‘Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat’ Star Alex Bonifer Breaks Down Dougie Jr.’s Client Cookout Gone Wrong

Jury Duty‘s long-awaited second season has finally arrived, and it’s delivering all of the cringe comedy fans could want as it embarks on Company Retreat.

This time around, the unaware straight man is Anthony Norman, a temp hired to assist Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce company with their annual work retreat. But as viewers see in the first three episodes, which dropped on March 20, no punches are being pulled when it comes to delivering laughs. Warning: Spoilers for the Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat Episodes 1-3 ahead! 

As viewers quickly learn, the story Anthony is being presented with involves Dougie Jr. (Alex Bonifer) as the heir apparent to the company; he’s preparing to take over the CEO role from his father, Doug Sr. (Jerry Hauck). His biggest display to date is attempting to impress his father with a presentation at the Client Cookout, which sees vendors and clients attend a celebration for the company.

In Dougie Jr.’s world, this involves presenting an idea for a new sauce, but the label isn’t quite right for what he calls Jamaican Jerk Sauce, which reads “Jamaican Jerk Off Sauce.” The innuendo doesn’t go unnoticed as the scripted scenario unfolds, made worse by a display that shows off Rockin’ Grandma’s titular mascot doing an interesting hand gesture to play her guitar, and what follows is an embarrassing scolding from Doug Sr. to his son as he also learns that the majority of this sauce that is handed out to clients is actually made up of Taco Bell sauce.

Needless to say, it’s embarrassing for Dougie Jr. as a character, but not so much for comedian Alex Bonifer, who embodies the hilarious role. Below, he breaks down some behind-the-scenes secrets from this Client Cookout and more.

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When you stepped onto the stage to give the hot sauce presentation at the Client Cookout, was there added pressure to keep up the ruse and not break? 

Alex Bonifer: There were definitely moments where I was concerned about breaking, but it was Dougie’s defining moment at this point in his life, and so I was just so dialed in to the emotions that Dougie was feeling and how important that was to him… and I knew it would hit even harder the more you said it earnestly. For that particular moment on stage, that’s probably the least I was worried about breaking, because it was so important to Dougie. The moments in some of the seminars where I’m not the focal point… it was hard not to break at some of those because they were just so ridiculous.  It’s interesting because I perform at the Groundlings Theater, I do live comedy for 110 people every weekend, and in a lot of ways, [being on stage for the presentation was] the most comfortable that I was because I was like, “Oh, I have an audience now.”

What inspired Dougie’s unique style? 

Dougie’s hero look or suit [I wear during the] Client Cookout when I’m on stage, that suit is what I wore to my audition, and it’s a suit that I have from my work at the Groundlings for various characters, which is ill-fitting. It was him trying to do business, but clearly not looking that way. That was really important to me that Dougie was gonna try and wasn’t gonna phone in anything he did. Now, obviously, all of his efforts were left to the center, but it was important to me that Dougie’s intentions were always [good].

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I worked with Annie Bloom, our amazing costume designer. I brought in a lot of my own pieces and we found a really nice balance of bringing Dougie, but also, if you watch, there’s a lot of parroting [Doug]. Jerry brought in a lot of these Hawaiian shirts, and so that’s where I think in one of the first episodes, I have like the banana shirt that’s like Dougie’s version of what Doug, his dad, is doing. And then, in terms of up [the hair], I was in three national commercials that were running right when we were getting going in that rehearsal process. So, we knew Anthony didn’t watch a lot of television, but he watched a lot of sports, and that’s where you see commercials a lot of the time. So I was terrified, and I had medium-length hair when I auditioned initially, which I had teased and frizzed out, and so I just left that growing.

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I was like, gosh, I still feel like I’m missing something. If I were at the Groundlings, what would I do?  I own over 50 wigs. I would wig, but I can’t do that. Bingo, I’ll bleach my hair. Not only will that help further disguise me from these commercials that have been running, it will also make me look a little more boyish, a little more juvenile, a little more unfit, and I was actually pretty particular that we use two or three different colors of bleach, two different tones, and it was really important that it wasn’t all the way done to show there’s no follow through, there’s no upkeep.

Doug Sr. and Dougie Jr. share a few mouth kisses. Was that scripted or something you came up with? How many were there?

I brought that idea to Jake [Szymanski], our director, and to Jerry. I’ve written a number of sketches about that, and I remember watching the first season of Jury Duty, and my favorite moments were the ones where Ronald would just have a look [on his face when] something would just strike him as odd. And I did a little bit of meditating over the course of my life to go like, what are some moments that have caused that kind of reaction in me? And when I was 15 or 16, my grandfather was kind of at the end of his road, and he had reverted back to this state of childhood with my dad and my aunts and my uncles, where he would, in a very non-creepy, very sweet [way] insist on kissing all of them on the mouth… I thought that would be a really funny way to potentially elicit those kinds of reactions, but it was also a way to show that Dougie never really graduated past that stage of almost infancy, you know what I mean?

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Without making it sound creepy, because I didn’t want to only kiss Jerry on the mouth when our documentary cameras were around, every morning and every evening, I would kiss Jerry on the mouth, and I called them shadow kisses because I knew they would never be seen, but it was really less about the volume. It was about the consistency of those kisses. And one of our amazing camera operators started noticing and keeping a tally of all the kisses, and so we developed a shorthand where I would give him a look, and he knew that meant I was going in for a kiss, so he would line up the shot, and we totaled 100 on-camera kisses over the run of this.

How did Taco Bell enter the mix as an ingredient in Rockin’ Grandma’s Jamaican Jerk Sauce? 

He’s an idea guy with no way of executing those ideas. The Taco Bell thing… We wouldn’t have scripted dialogue, but we knew the journey, so we must have gotten clearance [to use the brand name]. When Anthony and I first meet each other in the conference room, I have a box of sauces, and I’m mixing together name brand sauces and so it makes sense that if we don’t address it then it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but Dougie is trying to come up with a new sauce by just mixing together sauces that already exist.

One of the fun things that I did do was we had two full days at our office, and a lot of that was establishing a baseline reality that this is a real business that works. So most of that time was fake busy work, making fake phone calls, sending fake emails, doing fake research, and one of the things that I did to pass the time was I called around to about 30 different real Taco Bells asking them how many sauces I could get free. Do I have to buy something? And if so, how many sauces can I take? So somewhere in Taco Bell’s phone call database, you can hear me asking those poor, sweet employees who had to put up with me, how many Taco Bell sauce packets could I take?

Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, New Episodes, Fridays, Prime Video

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