By Ryan Berenz
When the beloved LEGO construction toys hit the big screen in 2014’s The LEGO Movie, Will Arnett’s career trajectory took an awesome turn. His gruff voice portrayal of a comically brooding Batman was a hit, leading to a starring role in 2017’s The LEGO Batman Movie and a sequel coming in 2022.
“I never thought that my life was going to be so LEGO-centric,” Arnett says. “In the last 10 years, so much of what I’ve done has been around LEGO.”
Arnett’s LEGO cachet continues to grow as host and executive producer of FOX’s new competition series LEGO Masters (premiering Wednesday, Feb. 5), which has teams of skilled LEGO creators going head-to-head in elaborate brick-building challenges. The winning team scores a cash prize, the ultimate LEGO trophy and the coveted title of LEGO Masters.
Arnett says the decision to hop onboard the series was an easy one. “If I saw somebody else hosting the LEGO show, I’d be jealous. I’d be like, ‘That’s mine!,’” he says. “We were shooting an episode and had [The LEGO Movie directors] Phil Lord and Chris Miller come on, and we’re just standing there, the three of us, all these years later, at this LEGO competition show. We’re thinking like, ‘This is weird, but it all makes sense. After all these years, here we are, the three of us.’”
Joining Lord and Miller as celebrity guest judges are Mayim Bialik, Terry Crews and Nicole Byer (Nailed It!), plus droids C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8 visit during a Star Wars-themed episode.
The LEGO builders are intensely passionate about their creations, which makes it heartbreaking to watch some of them completely fall to pieces. In a fun twist, competitors will create something for the sole purpose of spectacularly destroying it. “Some of them we dropped from on high. Some of them we laced with explosives and blew them up,” Arnett says. “But it was super satisfying, I’ve gotta say, smashing them with a baseball bat. And then watching it back in super slo-mo is really cool.”