by Brent Simon, photo by Robert Todd Williamson

Rubber-faced Trevor Moore is best known thus far as part of the New York-bred The Whitest Kids U Know, a comedy collective that got snapped up for their own show by IFC. That point of reference could be changing, though. Along with fellow “Whitest Kid” Zach Cregger, Moore recently made the leap to feature films as a writer-director-star of Miss March, about a virginal guy who wakes up from a four-year coma to discover his high school girlfriend is now a Playmate. With his hornball friend (played by Moore) urging him to finally partake of carnal knowledge, road trip shenanigans ensue as the pair scheme to crash a party at the Playboy Mansion. h Magazine caught up with Moore recently to talk of prosthetic genitals, explaining slang to Hugh Hefner, and the gamesmanship involved in going Greyhound. 
h: You were born in Virginia and grew up there. How did your friends and family feel about you moving to L.A. while you were still a teenager? 

Trevor Moore: They were supportive, because I’d always been really obsessed with comedy, and talking about going to New York or L.A. way before I was 18, so it wasn’t a surprise or anything. I was in L.A. a couple months, started doing stand-up at open mics, then went back to college for a year in Virginia. And during that year a producer who’d been traveling through the area [and seen] reruns of a public access show I’d done in high school wanted to pay me to do a higher-budget version of it for some PAX television stations that he had. So I left college and did that for a year. But they were a very conservative network, and the show really wasn’t. 

h: That seems as good of a transition point as anything else to Miss March, since one of the characters is named Horsedick.MPEG, which, I have to tell you, I’m terrified to Google. 

TM: (laughs) Well it’s an old classic video file from the beginning of the Internet. It’s probably exactly what you’re imagining. But we’ve ruined it, because now if you type in Horsedick.MPEG, stuff for the movie comes up. 

h: On the audio commentary track for Step Brothers they talk with glee about the cost, I think $20,000, of manufacturing a prosthetic scrotum, and Miss March features a mangled-genital bit I confess I didn’t think I’d ever see. How many bids did you take for that prosthetic work?

TM: Because we shot during the writers’ strike and were one of the last things to get through, and since there wasn’t a lot of work going around, we had the make-up and props people from The Lord of the Rings. They brought their Oscars in one time, and we were like, “That’s cool, now make this guy not have any balls.” We had a stand-in come in for that, and I just remember that he was a schoolteacher, and was standing around [in] a robe all day, waiting for his genital-less shot. 

h: Miss March is partially a road movie. Have you driven across the country? 

TM: I haven’t, but I took a bus once, when I first came out to Los Angeles. Greyhound had a deal where $50 would get you anywhere in the country, so I bought a one-way ticket, and it’s interesting…because anyone taking a bus is usually running from something. They don’t want to put their name down on any sort of list, they want no paper trail. We got pulled over, and got searched for drugs at one point, and a drunk guy said he had a gun when he really didn’t. …You drive all through the night, stop once or twice a day to get food, and there’s this whole hierarchy [in which] everybody wants to get to the back seat, because if you can keep the seat beside you open you can lie down over the seats with no armrest. So whenever the bus stopped everyone had their own thing they’d do to try to make people not sit by them. Some people would put their bags on their seat. I’d talk to myself, just pretend to be a little crazy. But there was this other guy who would take out these Goth-y spiked collars and put them on, and then when we started driving again he’d take them off. You could tell who’d been on the bus the longest by how close they were (to the back seat), and around Arizona I got to the back; I finally had seniority. 

h: How did you get Hugh Hefner to cameo in the film? 

TM: Originally we tried to do it without Playboy’s involvement. We shot the movie with Robert Wagner as Hefner, because we were concerned about them changing things, we didn’t know how seriously they were going to guard their image. When you’re dealing with a company as iconic as that, you just don’t know. So we wrote what we wanted, shot it, and when we were done, the movie tested well all the way through until the end, when Wagner came out. Then there was this disconnect with the audience, because kids know who Hefner is, The Girls Next Door is very popular. So we went back to Playboy, kind of with our tail between our legs, showed them the movie and asked if they wanted to be involved. And luckily Hefner liked it, and wanted to play himself. And they didn’t have any note changes, other than wanting to add a scene with Sarah Jean Underwood, so there would be an actual Playmate in the film. That, and Hefner asked me what “busted” meant, and when I explained that it meant ugly, he said, “Is that what kids say, will they get that?” But I said, “Yeah, I think so,” and then he didn’t have a problem.