Initially, actor and musician Jason Schwartzman thought the new Prime Video series Kevin would be a live-action series — which was a bit baffling to him, considering that he was playing a talking cat. “I was like, it’s insane that this is going be live action. I just didn’t understand how they would do it,” he tells Consequence.
It’s easy to see why he’d have concerns about that, as Kevin is set in a world where humans and animals of all species are able to communicate freely. The series begins with the titular kitty and the couple he’s been living with going their separate ways, a scene that takes on the tone of a breakup as Kevin decides he needs to live his own life.
Schwartzman did find out that this would be an animated project before the first recording session with series co-creator Aubrey Plaza, with whom he performed his scenes while trying to make her and co-creator Joe Wengert laugh. “You’re trying to figure out the voice. You’re trying to figure out what they have in mind. It’s something that they’ve worked on for a long time, and they care so much about it,” he says of that first session. “To be invited to that party, to me it’s a big deal, when it’s that close to these people.”
So during the session, he says, “as I’m saying the lines, I really am just trying to find the character, based on facial expressions that I’m receiving back from them in the Zoom call. Like, ‘Nope, nope. They don’t like that kind of thing. They like that.’”
Eventually, he found that “as time goes on, and you do it more and more and more regularly, I don’t really know what it is about Kevin’s voice or, but he’s just so specific that I’m not sure if it’s a voice thing or a tonal thing, but just certain things seem to come out of your mouth better in a certain way. What was so fun about it was we were always finding it, even until the end. There was always a new version of something to mess with and try. So it was very much like a real living person looking for themselves. Which is what [Kevin’s] doing.”
Kevin’s a cat full of quirks, like a deep fondness for the band Pavement. Schwartzman says that the frequent mentions of the famed indie rock band in the show — including a voice cameo by Stephen Malkmus — come from Wengert. “That’s his favorite band by a lot. And they were able to reach out to Pavement and get them to be involved. I don’t know too many of the fine details, all I know is that it involves a lunch between the two of them before playing tennis of some kind. But I was so thrilled.”
To be clear, Schwartzman is also a Pavement fan. “Not only [Malkmus’s] music, but I like watching interviews with him and reading interviews with him. I’m just a fan of his as a person.” That fandom extended to appearing in past collaborator Alex Ross Perry’s 2024 movie Pavements, in which Schwartzman played Matador Records founder Chris Lombardi.
That movie was far from a traditional biopic — something Schwartzman acknowledged being confused by during production: “It was so complicated. While we were making it, I thought I knew what was going on, but I didn’t also want to ask, because there were so many levels upon levels upon levels.” Still, he was “so grateful” to be part of the experience. “It was a thrill for me.”
In addition to voicing the lead character of Kevin, Schwartzman writes and performs the show’s theme song. He admits that his experience as a co-writer on Phantom Planet’s “California” (later used for the opening credits of The O.C.) didn’t really factor into his approach. “I wish I was that saucy and that I was that knowledgeable about theme songs,” he says. However, he was excited about the idea of a track that was centered in the main character’s point-of-view — a somewhat unique angle.
“When we were doing it, it was just going to be music at first. And then we started talking about lyrics and all of a sudden I realized, oh, wow, this is going to be a piece of music that is going to be sung in a way by Kevin that propels you into the show. And that was super exciting to do. It’s almost like getting a little prelude or something. I just loved every second.”
The song ends with the joyful shout of “I’m Kevin!” — a touch which Schwartzman says was unplanned. “I think that was just we had done a bunch of [takes], and at the end I just did it to make people smile. It wasn’t meant to be part of the song. But we left it in there.”
Kevin joins a long tradition of great fictional cats, such as Puss in Boots, Sylvester from Looney Tunes, and Hobbes of Calvin and Hobbes — when asked to rank them, Schwartzman’s immediate top-tier pick is Garfield: “There are few creatures that you wish you could really know in real life, and that’s one of them. Like, I really do wish I could know Garfield or have Garfield stay with me for a little while. I wouldn’t mind even having Odie with me.” He’s also fond of Hello Kitty, even though — as we discuss in the video interview above — neither of us were sure if she is actually a cat. (According to Sanrio, she is not.)
Check out the full interview with Schwartzman above. All eight episodes of Kevin are streaming now on Prime Video.