My father didn't believe in revenge. Well, I do.

Experience the Cinematic event of the year on the big screen. My family has been fighting the Oregonians for decades.

This is a form of power that our world has not yet seen.

From director Deneve Villeneuve. We can stop them. Maybe I'll show you the way. Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zindaya Austin Butler, and Florence Pew.

I am Paul Matradis, Duke of Arrakis.

You are not prepared for what is to come. Dune part 2 in Cinemas Friday. Certificate 12A.

Mtv's official challenge podcast is back for another season.

Season 39, battle for a new champion.

Yes. 24 contenders will compete to win their first championship. They know the battle, but not the victory.

So every week after the episode airs, come hang with us as we break down all the challenges and eliminations, and of course, get the inside scoop on all of the drama.

Listen to MTV's official Challenge podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

You're listening to Comedy Central.

My guest tonight is an actor and playwright who's the co-creator and star of the new AMC miniseries, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. Please welcome Denai Guerrera. Great crowd. Thank you. Oh, my goodness.

That's a good welcome. A beautiful crowd.

Yeah, beautiful guys. Thank you, guys. Welcome. Thank you.

They're happy to be you, and I'm happy to see you. Thank you so much for being here. Of course. Thanks for having me. I am such a fan of your work. You're an incredible actress, and you command such a presence every time you're on screen. These roles that you play, you play these extraordinary, powerful, resilient, katana-wield women. Do you ever feel like you just want to take a break and play Linda from HR?

As long as she dresses cute. Yes. That's what I miss. I miss wearing cute clothes when I go to work.

Oh my God, even think about that. Just not having blood smeared everywhere.

Yeah, that's the makeup. Good smearing and dust. Get some more dust on here. Get some more dirt. That's perfect. Now, action.

You still want to kill zombies, but look cute.

Don't take away the katana now.

No.

Let me hold on to that.

I think you're managing it. You managed to kill zombies.

Can I be in HR with a katana?

Sure. Hey, I think it's an asset. We don't even have HR here. Our budget got cut. That's not true. We'll edit that part out. What's so interesting to me about this series is that you're not only acting in it, but you executive produce, you co-created it, you write on it. Was it challenging just juggling all the hats in one project?

Well, it was really cool because from where you start, you get a role like, what was that? 12 years ago, and it's in this show that was massive at the time. I'm just hoping I can keep this katana in my hand and not drop it when they're shooting. Then to go through this whole arc with the character and the journey she's had, which has been tremendous, and I'm very thankful for how she was written. Then to go into actually creating the spinoff that completes her story with the man who she loves, with Rick Grimes. That was a very cool arc. The interesting parts of it were, of course, executive producing is a lot of work. But then there was an episode that I wrote that I was show running, and Scott Gimple was like, Don't talk to me. Talk to her. It's all her. There are times I'm in this very intense episode, and then I noticed that the corpse in the scene doesn't look dead enough. I'm like, Special effects make up. Can you just help me with this a little bit? I have to jump out of Michonne and make sure she looks good in three weeks dead, and then jump back into the role.

Of course, the Walking Dead fans are going to devour this like a zombie on flesh. But truly, it stands on its own. If you haven't watched the series, it's its own beast.

Yeah, thank you. I think that's true because it really is the epic love story of the series. If you haven't watched it, you can really just latch in because you can see what's happened to Rick and what's happening with Michonne and how they come together and what happens there. It really stands on its own. It was an interesting journey to actually get the opportunity because Walking Dead was such a jogging out of various narratives, big villains and lots of things going on. To actually to step into just these two and their journey and a love story in the Apocalypse. It was really fun and intense.

Yes, you can feel that. I can't wait to... Maybe you would consider sneaking me the rest of the episodes because I don't think I can wait until they come out, if you don't mind. I'll look into it. Now, the Walking Dead franchise is considered a sci-fi zombie Apocalypse, but are you concerned when you look at the state of the world? Is it becoming a little bit more Is it a political drama?

I think they've been neck and neck for 10 years.

Well on its way.

What I love about The Walking Dead, and what attracted me to it, because I was scared out of my mind of horror. But what attracted me to it when I was asked to audition for it in 2012 was the fact that it was about people, characters. Everyone was like, Who would I be if the world ended? If everything that was convenient to me and normal to me just was gone, and everything was just totally upended. Who would I become? I think that is actually what attracts people to it. It became this family show. We meet people, seven-year-olds to 70-year-olds who are watching it with their family every week. It's how mothers bonded with their 14-year-olds. It was amazing to see that it was having that effect. But I think it was really just seeing people, all types of people, navigate something that you can't imagine, but then you almost can. Then everyone's like, Okay, what would I do? What would I become? People tell me what they got decked out for the bad day that could come. They've got it all in their garage.

Preppers, June's Day preppers. What's the craziest thing that a prepper has ever told you that they're collecting?

Wow. That's a good question. I've heard a lot about peanut butter. People like their peanut butter.

Yeah, people love peanut butter. I collect that just jars and tubs. I hide it under my bed just in case I want a midnight snack.

Listen, there is nothing like a good spuit of peanut butter.

I've got some under this desk. Do you want some? Actually, I would like some. Your birthday just passed. Happy birthday. Her birthday's on Valentine's Day. Yes. To celebrate, you wrote this beautiful post. What was behind that message? Tell us a little bit about the foundation.

I created Love Our Girls because I just think Valentine's Day is just such a sucky holiday. What is it, really? What is it? People are expecting things like, Give me roses and candy. You know what I mean? But I think it is beautiful in the sense that it's about love. I was trying to repurpose it about six, seven, eight years ago when I had a show on Broadway, and it was an all-women play. I just wanted to say, What if this day that has always been associated with the day I was born, so I can never disassociate from it, what if it was just about love and loving girls more so that a lot of the things that they face and the discriminations they face and the struggles they face and the celebrations that they face, just get more attention on that day. I decided to make that the theme of the idea of Love Our Girls, which is just an information hub. It's just about learn more about what girls and women are doing around the world and celebrate them and support them. You can't create advocates until you create information or just share information.

That's really all it is. It's just an informational hub to celebrate women and girls and show them love.

Oh, so beautiful.

My father didn't believe in revenge. Well, I do.

Experience the Cinematic event of the year on the big screen. My family has been fighting the Oregonians for decades.

This is a form of power that our world has not yet seen.

From director Deneuve-Vilnerf, We can stop them. Maybe I'll show you the way. Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zindaya Austin Butler, and Florence Pew.

I am Paul M'Atrady, Duke of Arrakis.

You are not prepared for what is to come. Dune part 2 in Cinemas Friday, Pick It 12 A.

Mtv's official Challenge podcast is back for another season.

That's right. The challenge is back, and so are we.

I'm Devon Simone. And I'm Devon Rogers. Now, you all know we had so much fun covering the Challenge USA one together that we thought, Why not do it again? So we are joining forces to dive into this brand new season.

Season 39, battle for a new champion. Yes.

Yes. 24 contenders will compete to win their first championship. They know the battle, but not the victory.

Oh, thank God. I am ready for a new champion, a new one. Okay, give us some fresh faces, people.

Girl, I couldn't agree more. So every week after the episode airs, come hang with us as we break down all the challenges and eliminations, and of course, get the inside scoop on all the drama.

And we got all the tea, okay? We will be joined by the cast members themselves every week, you all.

Listen to MTV's official Challenge podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

My guest tonight is a Grammy Award-winning musician whose latest album is called Weather Vains. He can also be seen in the Oscar-nominated film, Killers of the Flower Moon. Please welcome Jason Inville. Oh, my goodness. Congratulations.thank you.You got another Grammy.

I did. I got a couple this time. It was crazy.Oh.

My God. This is how many? Six?this is six. Good Lord.

Yeah. Well deserved.

Thank you. Well deserved. And not only are you an accomplished musician, but you are now an incredible actor. You were in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, which has been nominated for all of the Academy CME Awards, and you're great in it. Now, did you find that the grind of touring and performing prepared you for the pure stamina you needed to sit through the entire movie, start to finish? Yeah.

I do really good at not peeing, and that helped a lot.

You're well-trained for it.

Yeah, it was an incredible experience to see all that go down. I didn't know why I was there.

No, don't be so much. You're incredible in the film.

Well, thank you. I do believe they didn't let me screw the movie up. No. But it took a little while for me to realize that... They had this guy who was like a dialect coach, right? All day, every day, he was working with DiCaprio and with De Niro on talking like this. I went and met with him and he said, We're just going to hang out. I don't have any notes for you. You just talk like you talk. I thought, I know why I'm here. They're saving money on the dollar. There you go.

Talent and a budget cut. Two birds, one stone. That's so funny. I also heard that an incident happened on set when you were doing a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Oh, yeah, there was an incident.

It was an incident. Do you want to tell it?

I could tell you that. I would not have volunteered to tell the story. No, I think we should.

I have the sense of humor of a 14-year-old boy, so I would love for you to tell the story.

Perfect. We were in this very small space, and we were shooting a scene where the two of us get up in each other's face, and it's intense. We're not friends, and we're about to throw hands, and it gets really serious. We've been doing this for a couple of hours, and all of a sudden, there were like 30 crew people in the room, me and Leo. The camera was rolling, the film was happening, and all of a sudden, somebody in the crew flatulated.

You said that in the most polite Southern way. He flatulated. I shouldn't assume it's a he. It could have been a she. It could have been a she.

It very well could have been a she. But whoever it was, you could tell that that person had lost a great battle Oh, yeah. Just by the sound of it. Then, of course, everybody being the best of the best, nobody did anything. Nobody But he farted. It was like, later on, I called it a fartica situation because they were all willing to take the hit for this. But what happened was I started laughing and DiCaprio started laughing. I I thought, oh, great, we're doing one of those blooper reels because I've never been in a movie before. I thought, This guy farted. This is going to be great. Then he wove the laugh into his character, and all of a sudden, it was Ernest laughing at Bill, and I was not Bill anymore. I was a red-neck laughing at a farting man. I realized this is why one of us has an Oscar, and the other one is about a budget for an accent.

I thought you were going to say that he rolled it into his character and he just said, Excuse me, and just went on. Now that's part of the movie.

I'm nervous. That's what my guitar player said. I'm nervous.

I'm nervous. I imagine when you're on stage performing, that if that thing happens, one of the band members farts, then you just play louder.

You do. Yeah, you do. Well, we have cues. It's hard to communicate on stage. Sometimes it's intentional. It's like, Oh, that's when we go to the drum solo.

Now, was this the first time that you ever acted before?

Really, yeah, it was. I'd done some voiceover stuff for a show called The Squidbillies, show that I love.

That was great. Yeah, you got some fans here.

I was the youth minister on that show. I had gone to Bible school on a cheerleading scholarship. Essentially, I was just playing myself on that one. Sure. That was easy. Then I was in the Deadwood movie just standing there in the background because I just loved the show so much that they let me come stand in the background. That was-How generous of them. It was really kind. Yeah, it was But this is the first time I actually acted like somebody other than myself or a youth minister, so it was a challenge.

You're really incredible in the movie. Is it true that you just started auditioning during some downtime during COVID when you couldn't tour?

Yeah, we were locked down, couldn't tour. I told my agent, If you can find anything where people are working safely and I can keep me busy and do something creative, and if there's a good story to tell. So I got an audition. I got another audition, and I wound up on a Zoom call in my bedroom with Scorsese and De Niro, and then I got the part. Yeah, it was amazing. It was my birthday, actually.

Oh, what a birthday gift. It was great. It wasn't in any better than that. I want to talk about weather veins. I heard that you wrote the entire album when you had downtime on set.

Is that true? Yeah, almost all of it, I did.

Now, when I have downtime on set, I play Wurtl.

Yes. I had gone a lot of wortel. I'd try it. Sometimes I'll try everything else except what I should be doing.

How did you do that? Do you now have a creative association with the acting process on that film and the songwriting process? Are they woven in any way?

I think so, but that was incidental, really. I didn't know until I went back and listened to the finished product of the album that I had used a lot of themes and names that happened to line up with the movie. In the Song Kingdom of Oklahoma, there's a Molly. And that, to me, I had no idea that I was spending most of my time with Lily Gladstone, who was playing Molly. And it was just getting into my brain. And one of the tricks that I have as a songwriter, as I go along, I have eliminated ways of editing myself until it's time to start editing so I don't slow myself down. And so if I'm writing a song, I'm not paying attention to much other than just the puzzle of making the words line up.

Do you play and write in your head at the same time, or do you write first? Then how does the process work? How do you not get in your way when you're in the creative flow?

You have to remind yourself, am I writing a song or am I editing the song? You can't do those at the same time. I can't. Some people probably can. But I'll start by repeating a phrase. I'll overhear something or I'll think of something, and it may be literally what I'm doing. I might say, there's not coffee in this, and Well, you don't have to give it away.

I'm sorry they cut the budget, okay? We'll get you coffee.

Most of my songs are complaints at the end of the day. But then after a while, you just repeat it and a melody makes itself happen, and then I'll pick up a guitar and start finding the cords. I look at it like there's a big, huge field full of rocks, and everything you need is under one of those rocks. It might be under the first rock you pick up, but you might have to pick up a million of them. But if you just keep trying things, eventually you'll get there.

I feel like I'm just a lifetime of picking up rocks. Keep going. You have a song called Middle of the Morning, and you talk about being a strong but silent Southern man. Do you feel like the idea of what a Southern man is or Southern masculinity has evolved in your lifetime?

We We're trying to evolve that, but evidence sometimes shows the contrary to be true.

How so?

Well, in my experience, we're not always the best at talking about how we feel, and that makes us not very good at dealing with our emotions. Things will come out in ways that we don't intend them to when we're not able to say, I am scared or I am sad. I don't necessarily know that that's a Southern thing, but it definitely happens a lot in the South, and that's where I came from.

Do you hope that your music can act as a solve for young men to grow up and see another way of being?

I would like that. It serves a purpose for me initially, but I think if your intentions are honest and you're really trying to communicate with people, then that will happen as a byproduct of what you're doing. I do. I see a lot of big dudes crying at the shows, and it makes me really happy. It makes me really happy.

I think you're making a lot of big dudes cry out here right now.

Don't cry. You can do it. This is a safe space, big dudes.

Safe space. We can laugh We can cry. You also are extremely outspoken when it comes to common sense gun laws and advocacy. You wrote a song on your album that's about the fear as a parent that you have in this country, that many of us feel sending our to school every day. I can't even imagine how difficult that song was to write. Was it an emotional experience for you?

It was hard. The first time I wrote it, I didn't do a very good job because I wasn't saying exactly what I wanted to say. When I rewrote it, I got closer to what I meant, and then I did it again. Finally, I was actually telling the truth. Sometimes that's the process. You want to be vague and you don't want to hit the nail on the head. But this This one really called for that. When I'm writing about something that heavy, I find the best way to do it for me is to go from my own personal perspective. I don't have any experience in a mass shooting situation, so I'm not going to write a song about that. But what I will write about is being at the grocery store and hearing a balloon pop. The first thing that comes into my mind is, Oh, my God, is somebody in here with a gun? I know it is extremely frustrating for a whole lot of people in this country to deal with. It's something that we shouldn't have to worry about. I think it's something that is a capitalist issue at heart. I think all those companies that sprung up after the braided bill was repealed are really pulling the strings right now and selling people something that they don't need so they can feel proud of something that they really shouldn't be proud of.

But it's scary. Having a child, it does make you think about these things more often. It won't necessarily make a good person out of you. But if you start as one, it'll make you worry a lot. That's the truth. Cheers. I have to smell.

You're going to say and you're going to perform for us. I am. You're going to perform a song called Cast Iron Skillet. Now, I'm from Kentucky, so I'm no stranger to Southern phrases like, Don't wash the cast iron skillet. That's why I never do the dishes. But you have a way of using these simple Southern phrases, but there's a much deeper meaning underneath. What was the inspiration behind this song?

I like to make characters and then follow them around and see what they do. When I start a song, I don't necessarily know how it's going to end. I just like to make characters that you can believe and that are honest and then see how they behave as human people would behave. Sometimes that character is the narrator because this has got two... This has two separate stories. Both of them are true, and both of them happen to people that I was close to when I was a child. The first story is about a couple of guys that I went to school with who went down a bad path, wound up murdering somebody, going to prison for the rest of their lives. And then the second part is about a relative I had who fell in love with a black man, and her dad disowned her and never spoke to her again. These things really happened, and this was the '80s and the '90s. They It still happened today. The narrator is trying to give advice, but it's not really good advice. I mean, here's the secret. You can wash the skillet. It's made of... It'll be fine.

You can wash the skillet. A lot of times I'll write a song that has some Southern words of wisdom in it, and people will say, Hey, man, that's not exactly right. I'm like, You're almost there. You're almost understanding the song.

I cannot wait for you to perform. I'm very excited. Everyone here is very excited.

Explore more shows from The Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts. Watch The Daily Show weeknights at 11:10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Paramount+. This has been a Comedy Central podcast.

My father didn't believe in revenge. Well, I do.

Experience the Cinematic event of the year on the big screen. My family has been fighting the Oregonians for decades.

This is a form of power that our world has not yet seen.

From director Denis Villeneuve. We can stop them. Maybe I'll show you the way. Starring Timothée Chalame, Zindeya, Austin Butler, and Florence Pew.

I am Paul Matradis, Duke of Arrakis.

You are not prepared for what is to come. Dune part 2 in Cinemas Friday. Certificate 12A.

Mtv's official challenge podcast is back for another season.

Season 39, battle for a new champion.

Yes. 24 contenders will compete to win their first championship. They know the battle, but not the victory.

So every week after the episode airs, come hang with us as we break down all the challenges and eliminations, and of course, get the inside scoop on all of the drama.

Listen to MTV's official challenge podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.