We spoke to the pair about their new show and discovered that Cheryl is the proud owner of a hedgehog and Rachael has a strong love for air conditioning.
Getty Images / Graphic by Chris Ritter for BuzzFeed
Cheryl Hines, best known for putting up with Larry David as his wife (and ex-wife) on Curb Your Enthusiasm and now as one of the stars on Suburgatory, has teamed up with longtime friend and fellow funny person Rachael Harris in a new Yahoo web-series called We Need Help. The show revolves around Cheryl, Rachael and their joint assistant Max, who has to deal with the women's trials and tribulations that come along with fame. BuzzFeed spoke to Cheryl and Rachael to hear about the show, their friendship and a merkins.
So where did the idea for the show come from?
Cheryl Hines: Well, I was a personal assistant. When I got Curb Your Enthusiasm I was doing personal assistant work, and now I have a personal assistant, and the world of personal assistants in Hollywood is just really funny.
Rachael Harris: And Cheryl has been working with our writer Julie Welch, on kind of a different version of that, and then Cheryl and I really wanted to do something together. So she literally came up with the idea, "Well, what if we have an assistant and we share him?" and I said that's hilarious.
And then you came up with Max, your joint assistant. Is he based off anyone?
CH: Well, he's based off of himself! Max worked for me as a personal assistant for a while.
Ah! So that brings me to my next question. You both play yourself on the show and some things are very real, like Cheryl — you are in Suburgatory on the show. How do you differentiate between real life and what's on the show?
CH: We just take real life and exaggerate it a little bit in the parts that we think are funny. Just like the part about being on Suburgatory and I'm supposed to be tan all the time. We just take those moments and magnify them. But then we still get to use fictitious story lines and characters too, if we want.
What's the most different and similar thing about your show self vs. your real-life self?
RH: Well, on the show I own a cat. And I don't like cats. (laughs) And also, Cheryl and I are very supportive of each other's careers and I don't mind if she gets offered roles. It's more funny that I have to read for something, but it's not something that I'm angry about. In life we have a very realistic friendship and we are really great working partners.
CH: And we're not quite as self-involved in real life as we are on the show. If we are going to do a charity event and they fly us coach, we wouldn't be mad about it. But on the show we can be mad about it, because we do know people that would be mad about it.
RH: So we get to play those people that other people are like, "OMG can you believe they behave that way?" And then we'll say, what if we behave that way? And then we make a big deal like that.
So you know people that have done this, that have made a big deal about flying coach?
CH & RH: Yeah!
CH: We aren't here to name names, but I had to plan a party for a celebrity back in the day and we had people's assistants call and ask who their celebrity bosses would be sitting next to at the party, and if people weren't at the right table next to the right people, they weren't going to come. And if they didn't have the right food, they weren't going to come. It was just one cell phone call after the other asking questions like that, and they were just kind of losing perspective on why we were having the event.
When you were an assistant, what's the craziest thing you had to do?
CH: Well, when I was an assistant I had to sign a confidentiality agreement. But I know people that had to do horrible things, ranging from plunging toilets to buying underwear.
RH: When I was a nanny, the first people that I nannied for were older, and I was dealing with a 2-year-old. And the 2-year-old would want to see the parents, but this older couple would nap every day at 4 o'clock, and I had to keep the son away from them at 4 o'clock. And that was a bit weird. It was OK, but it was just a normal everyday thing that was strange.
And what's the most diva-ish thing you've ever requested of an assistant?
CH: I just recently had to ask my assistant to clean out my daughter's hedgehog cage. And clean out the poop. It's not easy because you can't really hold a hedgehog, so she would have to put on a rubber glove, to pick it up, you know.
So you have a hedgehog?
CH: Yes, well, my daughter does.
What's the hedgehog's name?
CH: Tiger Lily.
How much of the show is scripted versus improvised?
CH: Well, a lot of it is scripted. Our friend Julie Welch wrote the show and because of the way were shooting it — we shot it all very quickly and out of order — we had to stick to the script a lot. But we have moments of improv, so if something strikes us as funny when we were shooting, we could throw it in.
RH: Julie did such a great job of writing it that we really didn't need to improv very much.
In the show, Rachael, you have a cat named Fellini. Where did the cat come from? Whose is it?
CH: Can I tell you something, it's very hard to find a show cat at a reasonable fee. And we got very lucky because I have a friend named Maria and she has a neighbor who walks her cat. And so we asked if we could use her cat in this show. Because also it's hard to find a cat that walks on a leash, but we found a cat that walks on a leash outside. So it's a friend of a friend's.
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