Canadian Thomas Middleditch on missing out on ‘SNL,’ big break on ‘Silicon Valley’

Middleditch and Miller: sounds more like a law firm than a comedy team.

The two stars of “Silicon Valley” — back for a third season Sunday on HBO Canada — aren’t really a comedy team. Together, however, Thomas Middleditch and T.J. Miller killed at Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival last summer.

Miller toyed with the spotlight operator and ripped into poutine at an “All Access Pass” JFL taping at Club Lucky. He deconstructed poutine’s main ingredients: fries, curds and gravy.

“People!” he declared. “Fries alone are enough!”

Miller, originally from Denver, Colo., seemed to relish his role as the “ugly American” in Montreal. Middleditch, however, was feeling like the homegrown favourite; he hails from Nelson, B.C.

Middleditch says he spent a couple of years in Toronto “really aggressively trying” to break into the comedy business. He enrolled at the University of Toronto but later dropped out of theatre school when he found he could just get up on stage and do stand-up at various venues without formal training.

“I always wanted to be like Kids in the Hall,” he says.

He moved to Chicago and worked with the Second City troupe there. It took him three years but he finally got an audition for “Saturday Night Live.”

“I tested, which was really fun, but I didn’t get on it,” he says.

Miller has a similar story. He found his feet at Chicago’s Second City and eventually auditioned for, but failed to land, a gig on “SNL.”

Miller, seen recently in “Deadpool,” has worked in Canada at least as much as Middleditch. He’s performed at comedy clubs in Toronto and Vancouver as well as at the West Edmonton Mall. Last summer he shot scenes for Jay Baruchel’s “Goon 2” hockey movie in and around Toronto.

Both actors say “Silicon Valley” is their dream gig, praising the writing on the series.

“Thomas was always in my head as the lead,” says executive producer Mike Judge.

Middleditch was on Judge’s radar due to a short animated sketch the actor had submitted to several producers, including the “Silicon Valley” creators. The lead character of Richard Hendricks — a shy, reclusive programmer who becomes a tech titan after developing a revolutionary data compression technology — was even originally named Thomas Pickering, a reference to Middleditch’s mother’s maiden name.

Judge’s only worry was whether HBO officials “would sign off” on hiring the relatively unknown actor. Fortunately, at the producer’s urging, they did.

With the exception of Josh Brener who plays Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti, all the other main cast members of “Silicon Valley” read for the part Miller eventually got: Erlich Bachman, the arrogant entrepreneur who founded an innovation incubator in his home. Eccentric Erlich becomes like a frat house landlord for the other characters.

“They all had different ways of doing it,” says Judge of the auditions. “We saw around 100 people, probably.”

The other roles were filled by actors not chosen to play Erlich.

“We kind of went back and wrote specifically to those actors,” says Judge.

— Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.