This is Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews podcast war What You Hear
weekday afternoons on the Drive. Amber Nash is a voice talent and improv talent
as well. She's most known for the FX animated adult series Archer, where
she plays Pam Poovie, but you can also hear her doing work on adult
swims, Frisky Dingo, and Cartoon Network's Aquitine Hunger Force, among others.
Welcome, Amber Nash. Good to have you along. Yeah, thanks for
having me. Can you give me one of Pam's signature splooshes? Yeah,
here we go, sploosh. Gotta use that every now and then. As
you can tell, I'm a fan of the show, and it's in its
fourteenth and final season. Oh no, I know it is so sad.
Yeah, you can't tell me the writers ran out of ideas. I wish
that was the no. I think that there's so many more ideas still to
explore. So maybe one day, maybe we'll get lucky and the old gal
will come back somewhere. That is the other thing I was going to get
to in just a minute. But if you don't know what Archer is,
he's a secret agent. His mother runs the Secret Agency. Pampoovi is a
sometime agent, sometimes secretary. I don't know, is there really any definition
to her role. I mean, in the beginning she was supposed to be
the director of HR, but it's not like she never really did that or
always didn't enjoy it. And then we see in season fourteen her have to
go back to doing that a little bit, and she clearly doesn't know what
she's doing. She'd much rather just be horsing around and being out in the
field, you know, with big guns and explosives and such. Well,
later we learned she's an ace shot, she's a great fighter. She has
no fear when she's being interrogated. She insults her interrogators as they're beating the
hell out of her. She's quite a character. Yeah, she really is.
I think that's the thing about Pam that I've come to love the most
is that you're always surprised by what her abilities are. And at the end
of the day, she has one of the biggest hearts of all the cast,
which is I think why people love her so much. Well, and
then there's the fact that of all the women Archers slept with, she was
the best. I know what a nice little secret, right, Yeah,
totally. So she's great in the sack on top of everything else. What
can't she do? Yeah? Yeah, so you must have had a ball
doing this, even though a good deal of the time you weren't even in
the same studio as the other voice actors. Yeah, that's right. I
mean, that's one of the weird things about it is that it's kind of
a solitary situation. I live in Atlanta, so I would go into where
the director and the producer was, so I'd get to see those guys,
but I'd be in the booth all by myself and never got to hear any
of the other actors doing their Sometimes, if something was particularly like important timing
wise, they'd give me a recording if that person had already done their recordings
for the episode. But yeah, we were all by ourselves, which is
crazy, But it's also a testament to the amazing editing on the show where
it makes, I mean it sound like we're in the same room with each
other. Well, and then when the pandemic hit, you guys were already
kind of you were already kind of groomed to do the job that way.
Yeah, Yeah, we got really lucky. And also they kind of were
able to pivot with the animators too and send some big, amazing expensive computers
home with these guys, and they were able to do animation work from home.
So a lot of shows obviously had to shut down, but we got
to keep on working. Well. When you made reference to the old Gal,
that was in reference to one of the boys actors who passed away.
Yes, the old Gal still got it all six right in the ten ring.
I use that drop every now and then on my Firearms Friday feature every
week. Yeah, so what what have we done with that? Because and
I'm going to confess I left off at season eleven. Okay, yeah,
well we had a really sweet send off actually of Mallory And there's a real
sweet because you know, Ron Cadillac was played by her actual husband, Ron
Leibman. I didn't know that, but that's great. He sounded great.
That was a great character. Yeah, and I thought, this is this
is too good to be acting. He's not acting. He really is like
that. Yes, and that voice, I mean that voice, you just
don't get that without just years of being an actor. And he passed about
a year before Jessica did. And uh so Ron Leebman, Ron Cadillac.
They used a little bit of his voice stuff from the past in that last
episode too, and so it was a really sweet send off. It was
really sad for us, and we didn't think the show was going to be
able to go on without without Jessica, but it did. And then Lana
took over the work that Mallory did as kind of a boss. Yeah,
that was a good fit, a good Okay, Well, don't tell me
anymore because I got to catch up. Archer is on FX and the season
fourteen. It's the final season where everything's going to be wrapped up. But
if you want to go see past episodes, you can do like I do
and go back to Amazon and see it there also streaming on Hulu. Did
do you ever in the midst of recording your parts for Pam Poovi just break
down and lose it, just completely break the scene? Yeah, totally,
especially when we're kind of horsing around. The guys really like it. They
always try to make me burp for real in the booth and I'm like,
guys, I can do it. I can burple and command if you want
me to. And that's where we get lots of laughs. We laugh a
lot when we're recording, which is so fun. And usually I will have
read the script, so I definitely you know know what some of the things
are that are about to happen. But it's so such a delight when you
get a laugh from these guys just delivering the line the way that you think
it should be deliver It's it's the best part of my job. Do they
let you kind of improv the not the lines, but I mean the inflection
or is it always very specifically directed? Oh no, Yeah, they definitely
let me kind of make it my own and do some improv and we'll even
change the lines sometimes if they're not quite hitting the way that we want,
and so we'll definitely go back and forth and figure it out and work it
out together. And that's part of what keeps it fresh. I had Lucky
Yates on about a year ago. He plays Kreeger, who is the mad
scientist of the crew, and he told me that they let him improv more
than anybody else. He says he feels bad for the other actors. That's
funny, and I believe it. Lucky wouldn't have it any other way.
He's like, I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do, and you're either gonna
like it or not. Talking to Amber Nash, the voice of Pampouvi on
Archer and it's fourteenth season on FX. It's one of my favorites. The
show is so detailed and so well thought out, and because it's animated,
Amber, they can just literally do anything with those characters. Yeah, yeah,
I mean they can and the world like you know, if you've watched
the show in season one and then watch it in season fourteen and see how
amazing the animation style has become. I mean, they can really do anything,
and they're just like, you know what, let's just use the coolest
things that we can think of, and that's going to be the world that
we exist in. And yeah, and the characters never age. We always
look good like we did the very first season, so it's pretty fantastic.
Or you get one of the characters hooked on cocaine, like Pam and then
she slims down. That was great, but they keep her boobs the exact
same side exactly. That is the other thing too, Like the movement of
vehicles, the movement of airplanes in particular explosions, I mean they look so
real. Yeah, and I didn't realize this, and I don't know exactly
what season had happened, but we were doing a tour of the facility where
they animate everything, and there's like a whole three D department. I was
like, what, I didn't even know that was the thing, and it
definitely wasn't in the beginning. So yeah, it's incredible the stuff that they've
done over the years. Well in the details too, for instance, And
I caught this, I don't know if anybody else did. In the first
season, Lana shoots Archer in the foot, and the liner is something along
the lines of, I, why did you shoot me in the foot?
You know, I hate that, as though it's happened more than once.
And then later a couple of seasons later, there's a close up of Archer's
foot and clearly there's a bullet scar on the in the middle of his foot.
You know that if you had not watched the first season, you would
not, oh it look yeah, of course he's been shot in the foot
by Lana. Yeah, totally. And then this past season and season fourteen,
they talked about like how how like just broken up Archer was after all
the things that he's been through in all of these seasons. It's like no
human beings hand your body was very good stuff. I look forward to seeing
it Archer's fourteenth and final season, and Amber Nash is one of the stars.
She plays Pam Pooviy. If you haven't watched it, you can on
FX go back and catch other episodes on Amazon Prime, and it's streaming on
Hulu. So glad to have you along and I will see you down at
Pooviy Farms. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews
Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive live weekday afternoons from five to
seven and iHeartMedia Presentation