Adam DeVine’s Kelvin Gemstone and Tony Cavalero’s Keefe Chambers stand out as The Righteous Gemstones‘ most chaotic characters. Season 4, though, forces them to share the spotlight with an anarchic monkey named Dr. Watson.
Without treading into spoiler territory, a new cast member of The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 is a cute capuchin monkey named Dr. Watson. One of the trailers for the latest season gives viewers a sneak peek of the monkey interacting with Tim Baltz’s BJ Barnes, and absolutely no one expects Dr. Watson to behave in a civilized manner on the show.
During a recent roundtable session with the cast members of The Righteous Gemstones, The Escapist spoke to DeVine and Cavalero and asked if they ever felt upstaged by the monkey on set. “Yeah, for me, I wanted him off the set,” DeVine joked. “He was always upstaging me. Every time I would walk on stage and he was there, I was like, ‘What are we doing? I’m a star, dammit. What is this animal doing here?’”
Cavalero added that he was particularly interested in watching the animal wranglers on The Righteous Gemstones set, since he wondered how they manage to do their job. DeVine jumped in and said, “They are always very sweet people, but it takes a certain person to be the animal wrangler, because you do have to be a lunatic. Your job is to yell at a monkey all day.”
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For Cavalero, there was no hostility or jealousy about the monkey. Instead, he found common ground with Dr. Watson. “The monkey’s treat was a fruit snack, and then I would get a fruit snack,” he said. “That [also] became my nickname, Fruit snack.”
“Yeah, that was Kelvin’s nickname for Keefe,” DeVine quipped. “‘Come here, you little fruit snack. You little gusher.’”
Elsewhere in the roundtable session, DeVine and Cavalero opened up about how Kelvin and Keefe’s relationship evolved in The Righteous Gemstones. The pair revealed that they had no idea that their characters would become a couple when they first joined the show. They admitted that they noticed the sexual tension and awkward exchanges written between their characters, but whenever they asked showrunner Danny McBride about it, he remained tightlipped about where the story was going.
Eventually, McBride told them that he simply wrote the characters the way that he saw the real-life DeVine and Cavalero interact with each other. They joked that Kelvin and Keefe are HBO’s own version of Ross and Rachel from Friends, since all the fans wanted to see them together in The Righteous Gemstones.
The Righteous Gemstones is streaming now on Max.