Yeah because of the things that they say about serial killers, right? That they mutilate animals when they’re younger before moving on. We have a writer on the show, Rebecca Addelman, who I asked to do some punch-up on that scene between Gus and Birdie and she turned that over. I remember reading it, laughing out loud, and deciding that it’s got to go in. It’s making me laugh and I’m a cold-hearted person.

You pull off a pretty wonderful shrooms episode. Was doing a big drug trip episode something you were eager to do in this show? How did this story come about?

I think that came about because we were interested in putting Mickey into a situation where she’s newly sober and put in a position where she’s in charge and has responsibility. What we like to do sometimes in the writers room is go, “Okay, they’ve been together one month, two months now. What do you like to do two months into a relationship? What are your experiences?” Mushrooms seemed like a good fit here since it’s still a little early in the relationship and you’re worried about exposing something about yourself. We definitely tried—or at least the take on this was supposed to be to try doing something unexpected. I think most people would think that Gus would take mushrooms and flip out, so we kind of liked the idea of him doing them and going, “Hey, that was fun!” Which is typically something you can’t do on network. You can’t have somebody take hallucinogenic drugs and go, “That was fun!”

On the topic of how long these two have been in a relationship together, you guys do an episode towards the end of the season that crams 24 days of story into a single episode. Was that crazy, considering up until that point only about 3 to 4 weeks have passed over the course of the entire series? You have this very condensed timeline and then blow it up. Was there any hesitation with that at all?

Yeah! I get nervous about moving stuff along because since the first season Judd [Apatow] was really adamant about—it was sort of one of the top three decisions that we made early on—about going really slow. That was one of Judd’s major contributions to things. So I became obsessed with that. Even in season two, if we showed Gus and Mickey parking a car and then cut to them in the location, I’d be so obsessed and be all, “No! We have to show them getting into the room.” Just the idea of tracking every single moment became really, really fun. After a while I realized that this is impossible though. That’s why you cut stuff out, condense things, and don’t show everything.