Adventure meets comedy in Discovery's new 'Rob Riggle: Global Investigator'
Fans of adventure series like "Expedition Unknown" may want to check out a Discovery Channel series premiering this weekend that takes the genre in a more comedic direction.
In "Rob Riggle: Global Investigator," debuting Sunday, March 8, the actor, comedian and retired Marine best known for his roles in films such as "The Hangover," "The Other Guys" and "Let's Be Cops," travels the globe to explore some of the world's greatest mysteries and legends. He'll team with local experts in locales such as Scotland, to search for the Holy Grail; Greece, to dive for the Lost City of Atlantis; and Key West, Florida, to look for a pirate's hidden treasure.
And he'll do it using his formidable improvisational chops to mine comedy from his successes, failures and scary moments.
"I tend to play a lot of big characters, and arrogant ignorance is probably one of the games I play best," Riggle explains. "It's pretty satisfying comedically ... Now, if you take that and you tack on curiosity to that, then you've got something kind of fun to play with.
"But when the camera is rolling in those moments," he continues, "and you're interviewing and you're talking to people ... you're going with the flow. You're reacting to what's being said to you, and you're taking moments to find humor in those moments and, hopefully, some of it makes it; some of it doesn't. That's all right, but we try to keep it joyful and fun and interesting."
The comedy is evident in the trailer, which shows a comically clueless Riggle horrified by a snake under a board, wincing after nicking himself with a sword, and joyful about what he thinks is a priceless find in the Keys.
That last segment didn't come without some pain, as Riggle and his production crew had to wade in a swamp where they soon found themselves knee-deep in parasite-laden "fire mud," which produced a burning sensation in their legs and midsection.
"I'm dying, we're all dying," Riggle says. "And all simultaneously, the producer, everybody who was in the water just started screaming. It was like having, you know, Icy Hot on privates, and we couldn't do anything about it. And so if you touched it, it made it worse.
"And the director's in the boat going, 'We need another shot. We need another ...' (And I'm like,) 'You don't even understand. I've got to get out of this water now.' And we still had more shots to get. So I put him on the clock like, 'You've got five minutes to get all your shots because I'm dying.' So, yeah, that was an interaction that I did not anticipate."
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"Rob Riggle: Global Investigator"
Premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, March 8, on the Discovery Channel