that.
When you’re recommending people to watch Taskmasker, is there a particular season or task to start on?
Greg: I think that first task is a great example. Because you take one of the contestants, Romesh Ranganathan, who demonstrated one way of tackling a task by smashing it and ramming it into his face. It sort of showcases the many different characteristics of a human being.
Jason: I’m always trying to recommend this show to people, especially in America where the show isn’t as big. They’ve kind of put everything up on YouTube and, in fact, chopped it up into pieces, too. So if you know a friend you’re trying to turn onto the show, if they are a fan of Nish or James Acaster, you can lean into, “You already like this person. So let me show you this clip. Here’s a clip of everyone failing at the task or everyone eating s–t. Or I think you’d like this compilation of people being very clever and solving a puzzle.” The YouTube channel has a lot of good ways to recommend the show, including the full episodes.
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