Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon has opened up about his fractured relationship with Justin Roiland. He noted that the pair hasn’t spoken in several years.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in a recent profile, Harmon spoke for the first time about reports that he and Roiland’s friendship had ended over the course of their time on Rick and Morty.
Harmon and Roiland have not spoken since 2019
During the third season of Rick and Morty, Harmon recalled that a mediator had to be brought in to try and salvage their relationship. By then, however, it was too late, and Harmon said the last time the pair spoke was in 2019 over text, where things got “unprecedently confrontational.”
“He said things that he’d never said before about being unhappy,” said Harmon, “and I remember saying to him the last time we spoke in person, like, ‘I am worried about you, and I don’t know what to do about that except to give you all the string and also just say I’m scared that you’re not going to come back.’”
In reference to a report from earlier this year that said that Roiland had begun isolating himself from most of the Rick and Morty team after the first season, Harmon acknowledged that bringing in more writers was something that contributed to the pair’s rift.
Rick and Morty co-creators friendship fractured during Season 2
According to Harmon, when the show scored its second season, he began bringing in writers he knew that had worked with him in the past. While this was done in an effort to lighten both his and Roiland’s work load, Harmon notes that Roiland saw it differently, and felt like he was being pushed out of the show he had helped create.
“If anything, what I wanted was for Justin and I both to be able to be increasingly lazy and not show up for work. That was the dream,” said Harmon. “We’d be these rich idea men. He could roll around and go, like, ‘What if a genie had a butt instead of a dick?’ And I could be like, ‘Yeah, and plus, we’re going to make people cry about it, and that’s going to make them freak out. It’s a story about a genie butt dick, but then we’d win an Emmy, and it’d be more ironic than ever.’ And then I’d come to find out later that it was like, ‘Oh, Harmon brought in his Harmon writers,’ and, man, that is not how I saw it.”
Harmon went on to note that he and Roiland sat down after the second season and tried to hash things out, with Roiland expressing his unhappiness to Dan. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure what he was saying,” Harmon said, “other than, maybe, ‘I feel like I’m in your shadow and I wish I wasn’t.’”
