Do you miss New Zealand?
JEMAINE CLEMENT: I miss the city Bret and I live in, Wellington. It's a good place to be creative, in the same way New York is.
BRET MCKENZIE: I definitely miss New Zealand. Mainly friends and family. [Wellington] is a very small town. It's strange, though — that small town quality is actually kind of similar to the East Village. New York has small towns within it, I think.
CLEMENT: We're sort of in a group of people back home — Taika Waititi, who directed and wrote Eagle vs Shark, is one, and me and Bret and a couple other guys.... There are [artistic cliques] like that here.

Jemaine, didn't you film most of Eagle vs Shark in Wellington?
CLEMENT: Yeah, I loved doing that.

Why?
CLEMENT: I enjoyed not having that responsibility of having written [Eagle vs Shark]. I just didn't have to worry about that part of it. And my character Jarrod — I like the guy. It was like playing someone playing a character. He's acting all the time. I like to think of him as a really nice guy who just got beaten up so much that he learned not to act nice. Even though he was. Some people who've seen it are like, ''That guy is such a jerk! Why does Lily like him?'' But I like to imagine that underneath, he's not a jerk.

What's the key to your partnership? Are you two opposites?
CLEMENT: I don't know if we're opposites. We like the same music: Parliament. Stevie Wonder. Wings.
MCKENZIE: Leonard Cohen. Cat Stevens. Beck. Neil and Tim Finn. Crowded House, right, has Neil Finn and Tim Finn in it? Neil Finn's kind of the Paul McCartney of New Zealand. Part of being a New Zealander is liking [his] music.
CLEMENT: Like part of being an American is liking Bruce Springsteen.
MCKENZIE: We have different tastes in comedy. But they generally align. And I think we have different skills...Jemaine's grumpy, and I'm moody.

Really. How else might we be able to tell you apart?
MCKENZIE: I'm easy to get along with, and intolerant.
CLEMENT: Unlike me, you mean.
MCKENZIE: Jemaine's very tolerant but difficult to get along with.
CLEMENT: Yeah, they don't get along with me, but I get along with other people.

Looking back at the FotC shoot, are there scenes you particularly enjoyed?
MCKENZIE: One of my favorites is when I get to throw a peanut butter sandwich in Jemaine's face.
CLEMENT: He did enjoy that! Definitely. He put a lot into that. [I liked] a scene where our characters were peer-pressured into taking acid. Two new fans think we're really rock-and-roll, so we try to act more rock-and-roll in front of them. We go into a psychedelic song, running around the forest in Beatles clothes.... Bret was so excited the other day [when] we had a cameo by Daryl Hall. And he was really good. A natural actor.
MCKENZIE: That was a seminal moment of my life. I never thought I'd actually get to meet Hall from Hall and Oates. He was very personable. He was really into the comedy of the scene and played it really well.
CLEMENT: We're Hall and Oates fans. We always wanted our apartment on the show decorated with their posters, but weren't allowed to [due to] copyright stuff.

NEXT PAGE: ''I think once the show's on TV, yeah, we could become — what do you call them? — mascots for New Zealand. Which is quite concerning, because we portray New Zealanders as total idiots.''