Jorma Taccone Reveals the ‘Hot Rod’ Easter Egg He Regrets Including in His New Dark Comedy

To date, Over Your Dead Body is certainly Jorma Taccone’s darkest venture yet behind the camera. The action-comedy is a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian horror The Trip (2021), and at SXSW 2026, where the movie celebrated its world premiere, and the Overlook Film Festival, where Taccone spoke with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, one of the most burning questions was: Why remake a movie so soon, and why this movie? Surprisingly, the answer to both of those questions has a lot to do with Akiva Schaffer’s 2007 cult favorite comedy Hot Rod, starring the rest of The Lonely Island, Taccone and Andy Samberg.

Over Your Dead Body stars Jason Segel and Samara Weaving (an intentional move that further highlights the tonal gymnastics this movie displays throughout) as dysfunctional couple Dan and Lisa. Grasping at straws to save their marriage, the pair agree to go on a weekend getaway vacation to reignite that spark, while separately, both intend to murder the other for insurance money. This absurd plan gets upended when three nefarious individuals (Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Keith Jardine) turn up at the cabin.

While talking with Nemiroff, Taccone admits he was actually reluctant to take this remake on. After watching the original, the comedy-actor-turned-filmmaker decided it was “so emotionally dark,” but more than that, he loved Wirkola’s original, which, as he points out, “is even more daunting.” So, how exactly did Taccone end up directing the “inarguably more violent” Over Your Dead Body?

Jorma Taccone Did Not Want to Make ‘Over Your Dead Body’

“By that, I mean I didn’t want to make a remake.”

When Taccone was first approached with the idea to remake Wirkola’s movie, he tells Nemiroff, “I didn’t want to make it from jump.” Though he clarifies, “By that, I mean I didn’t want to make a remake.” He watched the original, released only five years ago, starring Noomi Rapace and Aksel Hennie, and couldn’t understand why this specific project was brought to his desk. Taccone is best known as one-third of the comedy trio The Lonely Island, alongside Samberg and Schaffer, a writer for Saturday Night Live, and the director of 2010’s MacGruber. So, where’s the pipeline from comedy to a gory and brutal Norwegian remake?

Taccone explains:

“The way it came to me was that my producer, Guy Danella, was working with Tommy, and Tommy was quoting Hot Rod, Popstar [Never Stop Never Stopping], and MacGruber relentlessly. So Guy called me and was like, ‘Tommy loves your stuff. Let’s talk.’ Then we had a great conversation. A week later, he was like, ‘Tommy has this movie, The Trip…’”

Image via SF Norge

Wirkola, who helmed the beloved B-horror Dead Snow and Netflix’s new shark movie Thrash, released his dark comedy The Trip in 2021, which was well received for its outlandish premise and willingness to push its own boundaries. The plot is much the same as co-writers Nick Ball and John Niven’s script for Over Your Dead Body, but the characters lack a degree of sympathy. Taccone tells Nemiroff:

“In wanting to make a remake, I was like, ‘What can I bring to this?’ I loved that it’s like three movies in one. It goes from a suspense movie to another kind of movie, no spoilers, to almost an action movie. So it had all these different tones that I was super excited about. There are so many twists and turns and surprises in it. So structurally, I absolutely fell in love with it…

“Then I wanted to see the characters be a little bit more sympathetic and me root for them a bit more, and I don’t mean that in a shitty American way, of like, ruining the tone of a European movie that is dark. It is still very dark. It’s still very fucked up. It’s, I think, inarguably more violent than the original, a bit more gory, honestly, than the original. So it has the teeth of the original, but I just wanted to push it in directions that I felt more comfortable as a filmmaker telling, and that involved casting Jason Segel, who I think is amazing in the movie, and Samara Weaving.”

For Over Your Dead Body, the key to Taccone’s remake became the contrast of the original’s relentless darkness and his own comedic instincts.

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“To me, humor is actually what brings it all together.”

Image via Paramount Pictures

Over Your Dead Body became a sort of mental gymnastics for Taccone to seamlessly blend the original’s sinister storyline with the kind of comedy fans have come to expect from him. On top of utilizing Segel and Weaving’s top-notch genre performances, the director fell back on what comes naturally to him, while challenging himself to balance the unusual tonal tightrope the movie calls for.

“That was another reason why I really wanted to do this, is because there are gymnastics that have to happen in this, and it’s like all these needles have to be threaded to have it feel like it’s a cohesive piece. To me, the humor is actually what brings it all together with that because there’s drama, there’s action, there’s gore, there’s suspense. There are all these things, and humor, to me, weaves all that together. But it was exactly that. That was the challenge of wanting to do this, was exactly that.”

So while Over Your Dead Body wheels and deals in a sadistic relationship, murderous escaped convicts, and even more gore than the original, Taccone couldn’t resist staying true to his own personal flair, revealing to Nemiroff the Hot Rod joke he snuck in.

“There’s only one joke in the movie – it’s a Hot Rod joke with a newscaster and a raccoon [laughs], and I’m like, ‘I shouldn’t have put that in.’ Here’s the thing: I love being able to have a very realistic newscaster say crazy shit. Like in Hot Rod, we had real Canadian newscasters. In Hot Rod, she says, ‘The dog ate a pizza, walked home, and took a nap. In other news…’ And I had one like, ‘And that’s why whales are stupid. In other news…’ I just love the snippet of, like, dropping into something that is a psychotic thing that is going on in the news. But it’s the one moment that I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I need it.’”

This is the only absurd humor in the movie that calls back to Taccone’s roots, but it’s the one he’s still the most unsure of. It’s not the only Easter egg the director slipped in, however, so be sure to check out the full conversation with Nemiroff from the Overlook Film Festival 2026 in the video above.

Over Your Dead Body is in theaters now.

Release Date

April 24, 2026

Runtime

105 minutes

Director

Jorma Taccone

Writers

Nick Kocher, Brian McElhaney

Producers

Aram Tertzakian, David Leitch, Guy Danella, Kelly McCormick, Lee Kim, Nick Spicer