Special Report: Cassie Workman is Witchy AF

Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Turn it off. Hail Satan. Hail Satan. Hail Satan. Hail Satan.

Hail Satan. Hi, I'm Cassie Workman. Hello. Hello. A television host created in a lab specifically to make Rhonda Sanders angry.

God, I love Ashish. In this series, I will lead you on a journey through the mysterious and absurd world of the occult. That's right. A show about black magic. Fuck is this?

Hosted by a transgender immigrant. Hail Satan. Are you hydrated? Yes, Satan. Does vodka count?

Yes! As you know, being queen is the tits. You're not a... A turf? Oh, fuck no.

I'm a demon, not a cunt. You sort of need things to get out of control. Oh my gosh, this is crazy. I can't wait to tell my agent about this. In order to make them better.

Store me. I hunger for the chicken of General Tso. So if there's anything tumultuous happening now, I wouldn't know. I haven't been paying attention. Am I pretty?

You are stunning. Am I pretty? Just remember, an enlightenment of epic proportions is probably not far off. And I know that's going to upset a lot of people, but if it's any consolation, I don't care. Welcome to the show.

Welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. Joining me this episode is comedian Cassie Workman, whose new series, Cassie Workman is Witchy AF, mashes stand-up with the occult, and was shot in two brutal weeks in Asbury Park, New Jersey, with Lily Wachowski producing. cassie workman is witchy af is out now from etch and anarchist united studios i had a great time talking with cassie and i hope you have a great time listening enjoy can you tell me a little bit about how you even got involved in show business. I began as a stand-up comic i was in uh bands before that and i was a musician and then uh i really enjoyed that but then i um I decided I would get up and try stand-up, which I did in Perth, Australia.

And it just kind of snowballed. I ended up, I won a national competition for stand-up. And then I thought, well, this is, you know, the most successful I've ever been at anything. I should probably keep doing it. It's the longest I've done anything.

And so now here we are. Almost 20 years later, and I now do more sort of writing and this witchy stuff. But yeah, that was my beginning in the world of stand-up. What was your stand-up act like? I would describe it as a lot of wordplay, and it was pretty surreal.

So I like to play around a lot, and. I haven't done stand-up for a while because I haven't really had to do stand-up. But it was definitely fun to get on stage and play with people. It's such a weird art form because it's totally unmitigated by... You don't have an instrument in front of you.

You don't have the ability to go back and do it again. You've got to play. With exactly what you have. That's very exciting. I like to make things weird.

I like to. Surreal and go in different tangents that maybe are not expected. I think I read that you had been at Edinburgh. Is that at the Fringe Festival? I've done stand-up there and I've done poetry there.

So I think I've done it three times. It's huge and it's very exciting and it's fun. If you're an artist, it's expensive and you will definitely cry at some point. But it is also a great That's fantastic. I am a big fan of a lot of Australian and Kiwi comedians.

I watched the Taskmaster, Guy Montgomery's Spelling Bee, those types of shows. So many good things. And I was super excited to see that you worked on the Aaron Chen show. Yeah, I was head writer on the Aaron Chen show for a time. And I'm still friends with Chenny.

We hung out a few times in New York when I was living there. It's fun. Where did Cassie Workman as Witchy AF, where did the idea for that come from? I think I was looking for something to do, and so I took two of my interests, which was comedy and the occult, and I mashed them together, and for years it was on the back burner until I got to America, and I was looking for things to pitch, and I pitched this idea to my manager, Lawrence, and he loved it and said, you know, we should really make this happen, and we went to Will and Phil at Etch, and they loved it, and we developed it, and we ended up filming it in Asprey Park in New Jersey, where I was living at the time. When did you get interested in the occult?

Probably at about 15, I'd say. I started looking into it. That's a good age, right? When you're still sort of mentally developing, and it's good to incorporate that kind of stuff into your brain, meat. And.

Yeah, it's just fascinating. It's fascinating. Can you tell me about the writing of the episodes? Because I imagine you probably already knew a lot of the things that you're talking about, but then you probably had to do a little bit more research just to get everything together. Yeah, yeah.

We had a great researcher, Morgan, who was able to Give me all the extra stuff that I needed and it formed a great basis for the episode. So I was able to mostly just riff off those facts and those timelines and then add some of my own knowledge and stuff and build episodes that way. So it was a really fun process because a lot of the stuff is laid out for you and then you're just making jokes about it. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the other folks that you work with on the show? Like some of your co-stars, obviously your puppet friend is, is very interesting to me, but you know, having like actual other folks show up, you know, demons, whatnot, fairies, et cetera.

So where are these folks coming from? Are they all friends already? Well, it was a, it was a great team. It was a, you know, mostly women and a very queer team. And obviously Lily was, Lily Wachowski was producing and, I was friends with Lily.

We work on other projects together. So it was great to have her backing. And then, of course, we have Anna Leaver as a director. And I was just so happy with how it turned out. And Will Battersby, who's our producer from Etch, did such a great job of keeping me sane and Also delivering on what I wanted the show to be, which was really cool.

And then, of course, my good friend Ben Russell, who is our King Grimmsquawk, who came all the way over from Melbourne, Jersey, to lie under a desk with his arm up in the air and play this character. I remember talking to him. He's, I think, the best impressionist probably in the world right now. He's just so funny, such a good improviser. And he asked me when he got there, you know, what do you want with this character?

And I said, just do Werner Herzog as a bird. And that's exactly what we got. This medieval Bavarian crow demon. So that was great. And then, of course, we have, you know, all these fantastic actors who play demons.

And also what's really cool is people from Asprey Park who were just part of that community. And I wanted to give like a special shout out to Asprey Park because so many people from the community were involved in this who came in, who played like, you know, extras or played demons or just supported the project. Because they were excited by it. It's just such a special place in the world. I love Asprey Park.

It's cool to be part of it. And you mentioned that you had worked with Lily Wachowski before. How do you know each other? During lockdown, I came up with this idea for an animated series, which we're now making a pilot for that, which will be released next year. And when I was making that, the production company, Princess Bento, was like, who do you want to And I said, well, what about Lily Wachowski?

And they were like, yeah, you should, you should write her a letter. So I did. And she liked the letter and we had a meeting and we started working on that. And then I went to Chicago. and we worked together i stayed in our little apartment and we worked every day on hashing out that series and we just became friends and so here we are making other stuff. Was she involved with witchy af from the beginning As a producer, obviously.

And also, she came over to Jersey to have a look at how everything's going and meet everybody. And it was a really wonderful day to have her and Mickey, her partner, on set. So it was really great. What was the actual shooting like? Did you do all of these just kind of back to back?

Yeah, it was brutal. We shot the entire thing in two weeks. So we were shooting 40 pages a day. So I would get up at like 4 in the morning and we would be done until, you know, 8 p.m., 8 or 9 p.m. And then it was like dinner, bed, get up in the morning, leery-eyed, grow up.

And go to work. Yeah. I imagine you're probably pretty grateful for all of the puppet reenactments. I mean, did you get to do those later as like a voiceover session? Yeah.

So at the very end we did, uh, VO and we, and Ben and I just sat in a tiny little room and did all of the, the voices. I think the only voice that we didn't do was Joan of Arc who, uh, will our, our producer did Joan of Arc because he's the only one who can speak French. Yeah, but then everything else was us. Like, I was dumb because I was like, I'm going to put myself in. Every scene because then I can be a star.

Dumb, dumb idea. So much work. I'm sure you had to be in hair and makeup for quite a while every single day just because you are on camera every single day. Yeah, well, I made a routine. I did my own hair and makeup.

So I would get up real early before anybody else was on set, and I would go to the little studio space that we had, and I would sit there for like an hour and a half just doing hair and makeup, listening to Mary in the Junkyard. That was my morning routine. Big old cup of coffee, about 50 cigarettes, and then off to work. Other than being on camera and that arduous work schedule, what were some of the other hardest things about putting the show together? Putting the show together in terms of being on set all the time was, I think, the hardest thing.

Saying goodbye to everyone at the end was hard. You get bonded so quickly. We had kind of a dream run. It was just such a beautiful experience. Really very little that i i think was you know it was definitely like exhausting and very demanding but it wasn't yeah there wasn't like.

Conflict i mean just even keeping your energy level up must have been a little bit uh of a challenge. It was like definitely towards the end i was starting to get a bit frayed around the edges but um but it was uh like i there's nothing else i'd rather do this is my favorite thing in the world to do have. You had the chance to see this with other people A little bit. A little bit I have. Yeah.

But this, I think now that it's premiering, this is like the first time that I'll be genuinely seeing a public reaction and I'm hoping it's good. Do you already have like a watch party lined up? I don't. You know what? I should.

And where's the best place for people to keep up with you in the new show? Oh, definitely come see me on Instagram at the Cassie Workman. Well, Cassie, thank you so much. This was so nice talking with you. No, I appreciate it.

In the cool of the. Evening when everything is getting kind of groovy I call you up and ask you if you'd like to go with me and see a movie First you say no You've got some plans for the night And then you. Stop and say. All right, love is kind of crazy Well, the spooky little girl like you. You always keep me guessing I never seem to know what you are thinking And if a fella looks at you It's for sure your little eye will be a-winking.

I get confused. Cause I don't know where I stand. And then you smile and hold my hand. Love is kind of crazy with a spooky little girl like you. Spooky.

If you decide someday to stop this little game that you are playing. I'm gonna tell you all the things my heart's been dying to be saying. Just like a ghost, you've been haunting my dreams, so I propose. On Halloween, love is kind of crazy with a spooky little girl like you. Spooky, spooky, oh, oh, all right.

I said spooky, oh, yeah, yeah. I said spooky, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, spooky.