Miranda Cosgrove and Nathan Kress joined AfterBuzz TV to reveal how they’re taking on their new behind-the-scenes roles producing and directing, what it was like reuniting with Josh Peck on screen and the possibility of new music from Miranda.
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iCarly is back for season two on Paramount+, but this season Carly and the gang aren’t alone: they’re bringing along some of our favorite OG guest stars (i.e.: Grandpa Shay!) and some brand new faces too–can we get a “hug me brotha” for the Josh Peck cameo?
Miranda Cosgrove and Nathan Kress joined AfterBuzz TV to reveal how they’re taking on their new behind-the-scenes roles producing and directing, what it was like reuniting with Josh Peck on screen, and the possibility of new music from Miranda:
AFTERBUZZ: Miranda, congrats on becoming an executive producer!
MIRANDA: Thank you!
AFTERBUZZ: I think a lot of people are curious about what producing entails. What does the day-to-day look like for you?
MIRANDA: Well, the writer’s room starts off a couple months before we start filming the show and they get all the episode ideas in order so that once we start, they already have everything kind of mapped out and maybe even a few scripts already finished. That’s been really fun getting to go to the writer’s room and be a part of that process. Then later when we’re finished filming the episodes we edit them, and I had never edited before, but getting to be a part of that is probably one of the most fun things about coming back.
NATHAN: And if I can add–because Miranda’s not gonna say this, but I will–Miranda T. Cosgrove works harder than anyone else on that set. A lot of people will sign onto a project and take a producer title, especially an executive producer title, as essentially a title. And that’s just part of sweetening a deal, but not for Miranda. Miranda has been a part of every single aspect of production. The amount of hours that I happen to know with confidence that she spends after hours working on future or past episodes exceeds anything that I’ve ever seen from anyone. It’s just been really interesting going from not having done that to being an absolute rockstar at doing that and putting in so much time and effort into this thing. You can just tell that there’s a lot of love and care going into trying to make this the best thing that it can be. So I’ve had fun watching that happen.
MIRANDA: Thanks, Nathan! Also, Nathan has been directing episodes, which has been really cool. It’s just fun because when we did the first series, we were kids and all I did was try to remember my lines and do the best job I could do. Now it kind of feels like we’re all more of a team, and with Nathan directing and getting to be a part of editing and all of that, it’s just stuff we never got to do before, so it’s been really cool.
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AFTERBUZZ: Nathan, what was the experience like directing the first episode with Josh Peck guest-starring?
NATHAN: Oh my gosh, such a blast. I was very nervous at first because I love Josh so much. I respect him so much as an actor and I felt really unequipped and frankly dumb telling him to do anything because he just knows exactly what to do. But that was what became so fun, was that the whole week was very collaborative between all of us, and especially Josh. He comes in and just has such fun ideas and whether or not we rehearse them, there’s several bits from the show of interaction between Freddie and Josh that were not scripted. And after a couple takes, he would just say, ‘Hey, what if we do a thing where we try to push each other through the door?’ or ‘What if we really lean into this whole ‘dope eating pasta’ gag and just riff off of each other?’ And there’s so much stuff that he brought to the table that just made life so easy, and that was half of what made it so fun. And he’s just so disarmingly nice and fantastic to work with that it was just an absolute blast. So he can come back anytime. It was smart that the iCarly folks made him a character that could be around, making him the manager character, because we can talk about him a lot, but then if he wants to he can always just pop in every once in a while. And he elevates everything that he’s in, so I would be thrilled if he would continue to come back and join us every once in a while because that was a blast.
AFTERBUZZ: I always love hearing what was scripted versus what was improvised. Do y’all do a lot of improv on the show?
NATHAN: Somewhat. I feel like some of it plays out in rehearsal, and then sometimes it gets added into the script, or sometimes that’s just us messing around and they go, ‘Haha, no. That’s not gonna happen.’ Because a lot of the time, it’s so hard when we’re tied down by time. We already know that the episodes run long and so there’s already stuff that’s gonna have to be cut out, and so by adding in a bunch of fun riffs and improv a lot of the time, we’d have to decide between that and a story point, which we can’t afford to lose. So it gets really hard balancing that improv, but I think for us and for me personally, the improv is more within the performance of a line and really getting to play around with it. And that’s been fun on the directing side, especially for ones that I direct, I get to see all those takes one after the other, and it’s fun getting to watch all of us sort of experiment mid-take and try to just find things. And it’s really fun when those sort of off-the-wall choices end up being the ones that click and make the most sense. It’s been really fun to find those kinds of spontaneous moments, and let those little fun side things that we play around with at the end of the day or at the end of the scene when those actually become the ones that make it into the show.
AFTERBUZZ: That’s really cool. Miranda, since the original series ended, you went to college and studied film and then psychology. Do you feel like that’s impacted or influenced your acting at all?
MIRANDA: I don’t know if it’s influenced my acting, but I do feel happy that I had the experience because I started doing homeschooling when I was eight and I went to public school before that and I really liked it. So just getting to have the experience of meeting people and being back in an actual classroom, and getting to walk around the campus and be in college, I’m really grateful for the experience. Maybe if I was a super dramatic actress or something I could have used some of the psychology, but I feel like with what we do, it’s just so fun and silly that I haven’t really used any of it.
AFTERBUZZ: For both of you, what was your favorite moment from filming the season?
MIRANDA: I know Nathan’s favorite moment because we’ve been talking about it.
NATHAN: Crystal the Monkey who played Sully, she is obviously probably the most famous monkey alive. She was the monkey from The Hangover, so usually when you spit that out, that’s what everybody knows her from. So there’s the bit where Freddie calls her cute and Sully doesn’t like being called cute, so Sully slaps Freddie in the face. And she slaps hard. She doesn’t really know how to hold back, and the density of that little monkey hand was phenomenal. And so in rehearsal, she got me through my mask. I had my mask on and I felt it, and so I was a little freaked out when it came time to shoot. But apparently, we bonded over the course of the week, and instead of slapping me for one of those takes, she kissed me right on the face instead, and it was the cutest thing ever. It made me very happy and I really just hope that that outtake exists somewhere, because that’s probably the most famous person–creature–that will ever kiss me. So that’s gonna be my claim to fame. I got kissed by Crystal. It’s gonna be my license plate.
Credit: Paramount+
MIRANDA: For me, my favorite moment is two really funny things that happened during the finale. The cake was supposed to go in my face, so I was excited to do that because I had never done anything like that before, and it was fun to do it with Jerry. But Jerry was wearing these insane shoes and everybody was so nervous about the stunt of putting the cake in my face, because we didn’t know how many takes we were gonna have and we were trying to get it on the first one. Everybody was nervous about it and then when we went to do it the first time, Jerry’s shoe broke. So the whole really tall, lift part of his shoe just completely came off when he went to put the cake in my face, so he was standing there balancing on one foot with the other foot like six inches off the ground with no shoe on it. It was like everything went wrong that could have gone wrong even though we tried so hard to make everything go perfectly that first time.
And then it didn’t make it into the episode, but at one point after the cake gets in my face and it’s all over my hands, I was supposed to exit the apartment to go to my apartment to change and try to clean it off my face, and I couldn’t open up the door because my hands were too filled with cake. I tried for minutes to open up the door while the crew and everybody just watched me try to open it and it was too slippery, and it was just fun. I just like the random, unexpected things that happen during the tapes sometimes. You never know what’s gonna happen.
NATHAN: That was a very I Love Lucy moment. That was a fun one to watch and try to stay in character while observing this absolutely absurd thing, so that was great.
AFTERBUZZ: That’s so funny. I love the costumes in that episode. They’re amazing.
MIRANDA: I love costume parties. It was so fun getting to see everyone in the outfits. I thought it was fun getting to dress up as Cher, but then also getting to wear the Saturday Night Fever suit and that crazy hair. I felt like I looked a little bit like Kris Kardashian.
AFTERBUZZ: I can totally see that. And also for both of you, so many of us grew up with the characters on iCarly: are there any moments that y’all have been star-struck meeting any actors that you grew up with?
NATHAN: Oh boy. On the original show, a huge one for me was Jack Black. That was massive. Oh boy, that guy. I think that was probably the hardest one for me to get over from the original because he is just the greatest and I memorized every line from every movie that I was old enough to watch at the time.
MIRANDA: I would say probably, it was really cool having Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey do a cameo in an episode. That was awesome, and I think that was one of the craziest guest stars we ever had. That was really cool.
AFTERBUZZ: Speaking of the original iCarly, I think one of the most iconic episodes is the first Halloween episode. Do you have any plans with the new series to do any holiday episodes, or are there any ones that you really want to do?
MIRANDA: I’d love to do another Halloween episode. Halloween’s my favorite holiday by far, and that’s why it was so fun getting to do the finale episode because even though it wasn’t Halloween, it was a little bit Halloweeny with the crows and the costumes and everything.
NATHAN: Yeah, I think what we’ve learned is there’s a lot of fun gags to be had when there’s a reason to wear a ridiculous costume. So Halloween would work or Half-oween because that was a thing that we did too. Or a Quarter-ween, or Semi-ween. There’s all kinds of reasons to dress up, so I would love to do that. I think TV shows really like to make it line up when the air date is right around the time of the actual holiday, so part of that probably affects what we can and can’t do, so I’m hoping that we line up. We had a fun Christmas episode, too. We did kind of a riff on It’s a Wonderful Life and that was sort of fun, doing kind of alternate reality versions of Carly’s life. So I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind doing that. I feel like a Thanksgiving episode would be a hot mess. It just seems like Thanksgiving always goes wrong for everybody and iCarly would probably take that to an even farther degree. So yeah, there’s a million holidays that I’d love to hit because you know we’d mess ’em all up. We’d find ourselves in big trouble no matter what we’re celebrating.
AFTERBUZZ: And so many opportunities with Thanksgiving for Spencer to set things on fire.
NATHAN: Exactly. True. Very true. God help that Turkey because you know that bad boy’s getting torched.
AFTERBUZZ: Speaking of different episodes to cover with the new series, y’all have touched on a lot of adult topics so far. Is there anything you haven’t covered that you would like to see covered on the show?
MIRANDA: I’d like to know who Freddie’s ex-wife is, because he has two ex-wives and we’ve met one of them, but I’m wondering who the other one is. And I also wish that we had some answers on who Carly and Spencer’s mom is or what happened to her.
NATHAN: Yeah, I think some family history stuff would be fun. Same with Carly’s mom, I don’t know anything about Freddie’s dad, so that would be an interesting thing for me to find out. And if his dad’s still around in some way or another, that’d be a fun opportunity for a guest star. But also, I’ve really enjoyed the interaction between Freddie and Millicent and kind of that father-daughter relationship. That’s one of the more interesting things that my character gets to do because it’s so out of character for the age that we are. Freddie, as a not-quite 30-year-old, shouldn’t have to be giving advice to a 12-year-old who’s his daughter, you know? So that’s been a really interesting opportunity I think for fun character growth and unique things. And for me as a dad too, I enjoy it because it gives me a chance to get a head start because mine’s only four, my oldest. So I get to have some difficult conversations in character and I get five takes to do it so I can kind of work on my performance in advance, so I get a little bit of a parenting cheat sheet through Freddie.
AFTERBUZZ: That’s awesome. And one last question Miranda: you did some music on the original show. Is that something you would consider doing on the new series?
MIRANDA: Yeah, definitely. It could be fun to do something like that, but right now we just have the theme song from the original show, and it’s funny because I recorded it when I was 13 and it’s the exact same song that was in the original series. So that’s the only music that’s really in there so far, but yeah, I’d be open to doing an episode. We even all talked about doing a musical episode and then we were like, no.
NATHAN: Shot down immediately.
To find out more about this season of iCarly, check out our interviews with the rest of the cast, and watch season two of iCarly now streaming on Paramount+.
