Rick and Morty‘s first spinoff that isn’t a variation on Rick and Morty (like its short-lived anime variant) arrives in just a few weeks. President Curtis, focusing on the mainline show’s POTUS voiced by Keith David, hits Adult Swim July 26, following Rick and Morty‘s season nine finale. In a new interview, co-creators Dan Harmon and James Siciliano talked about why President Andre Curtis was their top choice among Rick and Morty‘s supporting characters to get his own series—and how he’ll be slightly different than the man we’ve previously seen in action.
Speaking to Deadline, Harmon explained that Curtis, being the leader of the free world with his own mysteries to poke into, was “the character who could have their own self-contained world that wouldn’t be redundantly overlapping.”
The idea for President Curtis has been percolating since season five back in 2021, when Curtis played a big role in “Rick and Morty’s Thanksploitation Spectacular” (you know, the one where Rick and Curtis’ feud escalates to them both turning themselves into turkeys).
“That’s where the conversation started—just seeing what Keith David brings to that character and that he could sustain that level of toe-to-toeness with Rick,” Siciliano recalled. “We could also see [President Curtis’] world—Spider FDR, the French assassin hidden in the Statue of Liberty, and a little more of the National Treasure/X-Files stuff. That was the fabric of what we wanted to do with the show.”
While it’s the same President Curtis from Rick and Morty (with a single crossover cameo in the first episode to prove it, apparently), he won’t be quite the same as before.
“The one thing we ‘retconned’ and adjusted from the Rick and Morty character when we were building our guy out is that in Rick and Morty, he is very approval-driven and craves that. That was the first thing when talking about this show—it is almost the opposite. We wanted him to not be rolling his eyes at the job as part of his duty to protect people,” Siciliano said.
Added Harmon, “We thought about it pretty hard, and what we needed to change about this guy is if you gave him a chance to have his numbers go up, but in order to do it, he had to lie or cheat, he wouldn’t. He is only doing the job of president because if he doesn’t, someone worse will … it is not the job he would have chosen. He is a soldier and a vampire slayer, and he was a lonely guy who begrudgingly took on this role of serving hundreds of millions of people.”
President Curtis also stars Jim Rash and Stephanie Beatriz; it arrives July 26 on Adult Swim.
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