Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne on How Collaboration Is Key to Finding Character Voices

Here’s creator Cirocco Dunlap’s basic pitch for Prime Video’s The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy: “Two best friends in space, who are doctors, taking on every kind of sci-fi case the galaxy has to offer.” It barely scratches the surface of the bonkers animated series, which features an impressive voice cast; the series is led by Keke Palmer and Stephanie Hsu as aforementioned best friends Sleech and Klak, with the rest of the ensemble including Kieran Culkin, all of Culkin’s brothers, Sam Smith, Maya Rudolph, and Natasha Lyonne.

The latter two are executive producers on the series as well as voice actors, and as Lyonne tells Consequence, she was “so flattered” that Dunlap wanted to collaborate on the series. “It meant so much to me, because it’s exactly my dream of a life in this business — it’s so cool that we’re here talking about Cirocco’s show that she created. She’s the showrunner, it’s her brainchild, and Amazon flipped for it right away. It was a really clean path.”

Lyonne first worked with Dunlap when the latter wrote for the acclaimed Netflix series Russian Doll, though Lyonne was also familiar with Dunlap’s contributions to The New Yorker‘s “Shouts and Murmurs.” “I remember really falling in love with her writing style. It was just like, who is this person? Just this extraordinary mind that was so funny and so precise and so out there, but also so grounded.”

Impressed by Dunlap’s work, Lyonne not only came on board the show, but enlisted Rudolph; Rudolph says that she quickly responded to Dunlap’s unique point of view. “We got to hold this little mind of beauty in our hands and get to say, ‘Whatever you want to make, let’s make it,’” she says. “When she first described the show to me, what I remember most is time sickness. Time sickness was one of the ailments that came up. And I thought, this is a very brilliant human, and I can’t wait to work on this show. Who else thinks of time sickness?”

In the series, Rudolph plays Dr. Vlam, a robot doctor with a rich backstory. Figuring out the voice for Vlam was a challenge for Rudolph, though, because her initial thought was “like a GPS lady. I actually had a really hard time figuring out who she was.”

In general, when Rudolph isn’t immediately sure what kind of approach to use for a character, she does exactly what she did with Second Best Hospital: “I try to think of, ‘Okay, what have I seen?’ Or I say to the creator, ‘Do you have an idea? Like, does she sound like anybody I know?’ On this one, we went in different paths and then I think we found her. It was Cirocco that really wanted to not just go for ‘robot’ — [because] how long has she been alive, 20,000 years? So she’s seen a lot of life and lived a lot of lives and lived in different times. And that was the interesting approach.”