Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a new comedy-fantasy series debuting this Thursday on Comedy Central (10 PM/9 C), might be set in a medieval time of wizards and warlords — but it has a very modern sensibility, and an equally modern sense of humor.
When Krod Mandoon, the title character and a self-proclaimed freedom fighter, is giving his band of companions “notes” after particularly disappointing battle, the hapless wizard complains of a “hostile work environment.”
“We’re freedom fighters!” says an exasperated Krod. “All of our work environments are hostile!”
In short, Krod is part fantasy satire, and part office workplace comedy, but with simply a different kind of office.
Thursday’s one-hour pilot has moments of genuinely inspired lunacy, much like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the classic movie comedy that this project most closely resembles.
In a joke whose sensibility seems to come straight from Monty Python, when the evil Chancellor Dongalor threatens to kill one villager every minute until Krod comes out of hiding, one of the villagers rightfully asks, “How will you mark the time to a minute? Even our most accurate sun-dials are approximate at best.”
Krod – whose full name, we learn in one scene, is the appropriately ridiculous “Krodford J. Mandoon” – is played by Sean Maguire, the actor who played the lead in the 300 spoof Meet the Spartans. He has a very easy-going charm. (Read our interview with him here.)
And the British comedian Matt Lucas, as the series vain, clueless Dongalor, has the Python’s droll deadpan down pat.
That said, much of the show’s humor is of the pun and pratfall sort. The emperor is “Emperor Zanus”. Emperor’s anus? A horse-buggerer is named “Horse Draper.” Horse raper? There is much walking into walls and posts — gags that the willing cast mostly pulls off.
Alas, the show does have two thoroughly false notes. Bruce, a gay guy who joins Krod’s band, is a fey stereotype obsessed with sex and fashion, and has thick faux-Latin accent. Meanwhile, Anika, Krod’s sexually liberated pagan girlfriend, seems to exist merely to give Krod something to fret about.
As part of a pagan ritual, Anika agrees to have sex with 300 men. When she decides to call it off in mid-gang-bang, Bruce happily takes over.
It’s not that I was terribly offended by these jokes — the show makes its raciness clear from the outset.
It was just disappointing that a show written by a heterosexual man has the two non-heterosexual male characters — virtually the only two non-heterosexual male characters — obsessed with, and defined by, sex.
Which I suppose is how a lot of straight men think of women and gay guys. But this is the one part of the show that seemed decidedly retro to me: not contemporary or irreverent at all, and definitely not like the sly, subversive Month Python crew. Rather, they seemed like something straight out of a 1980s sex comedy, Revenge of the Nerds.
Still, this is a show worth watching.
The series is a co-production between Comedy Central and the BBC, which will air slightly longer episodes later this month.
As anyone who’s ever worked in Hollywood knows, the process of a creating television show can be long and maddeningly frustrating — especially one as different as Comedy Central’s new fantasy-comedy, Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (Thursday, 10 PM, 9 C).
How did this particular show come to be? The story is part perspiration, part inspiration, and part collaboration.
“The great thing about this series,” says British comedian Matt Lucas, who plays the show’s villain Dongalor, “is that the writers are on-set all the time, and they sort of encourage the actors to contribute.”
Recently we sat down with the Krod’s creator, Peter Knight, to the hear the story behind the story, right from the very beginning.
TheTorchOnline: First, I love the title of the show, the double umlauts, the redundancy of it!So tell me how the idea for the show came about.
Peter Knight: I had done a few different cycles of development, developing different types of sitcoms sort of in the conventional, multi-camera family. I think they were really good. I had had a lot of fun working with [20th Century Fox's] Brad Johnson who was in development. We worked very well together and we developed for a couple years in a row and we hadn’t gotten anything made, but we always really enjoyed the experience.
In our last go-round, we had a sort of a heartbreaking disappointment with a script that we thought was great that didn’t go. And you find yourself going, “Well, next year I’m going to really try and find out what they want.” And that is really like trying to nail water to a wall. It’s such a moving target. Whatever it seems like they might want exactly when the development season starts has shifted radically, so you have to have a little bit of wizardry or better luck than I was having.
TTO: So you’ve done all this work on an idea they no longer want? Is that it?
PK: It’s just that you’ll write something, and in a lot of cases you’re getting your notes on a day-to-day basis, or on a draft-to-draft basis, from, for instance, the head of comedy at the network. And the head of comedy is somebody who in a lot of cases, that’s not a job that lasts forever and you don’t know if they’re still in the good graces of the higher ups at the network, and you don’t know whether they know exactly what the people above them want.
So in addition to it’s a moving target, you’re playing a game of telephone to get the coordinates of where your target is. I did find that hard, and I didn’t have a lot of luck hitting the target.
In the post-mortem after of what I thought was a really good script that Brad and I had worked really hard on, I kind of said, “All right, I’m not going to try and figure out what they want.” And I really just kind of asked myself, “What did I want to see?” And I really kind of wanted to find an idea that meant something to me, and I had, a month before, in a really rare case of how the process happens for me, I picked up a Dictaphone and I said, “Middle Earth A-Team with a band of incompetents,” and then put the Dictaphone down and picked it up ten minutes later and said, ”And the guy has a girlfriend, a pig and he’s tortured by that relationship because she’s kind of promiscuous and sort of uses sex as a weapon.”
And I set the Dictaphone aside for a while, but I kept coming back to that idea, and I started to pitch it to some friends of mine over lunch one day, the way writers will do. And they said, “You shouldn’t write that. It’s so out there. You need to write it.”
And I said, “Fair enough. That’s a great idea.” And I just kind of locked myself away for five or six weeks and didn’t tell anybody.
TTO: So at this point did you envision it for a cable network or a broadcast network ?
PK: That’s a good question. I don’t know exactly what I thought. I mean, I will say this, I’m now convinced Comedy Central is really the only place where it makes sense, but I wasn’t convinced of that when we were pitching it to the broadcast networks because I was convinced and I remain convinced that as odd as it is on it’s face, it really plays on main street. I’m no interested in viewing something that’s so esoteric that only my six, most well educated friends can enjoy it. I wanted it to be mainstream.
You know, my fondest hope is that it could do what The Simpsons did so effectively. Which is to say there are jokes in there that your more sophisticated viewer is going to appreciate, but then there are also, you know, Homer does something stupid and anybody can enjoy that. And I’ve watched episodes of The Simpsons in really mixed rooms in that regard and you get little snickers in one corner and little snickers in another corner and everybody’s laughing at something. They’re always laughing, but it’s often at something different. I hope to do a little of that.
TTO: I think all the arguments you could make against this show succeeding, you could literally make against The Simpsons or any of the breakout shows of the past. And I don’t know why the message is never do something different instead of let’s repeat whatever the last different thing was.
PK: Well, there is that, but I’m going to save that kind of talk until I get to take a victory lap if we doing well, but until we’re proven, I’ll just say that is my fondest hope.
TTO: This isn’t the first show you’ve done, is it?
PK: No, I did a show called Big Wolf on Campus that my friend Chris Briggs and I had procreated. It ran on Fox Family Channel and on ABC Family Channel. We did 65 episodes. It was sort of a forgotten show that sort of – it had a small, but loyal fan base. Every now and then I’ll go to this website, BigWolfonCampus.org, the show’s been off since 2003, I think. And they’re still kind of chatting about which is the best episode. And I’ll go into the chat room, whenever I’m feeling blue and lonely.
I think Krod could be a smashing success and certainly my fingers are crossed for that. But if it isn’t, I do hope that we have that small, potent handful of fans that just love it do death.
TTO: So the fantasy genre, where did that come from in your life? Have you been interested in this all your life? Were you a D&D player?
PK: Well, let’s not let that get around, but yeah, I did play a little D&D at summer camp and got all the books and got very into it for a very short period of time and realized that maybe it wasn’t for me, or I didn’t find the right dungeon master or something like that, but I had some figurines and a pouch of dice and everything else, but I never quite felt like I was playing it right.
I’ll tell you one of the things that really connected for me. One of my best friends growing up in third grade had this giant, four-inch thick fantasy book, which I don’t even know what it was, whether it was one of the classics, whether it was A Song of Ice and Fire — I just knew that this was a gigantic book. I’m looking at my fingers, probably a two-and-a-half, three-inch thick spine.
But I was a terrible reader, and it was around that time in the barbershop in my town where I stumbled onto a stack of Conan the Barbarian comic books from the Marvel run of the 70s and 80s and that really hooked me in because it was everything that I was looking for that was on the cover of that two-and-a-half inch thick novel, but it was meant for me and I could read it and I could understand wench and taverns and flagons of mead and all of that.
They really appealed to me that this sort of muscle-bound guy wasn’t really a superhero, but he just sort of got his way. And then as I got older, I realized how unlike Conan I am and was just sort of destined to always be not like Conan, but I thought what if you took that and you kind of put the modern morays and sort of a little bit of my own outlook on it and sort of the troubles with life, the things that prevent you from getting what you’re hoping for and the things that stand in your way of your satisfaction and kind of graft that onto the sword-carrying warrior.
TTO: Do you see Krod sort of as a satire of some of the more hackneyed fantasy conventions, or is it you’re just trying to be funny? Or is it a bit of both?
PK: I would say this; I’m not trying to skewer anything. That was never the intention. We didn’t say, “Let’s really let ‘em have it over at Aragon,” or wherever the thing is. But the word “spoof” is an easy one to kind of hang on Krod and I’m not resistant to it if it has to come down to one word, I guess that’s fine. It’s just that “spoof,” its definition has been changed to encompass Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, where character has been utterly abandoned. You’re dared to care about the characters as you go for the gag. And when you’re living gag to gag, sometimes you find a great gag, and that’s great, and I’m sure a lot of those movies, which, by the way, tend to be very successful, they find an audience and people like the gag, but when the gag is over, you don’t care about the character. [But] that’s the antithesis of the type of writing that I strive for. I really like memorable characters.
TTO: Well, I think that even when you look at something like Monty Python, everybody remembers the sort of far out, over-the-top stuff, but in the really successful movies they had a straight man, usually Graham Chapman, as a real actor who took the character seriously. A lot of people are making the comparison, saying this is really Python-esque. Did that hang heavy over your head, that people are going to compare this to Monty Python?
PK: It’s funny you ask that, because I have I think probably a very odd answer to that question. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it just might in the grand scheme of, when all the statistical analysis is done on my life, I may have seen, from start to finish, Holy Grail more than any other movie ever. All of it between sixth grade and ninth grade. I would kind of come home from school on a Friday and, on any given weekend, three or four times, you know? I just watched it over and over and over. And then after about ninth grade, I just kind of went I’m just sort of done with that. It’s not that I thought it was any less brilliant, but I just sort of, that was around the time when people were quoting it and you couldn’t get away from people who were quoting it.
But in conceiving of Krod and the actual sort of going forward writing of it, it was nowhere in my head. It didn’t even register to me that people would say that, which we hear often. So I definitely love the Pythons. Foundationally, on the DNA level, I’m sure it’s in there, but it was nowhere in the kind of foreground, whereas for instance, Get Smart was sort of in there where it served in some ways – it did to an extent on my old show Big Wolf, where when you go to commercial, Max was in trouble.
I think on Monty Python there really wasn’t — the stakes didn’t quite feel as important as the delicious, absurd comedy nuggets.
TTO: Did you know that Sean was in a Monty Python movie?
PK: Sean Maguire was in a Monty Python movie?
TTO: Sean was in The Meaning of Life when he was seven years old. He sings in the “Every Sperm is Sacred” scene. I thought that was a nice connection.
PK: Oh, my god. And I thought I knew all there was to know about Sean. Yeah, that’s great. There was talk about at one point when we were sort of fishing around for who was going to be our narrator, a couple of times in our sort of internal discussion we thought wouldn’t it be great to have a Python? Just because I certainly bow to the Pythons in every way.
TTO: So this is a co-production with the BBC? Is that because of Matt Lucas? Are the episodes different?
PK: I’ll tell you how that happened. In the early goings, comedy Central came on board and they said, “We like this. We would probably need to find a way to make this . . .” – because there was a scope to these episodes that Brad and I had written and they were quite large, and Comedy Central knew they would need a partner to share the financial burden and so we partnered with a company called Hat Trick, based in London, and they took it to the BBC and so the BBC pays a hefty license fee along with Comedy Central. And so because those two were able to pony up, each of them, it’s an original run for them. It’s not what you would call an acquisition, acquiring an American show. It’s a show that they have developed and likewise, Comedy Central is not acquiring it from somewhere else. And the beauty of it, because it’s set in this world, [we can do it]. I mean, if this were a domestic sitcom, for instance, or even an American workplace comedy, you could never really do this. But once you’re in the fantasy genre — fantasy as a genre tends to take on a kind of quasi-medieval feel.
The British episodes are longer. Their running time is about 28 minutes and 30 seconds, somewhere in there, give or take a minute, whereas the Comedy Central airing, with the exception of the premier, which will be an hour long, they will be 21 minutes and 30 seconds including titles and credits.
TTO: So you had to write longer scripts and shoot longer episodes and then edit it down for the two different versions.
PK: Yeah, it’s a funny thing because I thought that well, you know, the British episodes will always be better to me. But that’s not the case, because , there are certain episodes in the British run where I kind of go, you know, as much as it hurts to make the cut at the time, I think we have a leaner, better episode in the Comedy Central one. But likewise, there are episodes where I think that the sort of definitive episode in my mind would be the BBC one. And it’s really about, and funnily enough, sometimes it’s in between. Sometimes I think well, that one in the British version is a little too long, and that one in the States is - but if we had just kept this bit of it, it would have been perfect. I actually think, miraculously, that the British ones don’t suffer from padding and the American ones don’t suffer from extreme cutting.
TTO: So I have to ask about the gay guy and about Aneka because I watched the pilot with a group of gay and lesbian friends, and we were all sort of disappointed in the stereotypes of gays and women.
PK: Here’s my answer to that. The number one objective that I have – judge me on this – is Bruce funny? And if he’s not, then we’ve got a problem.
But secondarily, in the characterization of Bruce, a couple of things were important to us. I actually do have some very good gay friends, including a guywho introduced my wife and I. But one of the things that I remember that he said one time when we were talking, he kind of recounted the pain of seeing, when you would see gay characters, in the few glimpses that you would see them, always tortured, always sort of morose or poor, or plagued as if by disease and how that made him feel as like a 15-year-old guy watching that, how it kind of made him feel worse about himself.
That was in the back of my mind and at the front of my mind and something that Brad and I – Brad is no homophobe either – we were thinking about like, well, if you’re watching this guy Bruce and you’re a closeted 15-year-old guy, are you going to love him or is he going to make you feel bad? And I hope that the idea of this out and proud character at a time when – I’ll never write a great, incredibly compelling, steamy, hot, gay romance show. Like that’s never going to be where I’ll succeed. But hopefully I can get you thinking about a gay character as just one of the people that you really want to be around who’s just funny and proud and off-the-cuff and liberated.
Read our review of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, and also our interview with its star, Sean Maguire, where he talks about appearing in a Monty Python movie at age 7.
In a career that’s as long and interesting as English actor Sean Maguire’s, it’s not surprising that he’s done his share of fantasy-esque projects such as last year’s 300 spoof Meet the Spartans and the TV movies The Charmings and Third Wish. He’s also done his share of comedy like the CBS sitcom The Class.
Frequently, the two genres even come seamlessly together, as they do in the new series, Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, about a hapless freedom fighter and his rag-tag band of talentless companions, debuting next Thursday on Comedy Central (10 PM/9 C).
The show, which co-stars Britain’s Matt Lucas, is one part spoof of fantasy conventions, and one part launching pad for some often inspired contemporary comedy — a brand of humor already drawing comparisons to Monty Python.
Which is interesting, because Maguire himself actually had a small role in a Monty Python movie: The Meaning of Life. At age seven, he sang — yup, you guessed it — “Every Sperm is Sacred” in that then-scandalous, but now-classic musical number about condom-disapproving Catholics.
Recently, I got a chance to talk to Maguire about everything from his brief career as a teen singing sensation in the U.K., the discipline it takes to look like a Spartan warrior, and why, thanks to his time with the Pythons, he still has a strong attraction to female skateboarders.
TheTorchOnline: It seems to me that between the Krod Mandoon show and Meet the Spartans and Prince Charming a few years ago, you sort of have the market cornered on the swords and sorcery comedy thing. Is this a coincidence, or did one lead to another?
Sean Maguire: Yeah, it is a coincidence. I don’t think it is specifically my world, it’s just something that happens, as you just said, one show leads to another. [They're] a lot of fun to do.
[Comedy can be] difficult, but it’s really nice when you don’t have to take home very painful, difficult drama and emotional things. You know, with comedy you really just got to work on it in the moment and try and make it funny, so it’s a lot more fun to do.
I don’t think it was a conscious decision to just do specifically comedy. In fact, I think I’ll be trying to look for something probably a little bit more serious. It’s really just, when an opportunity comes along – when Spartans came along, I’d never played the lead in a big feature, so that appealed to me. And I think doing that movie sort of put me in the right kind of world for Krod.
TTO: So I read that you also had a role in The Meaning of Life.
SM: My siblings [and I] were some of the many children singing “Every Sperm is Sacred.”
TTO: You’re kidding! I was wondering if that was what it was!
SM: Yeah, I’m the kid that’s sitting at the table, eating bread and marmalade, right in the middle of the shot, little Mr. Potato Head. That’s me.
TTO: What are your memories? Did you have a sense at the time that this would go on to be a classic film?
SM: You know, I didn’t at that time. I was very young. I was about seven, I think. But after that, about nine or ten maybe, I remember my father rented The Holy Grail, which again is quite reminiscent of Krod, and that had a really big impact on me. Obviously anyone who knows Python knows that they are geniously funny. I remember seeing Holy Grail, me and my brother were literally lying on the ground, our bellies were hurting so much because we were just giggling so much at it and then Derek said, “That’s what you were doing. You were making the next movie for these guys.” And we were like, “Oh, wow! That’s cool.” But we didn’t get it. We were still too young to really understand.
What I did remember was being in the campaign with tons and tons of women in skateboard gear with their breasts out, and as you can probably imagine to a nine-year-old, that was quite a vivid memory, let’s say. I think it actually had a profound effect on me. To this day, I’m still very fond of skateboarders.
“Every Sperm is Sacred”: Sean Maguire at age 7
TTO: What do you think now when people compare the show, I mean, it really does have a Monty Python sensibility. Do you feel flattered or is it intimidating or what?
SM: I think that it’s like [covering] a Beatles record. No, I don’t think anyone will ever achieve the heights that [Monty Python] did, because those were the guys who really did it first. I think that they have a special place in comedy that, a bit like the Beatles in music. It can’t ever really be bettered. All you can do is homage, you know? And learn and try and plagiarize cleverly.
I consider it a great, great honor if we’re put in any realm near them, but…they’re the best. I would consider it a great honor if we can introduce the kind of comedy that they did to me as a child. If I can introduce to, to 12-, 13-, 14-year olds who may not be familiar with the Python movies, then that would be great. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You try to learn and steal from the best and then try and introduce them with a slightly more modern flavor.
TTO: You mentioned how comedy is different from more serious projects. What’s the hardest thing about it?
SM: The hardest thing about comedy is finding the right piece of writing and then putting it together with the right actors and the right director. Everyone has to be on the same page and everyone has to kind of agree on a certain idea of what we think is funny, and also what type of funny we’re going for. Meet the Spartans is very much a kind of fun, silly spoof, making fun of pop culture and all of that. Krod is more like a Black Adder, if you’ve every seen Black Adder. I think that the writing is slightly cleverer.
We’re using the genre and the time period to kind of, as a backdrop for a modern workplace comedy. To me, that’s really funny, because we’re dealing with very modern sensibilities and metrosexual males and twenty-first century kinds of problems or issues in this sort of old, medieval type fantasy world. That just really connected with me. I thought that was really funny.
To be honest, when I first saw the premise and I read the title, I passed, because I had just made Meet the Spartans and I didn’t really want to do something too similar, but…I really, genuinely thought that the writing was something special. I also thought that the cast that they were talking about assembling and the director they were talking about getting really, really excited me, and I thought this has the potential to be something special. So that’s how I ended up in this one.
TTO: You really can’t beat Matt Lucas.
SM: He’s an utter joy to hang out with, to be on the set with, most of all to play opposite. He’s not as known here as in other territories. In England, he’s firmly considered one of the funniest men in the country. And for very good reason. I think he’s considered in Great Britain a lot like Will Ferrell is considered here, just geniously funny and complex, so getting that was a huge, huge coop for us, even though some audiences here may not know him, I think they will after the show if they give it a chance. Because he’s just one of those people who can’t help but be believably funny, and so the art of doing a good job playing opposite somebody like that, you just don’t do much. Just be a springboard for them to bounce off, you know, and let them use their magic.
TTO: Is it my imagination or did you really beef up in between The Class and Meet the Spartans.
SM: No, it’s not your imagination! I had to beef up a great deal.
TTO: How did you go about that?
SM: It’s one of those things that there really isn’t any cheat methods. There’s just the difficult route of just having seven meals a day and working out for four hours a day, every day, seven days a week. No alcohol, no sugar, no fat .
TTO: And do you still have to maintain that regimen for the entire show?
SM: No, because I wasn’t completely naked from beginning to end, I didn’t have to work out quite as much. I did work out every single day and I worked out in between takes, in between shots, but I wasn’t quite as regimented about the diet. I allowed myself a glass of wine at the end of the day, which I didn’t allow myself while doing Spartans. So it was a little easier, but it’s still very much an incredibly big physical task, because we shooting 15, 16 hours a day sometimes, and then I’m working out in between, so it’s very, very exhausting.
It’s a really tiring and physically demanding shoot, but, you know, these things are relatively short in the great scheme of time. It was three months or two months or something, so I tend to just buckle down and really develop myself to what I’m doing while I’m on the job, and then while I’m on my down time, I can eat and drink whatever I want.
TTO: You sing on the pilot of Cupid [in which Maguire guest-starred]and I know you had a singing career. Did you sing in any episodes of Krod? There are six episodes, correct?
SM: There are six episodes of Krod and no, I don’t believe I sang in any of them. I think it would only be fair to spare the public that. No, I was a singer briefly, but I was young. It was one of those things that just happened. I never really had a desire to be a singer. I’m not a musician. It was just one of those strange things that happened during my youth and I’m proud of it, and I had a good time, but no plans to reform with myself any time soon.
Maguire sings “Good Day,” his biggest hit, which reached #12 on the UK charts in 1996
TTO: Were you disappointed when The Class was canceled?
SM: Oh, of course, yeah. They were an incredible bunch of people that I’m still very close with. We all get together about once a month and have dinner, all of us. It was an incredibly tight group and I thought they were an incredible bunch of actors as well. And I just thought that we had a lot of the hallmarks of something that was going to be very good, but you know, that’s television. Despite getting seven million viewers a week and winning the best new comedy award from People’s Choice, it still wasn’t enough. Because it’s CBS, and CBS demands very high ratings and it was very sad that it went that way.
But, you know, you begin to come to terms with these things as an actor, that you know, as one job finishes, another began. If The Class hadn’t finished, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do Spartans, and then if I hadn’t done Spartans, it wouldn’t have led me to Krod, so, you know, you have to just make your peace with the river gonna’s flow where it flows and you just gotta go with it.
When Krod Mandoon, the title character and a self-proclaimed freedom fighter, is giving his band of companions “notes” after particularly disappointing battle, the hapless wizard complains of a “hostile work environment.”
Alas, the show does have two thoroughly false notes. Bruce, a gay guy who joins Krod’s band, is a fey stereotype obsessed with sex and fashion, and has thick faux-Latin accent. Meanwhile, Anika, Krod’s sexually liberated pagan girlfriend, seems to exist merely to give Krod something to fret about.![[Bloglines]](http://thetorchonline.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
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TheTorchOnline: First, I love the title of the show, the double umlauts, the redundancy of it! So tell me how the idea for the show came about.
TTO: So at this point did you envision it for a cable network or a broadcast network ?
PK: No, I did a show called Big Wolf on Campus that my friend Chris Briggs and I had procreated. It ran on Fox Family Channel and on ABC Family Channel. We did 65 episodes. It was sort of a forgotten show that sort of – it had a small, but loyal fan base. Every now and then I’ll go to this website, BigWolfonCampus.org, the show’s been off since 2003, I think. And they’re still kind of chatting about which is the best episode. And I’ll go into the chat room, whenever I’m feeling blue and lonely.
TTO: Do you see Krod sort of as a satire of some of the more hackneyed fantasy conventions, or is it you’re just trying to be funny? Or is it a bit of both?
TTO: Did you know that Sean was in a Monty Python movie?
In a career that’s as long and interesting as English actor Sean Maguire’s, it’s not surprising that he’s done his share of fantasy-esque projects such as last year’s 300 spoof Meet the Spartans and the TV movies The Charmings and Third Wish. He’s also done his share of comedy like the CBS sitcom The Class.
TTO: You really can’t beat Matt Lucas. 
TTO: How did you go about that?
