Key Points
Zooey Deschanel is looking back on the “fight” to get Lamorne Morris cast on New Girl.
The sitcom actress said that early in the audition process, she realized Morris would be perfect for Winston Bishop.
To make it happen, she enlisted Jake Johnson and Max Greenfield to contact studio execs about casting the role.
New Girl would’ve looked very different if Zooey Deschanel and her castmates hadn’t rallied behind Lamorne Morris.
Deschanel, who fronted the sitcom as the quirky Jessica Day, has revealed that she was very involved in the casting process when the show was first coming together. And while there’s no question for Deschanel — and millions of fans — that the sitcom settled on the perfect cast, the actress said it took quite a lot of work to get to that point.
“I love that I got to like be there for their auditions and see them come to life and really come into their own as actors,” Deschanel said during a recent visit to the Zach Sang Show, referencing the fact that stars Morris, Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, and Hannah Simone were early in their careers when they landed on the show. “I got to see kind of the beginnings of their careers, ’cause they all have gone on to do incredible things.”
Lamorne Morris and Zooey Deschanel on ‘New Girl’
Credit: Fox
Recalling how the auditions went down, Deschanel said that while Greenfield and Johnson were “cast very quickly,” she had to push for a few of her other castmates.
“Hannah had come in and I loved Hannah,” she recalled. “She was the only one who came in and was kind of deadpan and wasn’t trying to play Cece as kind of ditzy. She was playing her like smart and deadpan and I was like, ‘That’s who we need.’ But that wasn’t a super hard sell.”
The bigger struggle was getting everyone to see that Morris was perfect as the increasingly eccentric Winston Bishop.
Deschanel explained that Morris had previously come in to audition for Coach, the character Damon Wayans played in the pilot before exiting the show for another project.
“Damon already had a show,” Deschanel explained. “So they were very familiar with him… But Lamorne was the one that we had to fight for. “
She explained that after Wayans departed the show for Happy Endings, they brought in another round of people for the Winston character.
“We had so many people coming in and I was reading with every single person,” Deschanel said. But all the while, she knew they had already found the perfect guy for the job.
“I was just like, ‘What about Lamorne? That guy’s so good. He’s so talented,'” she recalled, adding that Johnson and Greenfield agreed. “They all knew him because they’d all been in the audition process together originally. And so we did this thing where I wrote to the heads of the studio and the network and Jake wrote to [executive producer] Jake Kasdan.”
‘New Girl’ cast members Lamorne Morris, Jake Johnson, Zooey Deschanel, Max Greenfield, and Hannah Simone
Credit: Fox
Deschanel said that each of the castmates wrote to “somebody different” with a message to the effect of, “‘Just putting my two cents in, we think Lamorne is best for this character and such a great addition.'”
She continued, “I was like, I can’t see anybody else playing this part and I know they’re going to see it eventually.”
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In the end, Morris landed the role and Winston evolved into a fan-favorite character, sticking through to the series’ conclusion. And his relationship to the show didn’t end there — Morris went on to cohost a rewatch podcast, The Mess Around With Hannah and Lamorne, alongside Simone.
Looking back on the battle to secure Morris for the role, Deschanel laughed, pointing out, “He was the one that everyone’s like, ‘Uh, I don’t know, like, you know.’ And now I’m like, ‘Guys, he has an Emmy and he’s killing it.'”
When Sang pointed out that rallying the troops to fight for Morris may have had an impact on the chemistry that the group of actors maintained over the course of the show’s run, Deschanel agreed.
“We went through a lot together,” she said of the cast, who spent seven seasons starring on the sitcom about a mismatched group of dysfunctional friends living in a Los Angeles loft. “There was a lot because we were doing these crazy long hours and all this stuff and definitely rallying for Lamorne.”
She added, “It’s like having siblings, you know what I mean? I saw them more than my family. We were in the trenches together.”
Watch Deschanel recall the battle above.
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