‘Smiling Friends’ Creators Zach Hadel & Michael Cusack Interview

Creed Bratton’s commitment to his art was on full display on the set of Smiling Friends.

Painting himself fully green for “Le Voyage Incroyable de Monsieur Grenouille,” an episode in the adult animated sitcom’s third and final season that brought the show its first Emmy nomination, The Office alum must have hoped to get the paint off by the end of his guest star appearance.

Per the show’s co-creators Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack, though, that’s not what happened.

“He was so good and really fun to work with. He was painted green fully all over the body,” Hadel recalls during an appearance for Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio. “He had to go film a movie the next day and apparently still had some green on him. So the green lasted many weeks.”

Watch the conversation with Hadel and Cusack here.

The film Bratton was going to shoot, we’ve confirmed, was Primetime, A24’s crime thriller starring Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator‘s Chris Hansen, which we scooped in 2024.

Incredibly, the paint hadn’t completely come off even by the time Bratton was done with that project.

Cusack said, “He told our friend, the one that hired him, he said he went to the doctor a month later and they’re just doing a basic checkup. And he’s like, ‘Why is your skin slightly tinged green?’ And he’s like, ‘No, it’s not a health problem. I just painted myself with paint that never comes off, so it’s totally fine.’”

Smiling Friends is an absurdist, mixed-media comedy starring Cusack and Hadel as Pim and Charlie, employees at a company whose job is to help make unhappy people smile.

Bratton painted himself green for a live-action appearance as the father of Mr. Frog, a character Hadel describes as “the dumbest” in the show, which the creators conceived early in the design process on Smiling Friends. Over the course of the show’s Emmy-nominated episode, we follow this supporting character — a “hollowed out” TV star,” in Hadel’s words — from his leap to President and then ruler of the world. The episode then goes as deep as is possible, in the span of just 11 minutes, into what makes Mr. Frog tick.

The intention, Cusack says, was to see what would happen in devoting “a cinematic, prestigious TV episode” to “the stupidest character in all of animation.”

Of the show’s Emmy nomination for Outstanding Animated Program along long-running and beloved series like The Simpsons, Cusack said, “We feel very honored. Obviously, we grew up with all the shows that we’re against and respect them very much. We would’ve never thought in a million years that our little quarter-hour show that we did for Adult Swim would be in this league, so we feel very honored by it and it’s a very nice feeling.”

In the conversation with Deadline, Cusack and Hadel underscored that it’s easy to underestimate the rigors of crafting a 2D animated series, frame by frame, in 2026, putting the ambition of their process in context.