The HBO mock-documentary 7 Days in Hell—about an epic Wimbledon match between a bad-boy Andre Agassi type and a dim-witted British simpleton—plays like a comic hallucination of the McEnroe/Borg documentary Fire & Ice, full of absurd tangents and stories within stories within stories. At one point, a top-ranked player leaves tennis to start an underwear line in Sweden (which ends in lawsuits over groin-chafing); at another, the doc trails off into a mini-profile of a courtroom sketch artist famous for incorporating cartoon animals into his work. Created by Andy Samberg and Murray Miller, written by Miller, and directed by Jake Szymanski, 7 Days in Hell parodies the gravitas of ESPN's 30 for 30 series and HBO's own sports docs, but it's also inspired silliness for its own sake, packed with filthy jokes and appearances from big names in the sporting world and in comedy circles.

Under the HBO "Legends of Sport" banner, Samberg, Miller, and Szymanski have returned with Tour de Pharmacy, an equally brilliant riff on the plague of performance-enhancing drugs in professional cycling. Tour de Pharmacy takes a fictitious look back at the 1982 Tour de France, an event so scandalized with drug cheats that 170 riders were disqualified and only five continued to compete. (They're dubbed "The Fab Five," which prompts an appearance here by a deeply confused Chris Webber.) The remaining cyclists are Marty Hass (Samberg), an American schooled in Nigeria who proudly represents the entire African continent; JuJu Peppi (Orlando Bloom), whose heart explodes from a cocktail of about three dozen different drugs; Slim Robinson (Daveed Diggs), Jackie Robinson's nephew, who hopes to break the color barrier in this very white sport; Gustav Ditters (John Cena), a German who's bulked up conspicuously; and Adrian Baton (Freddie Highmore), a Frenchwoman masquerading as a Frenchman. In contemporary interviews, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Dolph Lundgren, and Julia Ormond play older versions of Hass, Robinson, Ditters, and Baton, respectively.

Many more unexpected people turn up in Tour de Pharmacy, from Mike Tyson to J.J. Abrams to Phylicia Rashad, but the real ace in the hole is Lance Armstrong, who appears in poorly shrouded silhouette. After spending years beating drug tests and vociferously denying accusations of cheating, only to finally get caught and confess his sins to Oprah Winfrey, Armstrong proves surprisingly eager to make fun of himself and his scandal-ridden sport. In an interview with GQ, Samberg, Miller, and Szymanski talked about Armstrong's participation, their odd digressions into a Swedish "Kultabank" credit-card commercial and a radical "red blood cell" animated explainer, and their devotion to full-frontal male nudity.

What went into persuading Lance Armstrong to do this?

Andy Samberg: Basically, we reached out to his reps and sent them the script. Then they said that Lance thought it was funny and he wanted to talk to me. So I called him. We talked and he liked it.

Was his participation essential?

Samberg: Murray wrote it in, and we all thought it was so funny that we were praying it would happen. No one knew what he would think of it. We felt like we could make it without him, but if we got him, it would be really clutch, comedically.

Jake Szymanski: He definitely lends a lot of credibility to it because he remains, to the general public, the face of cycling in America. I think we can say we were all pleasantly surprised he said yes.

Were there restrictions or lines he didn't want crossed?

Samberg: I don't think so.

Szymanski: No. He was pretty game for all of it and understood what the jokes were.

Samberg: We tried a bunch of stuff within the script—a bunch of alt-lines—and he found it all pretty funny.

Szymanski: I guess Lance Armstrong is not a guy known for saying, "Those are lines I shouldn't cross."

Samberg: That was Jake, just to clarify.

Szymanski: Put that on me.

HBO

How do the script and casting develop together? What adjustments need to be made based on who plays what role?

Murray Miller: It definitely starts with the script and then, like a typical film, we look to cast the parts. I had some notion of who we wanted—and we got lucky enough to cast those people, for the most part—but there were some parts that we were unsure about, and the casting director figured out some names for us.

Samberg: Yeah. And when you cast Jeff Goldblum, you definitely write lines that you imagine being said by Jeff Goldblum. Stuff like that.

In 7 Days in Hell , Andy plays an Agassi-like figure, and you reference things like the Fire and Ice documentary, or the Isner-Mahut match at Wimbledon. Were there specific references you were going for with Tour de Pharmacy?

Szymanski: There's a great doc called Pantani and another great one called Slaying the Badger. There's a couple of other things we watched that inspired Murray when he was writing, and us when we were making it. Probably none of those were specific as a comedic take on this one movie, but we pulled from a couple different worlds of cycling and mashed it all together.