Trey Parker and Matt Stone Gave the Lead of ‘The Book of Mormon’ A Comedy Masterclass With This Advice

What’s the secret acting trick to nailing a part in a Trey Parker and Matt Stone project? Shut the hell up and say the lines Trey Parker and Matt Stone wrote, of course.

When the South Park creators’ long-awaited comedic musical about their favorite friendly religious order, The Book of Mormon, premiered at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in 2011, it was an instant hit. Critics and audiences praised the playwriting and the performances, specifically that of Frozen star Josh Gad in the role of Elder Cunningham. Then, when Gad left the show in 2012, the Book of Mormon producers scrambled to find an actor who could handle the chaotic script from Parker and Stone while most closely imitating Gad’s immaculate performance, hiring future Miracle Workers star Jon Bass to do his best Gad impression.

Very quickly, the creative team of The Book of Mormon realized that no one could do a passable Gad impression besides Gad himself, so they brought in the big guns — Parker and Stone fixed Bass’ performance in a single rehearsal, as Bass explained to the comedy duo BriTANick during an episode of their podcast Cash Grab:

Before The Book of Mormon first hit Broadway, anyone who had been following the South Park creators’ careers since the show started in the late 1990s knew that Parker and Stone would inevitably write and produce a musical, and that such a stage play would probably be both hilarious and hugely successful. Like many of their contemporaries in the animated comedy industry, Parker and Stone couldn’t help but write show tune after show tune to shoehorn into so many crude and controversial South Park episodes during the early seasons. 

Then, when the pair turned South Park’s first feature film into a movie musical with South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut in 1999, Parker and Stone looked positively Broadway-bound, but the demands of their flagship franchise and their many side-tracking side projects stopped them from reaching that inevitability for another 12 years.

In 2006, with some help from Avenue Q writer-composers Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, Parker and Stone finally started formulating the plot and song list for their first musical, eventually fleshing out a full script and sending The Book of Mormon into workshops in 2008, which is when Gad joined the project. Gad’s performance as the habitually fibbing and charismatically incompetent Elder Cunningham would later earn him a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical, and although he lost out to Norbert Leo Butz for Catch Me If You Can, Gad cemented his legacy in the show as the single performer with whom his role will always be inextricably tied.

But instead of having Gad’s replacement do a Gad impression, Parker and Stone understood that a great comedic performance is, in many ways, about what the actor doesn't do, and, over the course of that one master class, they taught Bass to trust their script and just do less. Basically, when your lines are as good as the ones the South Park guys write, all you need to do to kill is be their construction paper cutout and flap your lips.