Vic Michaelis talks spy stories, birds, the weather, and the process behind VIP

It’s been a very busy start to 2026 for Vic Michaelis. Their deliriously funny improv interview show, Dropout’s Very Important People, is midway through its third season. They just made their debut in the Dimension 20 Dome, playing Hugi in the new season, Gladlands. And their highest-profile project yet – a role on the spy comedy Ponies, alongside Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson – premieres this Thursday on Peacock. 

I talked with Michaelis about their impressive lineup of projects, their goals for their career, the changes to VIP over the years, and their obsession with the weather.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You have so many projects that are out right now, and they run the gamut: improv and improv-adjacent stuff, TV, movies. Was that variety an intentional goal of yours for your career?

It's a dream. I really do think gone are the days of doing one thing. That is scary, and also, in some ways, very liberating. 

I was coming up doing improv at a time where your prayer was that somebody came to see you on Harold Night, and then had you audition for their TV show, and then you got to be on a network TV show. That way you could make enough money that you could do improv shows on a regular basis. And then, if you wanted to open an improv school, great, and if you didn't, no problem, you could just come and be on people's shows. 

There's so much luck involved in this. I hit a wave at the time where everyone around me was getting pulled for Dropout and Smosh and Buzzfeed. To get to do improv as a piece of my living is unimaginable. I never would have guessed it. 

And then I love doing film and TV stuff. It's wonderful. It's my dream. It's what I've always wanted to do. It really is incredible getting to meld these two things. I always said that I would love to make enough money that I can go perform on stage, and so getting to tour around and play these huge houses … if you would have told me five years ago this is what I was doing, I would not have believed you.

Is there anything you haven't done yet that you particularly want to do?

A disaster movie. I want to do a disaster movie so bad. 

I'm obsessed with the weather. I keep going into pitch meetings, and people are like, Pitch me stuff. What are you into right now? And I'm like, The weather. I've always been so fascinated with the weather. And what's happening right now is really interesting, because Tornado Alley, which historically has been in the middle of the United States, is moving way further south in places that are built for, say it with me, hurricanes. You can't really dig the cellars there like you can in other places. And these are also places that socioeconomically are not sustained, and that are already completely burned out of any FEMA funding that was left. The privatization of these weather services is one of the more scary things that I've seen happen, and I think it's something that people don't even know to be fearful of. So all of a sudden you're seeing these towns just decimated by tornadoes. And it's because it's in places that are not at all built to sustain F5 tornadoes. It's crazy. I’m sorry, what was the question?

If there was a type of project you wanted to do, and you said a disaster movie, which is a great answer.

I just think that would be fun. I love disaster movies. They're fun, they're makeable, those B-disaster movies. They rock. The stakes are so high. I think they make for excellent love stories. It's in the same thing as a soap opera – the plane is leaving, the tornado is touching down, say what you need to say.

What’s your favorite disaster movie?

Twister. Not even close. It's been my favorite movie since I was like seven years old. I saw it way too early, and I think it did some messed up things to my brain, but I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. 

I spent a lot of time in the Midwest growing up, and people there have a really blasé attitude towards extreme wind, in a way that I think is awesome in some ways, where there's some people that are just like, This is cool, come look, and are just sitting on the porch with a beer, and that's fun. But then there's also some people that take it in another direction, where you'll get people that are praying for the tornadoes to change directions and yelling at it. And I go, Hmm, yeah, okay.

I would love to hear a little bit about the process leading up to each VIP episode. How much do you know ahead of time, and what goes into the building of these characters?

I get to basically see the mood board from the character. In the first season, as we were figuring out what we wanted to do, this was what we landed on. I think it works well for us.

For the episode that just came out, the babies (“Archimedes and Ollie”), it basically was like Okay, we’re going to have two adult babies. There’s a Pinterest-y style guide thing where you get to see what it approximately will look like, and Alex [Perrone, makeup department head] will talk about some of the prosthetics she wants to include. She’s brilliant.

They do the reveals in another room. I’m not a part of the conversation that takes place around that, because they pitch out what kind of characters they’re thinking of and then they land on one. I don't want anybody to ever feel married to details that they came up with after seeing themselves in a mirror for 30 seconds. And if I hear an idea that I love, I don't want to get stuck on it myself. Because a lot of the beauty of the improv is building it yourself. So that is the part that I really stay very far away from.

I get the character's name from Paul [Robalino, co-executive producer], and he’ll maybe give me a little bit about what the title of the game would be in improv-speak, and we begin the scene. Often it morphs into something completely different. But we largely view it as our version of the suggestion, the hair and makeup. I think pre-planning stuff makes us all more rigid. It gives the glue time to dry. And I think that is where we can get into danger with the show, anytime anybody has too much time to really ruminate on something.

You’re now in season three of VIP, and it's got to feel great to be able to iterate on something and have multiple seasons at it. What are the things that you're happiest with in terms of the changes for the show over the years?

Honestly, we've got three completely separate shows. Truly. We have the show in the planning phase of things, where we think about all the stuff that we want to add for the season. Then we get to the shooting days, where we know what the raw footage is going to look like based on what we've shot. And then the edit, which is largely what we all sit with and what all of us remember. 

The biggest changes that we made between season one and two is we knew what those edits were going to look like. Originally, when Dropout had pitched this out, it was going to be six episodes, and they were going to do two to three characters an episode. It was going to be really quick, short things. And then they had so much footage at the end of shooting, they were just like, They're just going to be their own episodes, there's no way we can cut them down to five minutes. So I think knowing what those end edits were going to look like and having an idea of what we were striving towards made season two so much easier, because then if we're really luxuriating on a topic, our director can say Okay, cut. We got that. Let's move on to a segment, and then we can start back up again. It is an economy of time. And I think we became more efficient there.

You’re in the new spy series Ponies. Are you a spy genre person as well?

I love this genre. My dad has given me a lot of gifts, but I think the biggest one is a love of film and TV and theater. It was just him growing up, and sometimes after a rough day, he would grab me and my brother and sister after school, and we would just go to the movie theater. We have such a love for that. 

This is one of his all-time favorite genres, and so getting to be a part of that is just so full circle. My dad's coming to the premiere next week. That was the thing that was most exciting, getting to share this with my dad. I was just so unbelievably thrilled.

Are there any specific touchstones that come to mind for you for the spy or mystery genre?

My dad is, I think, part of where some of my neurodivergency comes from. We watch the same movies over and over and over again. It's really funny, especially when you get some of these mystery ones that you're watching over again, because you know who did it immediately, and so then you really just get to sort of enjoy the ride and the performances. Fracture was one we watched a lot. Along Came a Spider was one that he loved with Morgan Freeman. Spy Game, which really made me think of Ponies in a big way, just how sweeping it is. And I think they filmed that in Budapest a little bit, as well. I can't remember now. If it's a lie, just say that I didn't say it. [ed. note: Vic is correct, Spy Game did film in Budapest.]

One of our holiday traditions in this household is watching Round and Round. You bring something really different to the Hallmark movie protagonist role. Is there a Vic Michaelis flavor you were hoping to bring to the spy genre?

Listen, this is the biggest job I've ever booked. The flavor that I wanted to bring was, I need another bag of that, bring me back. Let me do more of this. When I think about the biggest flavor, it was salt. I need to eat more of these chips. 

But on a serious note, I think it's really easy, especially for characters that can be perceived as just sort of mean, and especially femme characters that are mean, to be sort of one-note. And early on, me and Nicholas Podany, who plays my husband, had this conversation of, Oh, I think that they actually do have to have love for each other. It's two people that are stuck in their own ways. And as stuck as Cheryl can be in her ways, I think that she, in any other lifetime, would have been destined for real greatness, if the circumstances were any different. She's so driven, and has so much, so much to give, and is just stuck in a circumstance where women don't hold positions of authority really, and so she's risen as high as she can, and is now so reliant on the men around her to raise her station, and it just will never happen. There's this seed of frustration and anger and competence just bubbling up inside of her. That was so deeply playable, in my opinion. I love characters like that. It's my favorite character trope to play with, characters that think that they're super high status, but really don't have any authority. 

I find that an interesting thread in your work, the relationship to meanness, because I think that’s something that sticks out about your character in Round and Round, as well.

I think it's just so human, too. None of us are all one thing. You can have characters who would be described as lovely that, under the right circumstance, talking to the right people... It all circles around, because I feel that way about VIP, too. You know, host Vic is the voice of reason. But in the right circumstance, with the right topic broached, all of a sudden, it's like, yeah, they can be the crazy person too. It just really is all circumstantial. It's such a fun thing to play with, and I'm very grateful.

I'd be remiss not to mention your most important project of 2025, which is that you decided to post photos of 500 birds before the end of the year, and you succeeded. I'm curious what inspired this, and what did you take away from it?

I was in Orlando, and I was looking at a raven, and I said, That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. And it was a moment of mental lapse, I think, where I just said, This would be funny. And then I think on bird number 17, I realized how many birds 500 was gonna be, and I went, Oh no, I've made a huge mistake. But I'm really lucky that the community showed out and showed up. The people said, you want 500 birds, we're going to serve you 500 birds. And so I'm just very grateful it worked. It was a community effort. I can't take any credit for that.

It was a nice break on the timeline, too.

Thank you. I had one person say, It's too many birds. Can you post a little less birds? And I almost threw my phone. I got so mad. I said, Get out of here. You have the power here. Mute me, block me. You do not have to see this. Don't come to my house, knocking on my door, going Less birds, please. Move. Go to a different neighborhood. You don't even live here.

Vic Michaelis recommends: The M&M store and Heated Rivalry

At the M&M store, you can print anything you want on M&M's, and they'll give it to you immediately. I printed a terrible photo of my sister and a nickname that she hates. 

And then, broken record, but Heated Rivalry has been so fun. And I think from my perspective, coming from the CanCon [ed. note: Canadian content] world, it has been so deeply exciting. I don't think I've ever seen this happen before, where a Canadian original has been bought by a major legacy production house, put out at the same time, and it was number one for weeks, and has the kind of buzz that it has. Even Schitt’s Creek took a while for people to catch up. It's really exciting. 

My big soapbox I always stand on is, I think people are sleeping on Canadian content. There's so much wonderful stuff out there. There's so many incredible artists. The ratio of people that make it in the United States coming from Canada, based on population size, is astronomical, especially in the comedy sphere. There's so much cool and fun, exciting stuff happening in Canada, and seeing Heated Rivalry succeed has just felt incredible.