Meet the Sewer Boys! Everything There Is to Know About ‘Dicks: The Musical’ Break-Outs Backpack and Whisper
They’re impossibly fast and strong. Their skin is pale-white and ice-cold. They travel in pairs and they’re at the epicenter of campy, creepy gay culture. No, we’re not talking about the vampires of “Twilight” or “Dicks: The Musical” writers/stars Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp.
Meet Backpack and Whisper, AKA The Sewer Boys!
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Born into this world as a one-off joke from an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch show a decade ago, they’re all grown up and now playing pivotal roles in A24’s gleefully unhinged musical comedy. It’s a genre first for the studio and, though the crusty cuties may remind you of iconic puppets from ‘80s and ‘90s films like “Gremlins” or “Labyrinth,” you’ve never seen anything quite like them on stage or screen before.
“I just remember that it was this big reveal that Josh and Aaron were like, ‘We have to show you the Sewer Boys,’” Bowen Yang, aka the narrator/God of the “Dicks” universe, told IndieWire. “Then I walked up to the cage that they were being kept in and it was just like just truly, truly, truly shocking and disgusting. But then there’s this thing where they end up having this Jim Henson-like quality where, by the end, they’re adorable and you really … love them?”
Backpack and Whisper serve as the money-shot for the “Dicks” trailer, which highlights their first scene opposite Nathan Lane’s Harris. Having collected them on a mysterious expedition through New York City’s sewage system (a rotted subterranean hellscape plenty of folks think harbor horrors unknown in real life), the unsuspecting father-to-be soon bonds with the strangely viscous creatures and takes them home to his Manhattan apartment.
“[The Sewer Boys] were a throwaway joke in the stage show and back then we didn’t have the money for anything like that,” Jackson told IndieWire. “Then, when we were expanding it, each character had to get a little bit deeper and have a little bit more going on. So, with the father character, we thought, ‘What if the Sewer Boys got expanded with him?’”
When we meet the darling duo, Backpack and Whisper are gobbling up deli meat spat straight from Lane’s mouth. They’re also scaring the shit out of Jackson’s Trevor Brock: half of a “Parent Trap” situation suddenly way in over his head with his estranged daddy’s nasty little pets. The scene is dove-tailed with Harris’ hilariously timed coming out scene (“I’m gay, queer as a three-dollar bill and just as thin…”) and the rancid wrangler’s repeated assurance that the Sewer Boys aren’t disgusting, “They’re gay culture!”
“The mapping game is basically, picture that fabulous gay man who’s obsessed with his poodle. Now, what if it was the worst creature of all?” Sharp said in his interview with Jackson and IndieWire. “I do like things that have a sort of internal tautology where you can’t really break out of it. It’s like, ‘Well, if a gay person says it’s gay culture, even if it’s clearly not, what do you say back?’”
“And it’s [Trevor] just trying to straight-man him so hard, like, ‘No, no, no, it’s not gay culture.’ And the dad is just like, ‘It is!,’” said Jackson.
“It gives a lot of room for Aaron to react to the horrifying thing that’s going on and Nathan to just go, ‘I understand. Coming out is hard,’” Sharp said. “At the same time, it’s also just us lampooning the sort of requisite coming out scene that every queer movie needs to have. I think there’s like four different things going on, but mostly it’s just funny to us. Most things in the movie, the end of the discussion is, it was funny to us.”
Hand-waving reality to make way for what’s funny is what “Dicks: The Musical” does best. (Read our deep-dive into how Jackson and Sharp achieved that balance here.) But there’s an algebra to absurdism and honing these gorgeously gross movie stars into a tightly crafted narrative centerpiece was no easy feat. It’s the pair’s escape that drives the “Scooby Doo”-esque final act of the film, as Harris, mom Evelyn (quite possibly a career-best Megan Mullaly), and their sons attempt to retrieve their adopted relatives from beneath the Big Apple.
IndieWire spoke with Jackson, Sharp, Yang, and director Larry Charles in a series of interviews to learn everything we could about indie film’s favorite little shit-covered celebrities, their big breakout moment, and what it means to finally find family.
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