Rapper Lil Dicky (aka Dave Burd) dishes on his FXX hit Dave and that surprising, cameo-filled Season Three finale boasting Drake and Brad Pitt
Season Three of Dave was all about the show’s title character — rapper Dave Burd, aka Lil Dicky, aka the star, co-creator, and one of the executive producers of the FXX comedy (which streams the day after on Hulu) — finally achieving his goal of international fame. After faking his own death — or, rather, allowing people to mistakenly believe he was dead for a day without telling anyone otherwise — he became a huge star with a fancy house, a bigger record deal, and invites to major-league events like the Met Gala.
And as the fictionalized Dave’s celebrity rating kept rising, so did the caliber of guest star. The first two seasons featured notable guest stars like Justin Bieber, Kourtney Kardashian, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so it wasn’t as if Dave was interacting with nobodies. But the guests tended to appear in dribs and drabs, or only briefly, or (in the case of Doja Cat, who digitally flirted with Dave but never met him IRL) didn’t appear on-screen with them at all. In Season Three, the guests on average were more famous, more numerous, and often more prominently featured. An early episode saw Dave get in trouble when an expensive chain Rick Ross loaned him got stolen, and also put Dave into uncomfortable encounters with Killer Mike and Usher. The Met Gala episode not only had a subplot where Dave’s hype man GaTa appeared on a panel with Demi Lovato, but had Dave himself hanging out with Jack Harlow, Don Cheadle, Megan Fox, Machine Gun Kelly, Travis Barker, David Dobrik, and Emma Chamberlain. He also befriended Rachel McAdams in that episode, and she appeared in the season’s two remaining installments, as Dave wrote a parody song about becoming obsessed with her, and got her to star in the video. The video, which we see a bit of in the season finale, has a cameo by Brad Pitt, and Pitt spends most of the episode trapped in Dave’s house while a crazy Lil Dicky stalker holds him and Dave at gunpoint. And when everything seems resolved and it appears that Dave is flying to Wisconsin to reconcile with new girlfriend Robyn (Chloe Bennet), we instead see that he has gone to West Africa to meet up with his idol, Drake, who has offered to help Dave with both his musical and emotional journeys.
How did Dave keep landing all these incredible guests? Rolling Stone spoke with Burd earlier this week about that, as well as other aspects of another terrific season.
Was it a key part of the agenda going into this season to get all these big names to play themselves?
Not necessarily was that part of the agenda. But there are certain episodes where, if you’re at the Met Gala, you want it to feel realistic. You’re going to have to have X amount of people come for that. But the thing that I like about the show is that the guest stars come and it’s not splashy, like, “Here’s a famous person!” They’re more than just cameos in a random scene. A lot of the guest stars that we have, from Rachel to Brad to even Drake, they play really important roles.One of the big themes of the season is that Dave claims he’s out there looking for love, but he also desperately wants to be famous. We get to the end of this episode, and Brad Pitt has a crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest telling Dave that he needs to love himself before he can worry about fame. And instead of going to work things out with Robyn, you go to Africa to hang with Drake. How did you want to intertwine those ideas with these celebrity appearances?
One of the main themes is love and romance, and a guy in his early 30s trying to find the one. And the other is a young aspiring artist at the pinnacle of success as far as the way the world sees him within the lens of the show. There are a lot of interesting parallels between them that weave throughout, which was really well-shown in Episode Nine. You’re seeing a lot of how I approach art from a perfectionist lens, and that can mirror itself in how I approach love, and how it isn’t necessarily fair to approach love in the same way. I feel like in the first two seasons, my character in the finale has a choice: In the simplest terms possible, do the right thing or do the selfish thing. In the first two seasons, I did the right thing. I didn’t want to say this is the dark side ending, but you think he’s learned all of his lessons through this huge ordeal of a night with Brad and the stalker, and he’s finally going to put his quest for validation behind him and focus on the important things in life, such as love. But I think a lot of people will feel that I’m going with Robyn. And I see the ending as my character not being ready for love, because he doesn’t love himself yet. And he could drag Robyn along to Africa, but I think that deep down, he knew he wasn’t ready. So I think he went all-in on career, and we’ll see what happens next.
