While covering NYCC 2024, I had the opportunity to speak with Grimsburg showrunner/EP Chadd Gindin, star/EP Jon Hamm, Rachel Dratch, and Alan Tudyk for the second season. New episodes air Sundays at 8:30 PM ET/PT on FOX.

Grimsburg, starring and executive-produced by Emmy Award winner Jon Hamm (Mad Men), centers on Marvin Flute (Hamm), who may be the greatest detective ever to catch a cannibal clown and correctly identify a mid-century modern armoire. But there’s one mystery he still can’t crack — himself. To do that he must return to Grimsburg, a town where everyone has a secret or three, and redeem himself in the eyes of his fellow detectives, his ferocious ex-wife Harmony (Erinn Hayes) and his lovably unstable son Stan (Rachel Dratch).

“Well, it’s my first one [convention] as an actor,” Dratch, who voices Stan Flute, revealed. “I walked around once with my son years ago. I love seeing people turn out in all these crazy costumes, [it’s] just a vibe.”

“For sure, it’s kind of the best part of New York, when everybody gets on the same page for one thing, it’s really fun. SantaCon is a perfect example of that,” Hamm, who brings Marvin Flute to life, joked only for Dratch to comment, “That’s something I’d like to avoid.” They both quickly agreed that NYCC was more enjoyable.

“I think when you’re coming here, you’re dealing with real fans. I mean, that’s the best part of it,” Gindin expressed. “These are not people who take this lightly and so, you have to appreciate that about this. You look around and you see the outfits, you see the things they’re buying — I mean, the amount of money that’s being spent.”

Tudyk, who takes on the roles of Dr. Rufis Pentos and Mr. Flesh, recalled, “Our first season, we didn’t get to come to the con because it was the strike. So this is really exciting to get to finally meet people.”

As for Hamm, it’s his second time at the convention. “It’s my second time being here. The first time I was here was with Good Omens and that was a very different experience because I was with David Tennant, who is [from] Doctor Who and carries a lot of water at this particular convention, so I was with Comic Con royalty at that point and it was quite fun. But this is equally fun. It’s like Rachel said, it’s really fun to see how into the whole experience everybody is,” he shared. “It’s really fun seeing kids, I think. The kids are just, this is like the world’s greatest toy store playground combination.”

While Dratch has plenty of notable and hilarious roles, I asked her to tell me what audiences would be most surprised to find out about voice acting. She said, “I think you don’t realize how much you actually have to act your lines. It’s not just reading, which you might think when you first start out, even if you’re a seasoned actor, but you can hear the difference when you’re really in the moment or not. I love trying different ways of doing a joke and all that stuff. So, it’s way more into it, it’s a total learning curve. I’m glad I’ve had more experience now [for season 2].”

Hamm then added, “It’s also fun. It’s super fun. People think, ‘Oh, you just sit in a booth and it’s lonely and solitude,’ but no, it’s fun, especially when the jokes are good and the writing’s good.”

“I think with the voiceover, everyone has their way of doing voiceover and Alan comes in full tilt. He is in full character,” Gindin told me, even comparing the actor’s work later on to the experience of doing motion capture, except there’s nothing on. “I mean, I wish there was a camera that was filming those sessions. He is not just doing a vocal performance. He’s doing a full acting performance in front of the microphone. So that is a very impressive and awesome part of this is to see someone commit when even no one’s looking.”

Tudyk mentioned that he has “no sense of it at all,” but explained, “For a voice actor, it’s a great opportunity to play around, to have ideas. I mean, you do what’s on the page, and then, you can do take after take after take. So you can find things together that, ‘Oh, wait, what about this? What about this?’ And so, it isn’t like film when you’re on camera where time is money. Time is money, but it’s a lot less in the performance. You don’t have to worry about the weather, a lot of things are controlled. So you can play around and have fun, and the process is drawn out because it then gets animated, new ideas come up, and you get to have a second bite at the apple, and I love apples.” Gindin was quick to confirm that fact was true, saying that he’s “always loved apples.”

“I’ve been a fan of animation since I was a little kid, in all styles, and we’re living in the golden age, I would imagine right now, because everything is so available,” Hamm concluded. “In my day, if you wanted to see cool anime, different kinds of comic books, or anything that wasn’t kind of in the mainstream, you really had to kind of dig for it. Now, there’s so many options out there. So it was a fun challenge for me to find a genre of animation that kind of was underserved a little bit in the market. We have this kind of horror/crime mashup that’s given us a lot of opportunities to really play with the form, and find the satire and find the humor in it and that was, I thought, a fun opportunity.”