Will Arnett used to leave BoJack Horseman recording sessions feeling disoriented. He’d step outside a dark Hollywoo(d) studio blinded by late-morning sunlight. As he walked to his car, he’d start to sweat.
The caffeine from the coffee he’d just drunk would buck in his empty stomach. All the while, he’d be struggling to shake his character’s pathologically antisocial behavior. “This guy’s just been really shitty to someone in some fucked-up scenario,” Arnett says.
“And I’m like, ‘What? How am I going to go on with the rest of my day?’” Hey, that’s life as the voice of a depressed, self-loathing, alcoholic, anthropomorphic horse: Occasionally, you sink into the depths with him. “There were days where I’d come home really bummed out, and I’d be like, ‘What is life, man?’” says Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the show’s creator. “And I’d go to work the next day like, ‘Oh, right.
I’m watching this really depressing episode all day.’ It’s seeping into my brain.” On first look, BoJack Horseman was a satirical story of a washed-up sitcom star desperate to be famous again.
But it was more than the tale of one unhappy equine. It was an existential comedy about people, some of whom happen to be animals, figuring out how to live without letting their piled-up baggage weigh them down. “That’s just such a unique point of view: to realize that each day, we get out of bed and we have a certain amount of damage that we are all either trying to.