Seth MacFarlane, the genius behind Family Guy has left an indelible mark on Mike Henry, voices of Cleveland, Rallo and others; Co-Creator/Executive Producer, THE CLEVELAND SHOW, and has shaped his career in creating some the most hilarious animated comedy series on TV.
“Seth definitely was a big life changer for me, and I’m very grateful to him for the opportunity and the education,” stated Henry.
In our conversation with Henry, he shared the reasons for the success of the show and the upcoming guest voice appearances which include: Basketball Superstars Kevin Garnett, Dwight Howard, LeBron James, Steve Nash,Dirk Nowitzki, Shaquille O’Neal and Dwyane Wade, musical stars Justin Timberlake, T-Pain and will.i.am.
THE CLEVELAND SHOW airs Sundays, (9:30-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.
Can you tell us how Seth MacFarlane changed your life?
Mike Henry: Back when I had finished college in Virginia, I worked in advertising for a short time, moved to L.A. for a few years, and started doing stand-up and shooting short films, went back to the East Coast, continued pursuing comedy, as far as acting, writing, directing short films, producing. I produced commercials to make a living while I was putting all these things together, and then I met Seth, who was at the Rhode Island School of Design with my brother Patrick. They were both film majors, or film animation majors, and I played a bunch of crazy characters in this film that my brother did, and Seth and I just hit it off. I thought the guy was hilarious, and I think I made him laugh. So we kept in touch for a couple years after that. Well, at that point, I was living in New York and doing sketch comedy and directing shorts for a college cable network that 
Loren Michaels oversaw and was getting to do a lot of cool live action stuff, but hadn’t really found any security or real direction at that point until Seth hired me to come work on Family Guy and create characters in the writers room and write gags. I think the template for Family Guy included all these short, crazy cut aways and TV parodies, and those were exactly the types of things that I was shooting live action and writing, and so I think he thought I was a good fit for the show. So when I got out here and got into the Writer’s Guild, I had already been in the Screen Actor’s Guild, it kind of just makes everything kind of real, and it pays well. I got to learn how to write stories while on the job, which was great. When The Cleveland Show started, I had the advantage of, to use a sports analogy, I had been standing on the side lines with a clipboard for six years while watching Seth quarterback the team, and so it was great for me to be able to come down the hall, team up with Rich Appel, who came up through The Simpson’s and had run King of the Hill and Bernie Mac and American Dad. So we just had—it was kind of the perfect storm of timing, a far as for me personally, there was a lot more Cleveland than ever hit the screen on Family Guy because there just wasn’t time for him, and teaming up with Rich, who can just run the hell out of a show in the best possible way. So yes, Seth definitely was a big life changer for me, and I’m very grateful to him for the opportunity and the education. The thing that I learned most about him or from him was there were times in Family Guy, in the writer’s room, where we all loved a joke and Seth just, he didn’t like it. “We need to do something better or I don’t like that,” and so it was good to be able to see somebody do that because that’s what I have to do a lot now is when everyone’s laughing to say, “You know what, let’s do better than this.” That was a big thing for me. So thanks, Seth.
When you write is it something that you want to watch at the end of the day or do you write mainly for your audience?
Mike Henry: I would definitely not want to just write for other people. We do what we think is funny, and that was the absolute way that it was on Family Guy and that’s how we try to do it on Cleveland as well. We will censor ourselves a little bit, as far as we won’t go quite as hardcore on some topics as Family Guy does because we want to be more of a teen-friendly, kid—not kid’s, but more of a family show I guess. So we definitely are trying to make ourselves laugh, and hopefully that makes other people laugh too.
Can you tell us a little bit about the upcoming guests like Justin Timberlake, and the situations they’ll be put in?
Mike Henry: I’ll just give a brief overview of the NBA episode. Basically, we have Cleveland and Donna, and Cleveland gets some tickets from work to the NBA All-Star game in Los Angeles. So he and Donna fly out for the game, and Cleveland gets drunk at the game starts heckling the players. They get their feelings hurt by this heckling, as I’m sure they would in reality, and vow to band together to go to Virginia to beat Cleveland up. At the same time, we have another story going on with little Rallo who befriends a dwarf, a little person, and the little person thinks Rallo is a little person, and Rallo thinks the little person is a kid. So they have a lot of miscommunication but—they’re basically fast friends and they’re having a great time together, and Rallo agrees to go and “marry” the little person’s sister. He thinks they’re going have like a play wedding. Rallo ends up blowing it off, and unbeknownst to him, Marty Barty, who is the little person, is the head of the dwarf mafia. So he leaves the dwarf mafia’s kingpin sister at the altar. So he’s got a band of angry dwarfs after him, and the angry dwarfs and the NBA All Stars converge and get into a big melee in the Brown’s front yard at the end of the episode. So that’s an overview of the plot, and I will say that Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, Dwight Howard, Dirk Nowitzki, Shaquille O’Neal, Dwayne Wade, Steve Nash—there are seven guys. I don’t know if I just named them all, but they are all hilarious. I guess when you get to play basketball and make millions and millions of dollars you are a pretty loose guy. So every one of those guys was absolutely hilarious and did everything we asked and more.
How difficult was it to get all of the NBA players on board for episode?
Mike Henry: We had heard that Kevin Garnett, LeBron, some of these guys, we had heard were big fans of Family Guy at least, and hopefully by association our show, and it turns out that that was true. My partner, co-creator, Rich Appel has a friend who works in the NBA who kind of got us a direct line to a lot of these guys, and all of them were into it. The beauty of animation is that you can record from anywhere as long there’s a high quality sound studio, and so actually none of those guys came to our facility to record. They all recorded from their own hometowns. They just send the audio over and our engineer cuts it together and then we draw the pictures to it. So logistically, it’s very easy if someone’s into it. We actually record a lot of our big time guest stars that way from New York or abroad, wherever they happen to be. The fact that they were fans of the show made it easy.
Did you get to meet any of the players?
Mike Henry: I have not met the players. They’re going to be here for the All-Star game. I have an opportunity to go. I’m not sure if I’m going to go or not, but no, we didn’t meet any of those guys.
The Cleveland Show has been very successful. Have you been surprised by its success?
Mike Henry: Well we had a huge platform that we were coming off of. Family Guy has been a phenomenal success, so to be frank, we had a pretty big leg up because of that. I can’t honestly say that I’m surprised. I’m thrilled and I’m happy. My biggest thing is I’m the most critical person in the world when it comes to the creative, and I think through season one we were really kind of finding out way, and thus far in season two, and we’re actually in production of season three, I’m really happy with what we’ve become. I think early on we were doing some jokes maybe that Family Guy would do that we wouldn’t necessarily do at this point. So I think once we got that first season under our belt we really hit stride. So I’m thrilled with the success. I’m thrilled with the people that we’re getting to work with, and the musical numbers that we’re doing, I think, are my favorite things. We have one coming up with Justin Timberlake, which is going to air a week from Sunday, where he plays a singing booger, and Rallo is trying to kick his booger-eating habit because it’s turning off the ladies at school. Junior takes him under his wing as his mentor, and it’s kind of an addiction story, and this song takes place as Rallo is flicking his last booger good-bye. It’s a breakup ballad between Rallo and this booger that is voiced by Justin. Justin also plays the gay lover of one of our other ancillary characters who is a friend of Cleveland’s. So it’s a big coming out episode for that character. I’m happy with that episode, and I’m very happy with that song.
