Zach's first words to me after this weekend were “that bitch Nick Rufca got me so high!”
Hi. I'm Rachel.
I'm one of the Try Guys producers.
- And I'm Nick. I'm also a Try Guys producer.
And this is your inside look at some of our favorite videos.
Producers react.
(upbeat intro music)
We've been working together for four years now?
Yeah, the twins are four, so it's been four years.
We have not been on camera together too much.
No, but we share an office and we sometimes share a brain.
- We're basically together all day long. - Mm hmm.
I think we keep each other sane.
Yeah, we do.
I don’t know if anyone knows the origin story, so:
Try Guys started five years ago.
And four years ago, I went on maternity leave,
and we hired Nick to do my job while I was gone.
And by the time I came back, we were all just like,
Please, please, please, can we keep Nick too?
Four years later, here we are! Yeah.
And you probably never see us together too much
because we have traditionally split our videos.
It's always divided quite naturally.
Yeah.
Sometimes we'll be like, Ooh, can I have that? And you'll be like,
Oh, thank God. I didn't know who was going to respond to that.
I'm like.
Oh! Okay, good! Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we're going to start with The Zachelor Party.
Here's the thing that I think we all want to know.
Was this Zach’s actual bachelor party?
or did his best man who was not you...
- Right.
...plan him one?
It was his real bachelor party,
and it was a true surprise as far as I knew.
I think I signed up for it.
I’m like “I’ll take that on.”
And I really thought it was just for the channel and a video with the Try Guys.
I never thought it was his real bachelor party.
We originally just talked to the other guys.
We're like, What are some ideas you guys want to do?
We landed on Vegas.
We were sort of repeating the Keith bachelor party.
We put it in the books.
We were going to surprise Zach,
but he started asking questions.
He’s like, “Okay, that's fun...”
“But like, when are you going to let my friends know?”
And that's when I had this “Oh shit” moment.
I feel like we were together.
I'm like, “This is really his bachelor party.”
This is it.
And suddenly the pressure doubled.
You know, so Zach’s like, No, no, no, this is really it.
And I let it slip that we were planning on Vegas.
And he’s like, “I just don’t even know if that's me.”
So we scrapped that.
Zach sent an email.
Did he list like 45 ideas?
45 ideas.
There were so many of them, like,
I don't know if we can go to space camp, you know?
(Rachel laughs) Like these weird Zach fantasies?
Definitely one of them was...
...get a Vin Diesel lookalike to perform a lap dance.
Mm hmm.
And then there was one that sort of caught my eye.
Recreate a zombie laser tag fight.
I was like, You know what?
If if we want to go that route, I think I can do this.
So I zoomed with Zach.
I was like, Look, let's start over.
This is your real bachelor party.
But if we're going to do this, you have to trust me.
I know you want weird, and then after that, you can't be involved.
And he agreed.
He was like, I trust you.
I've planned my brother's very straight bachelor party,
and I've planned my best friend’s very gay bachelor party.
And then Zach is neither very straight nor very gay.
Yeah. I was like, I think I can do this.
I think it's in my wheelhouse.
(upbeat music)
[Nick] I love this opening.
It's so cinematic, which feels very Zach.
Here's Keith and Zach driving to Palm Springs,
and I'm already super nervous because they had to leave L.A. at 8 a.m..
I was just trying to keep my composure, but like,
everything had to come together just right, you know?
Like all the guys were meeting there as a surprise.
[Rachel] And they're having a bachelor party,
but you're trying to produce a shoot.
I’m trying to produce a shoot.
And those things are kind of at odds with each other.
I didn't want to stage things too much.
Like Zach's friends are his friends. They're not Try Guys.
We sort of stayed away from the friends.
- Mm hmm. - Capturing them.
Just because it’s not really...
They're not YouTube stars,
so they don’t need a camera focused on them.
They didn’t agree to this life!
They just like Zach. That's right.
So that's my poor husband, Paul, who’s the alien.
Wait, Paul's the alien in the liquor store?
Yeah, I recruited him.
I was going to do it.
I'm like, I think I'm going to be concentrating too much on everything else.
Will you please put on this alien costume?
(laughing)
The Airbnb we got
was not sponsored, by the way.
We pay for our locations, unfortunately. - Yeah, we did.
And it actually is one of the few rental houses where
it was so much better than the pictures.
So I drove to the house with the guys seeing it for the first time and I was
like, oh my God. - You had never been there before?
No, I asked. I asked them if I could come out and look at it.
They're like, No, we don't do that.
How many days did you guys film?
We filmed for two packed days.
They were about 12 to 14 hours.
My plan was for three, which would have been a little nicer on the crew.
Uh huh.
But Keith said that they really wanted Saturday to just be off camera.
What were they doing Saturday?
If I had had my way, it would have been three days.
And Vin Diesel would have come.
And Vin Diesel would’ve been on day three!
So blame Keith for that, Zach.
Did you get to go out to Joshua Tree
and Palm Springs and vet all these places in person first?
Yes.
I vlogged myself.
I met all these vendors.
You vlogged yourself!
I did.
Okay. I'm out here
in the middle of August.
It's hot.
It’s almost 100 degrees.
And I'm scoping out whether
this property in Joshua Tree could be
good for a zombie apocalypse or
a trippy cannabis dinner.
Let's see if this will be good for old Zachy.
So now we're sandbathing.
Soundbath.
Which, production order,
we did this before they got to the house.
We swapped it in the edit.
Sarah, she really is a soundbath healer and she was just game.
I found her on Airbnb.
On Airbnb? Airbnb experiences.
If you want to look her up.
I met with all these vendors months in advance.
Everyone we partnered with was lovely.
Which, you know, that's always a risk, right?
Like, this was kind of a weird request.
Like, this is a bachelor party.
We're shooting it.
So Palm Springs Underground.
Yeah. Yeah.
You went to Palm Springs underground? Yeah.
They were wonderful. They opened their doors for us.
This was pretty much all complimentary, this experience. Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
They knew the Try Guys, so they were like, This is cool.
And they do these, like, kind of radical dinners based on elements and stuff?
Yeah. It's supposed to be like a full sensory experience.
They have all these different themes.
I gave them the theme of aliens elements, and then they went with it.
Was the conversation flowing?
Because at one point Eugene just goes, What are all your moms’ names?
And I was like, Was it awkward at all bringing different groups of friends together?
You know, Keith and Zach and Eugene, it's not a performance.
They're hanging with their friends. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.
And the friends aren't used to Try Guys videos, so it did take a while.
This is the end of day one. A long day.
And we went to the observatory that opened for us after hours
to let them look through the telescopes and see the stars.
How did you think of that?
I've seen the observatory driving by.
I don't know. I just thought it like tied into the alien theme
that it would kind of be a cool bachelor party activity that's not getting wasted.
I tried to keep the guys, like, not hungover for the first couple days.
And do I remember something happened to Eugene
while he was looking through the telescope?
Did he get, like, existential?
Jack’s laughing. Yeah.
[Eugene] As an astronomer, how do you deal with, like, the nihilism of space?
Yeah, that's one of Eugene's personalities. - Exactly.
Is existential dread.
So day two,
I sent them into Joshua Tree on a tour that we did not go on.
Okay.
My goal was to get Joshua Tree footage.
Uh huh.
But also to keep these guys busy
so they wouldn't just drink and get high all day.
(laughing)
Producing! - It’s kind of like babysitting.
Yeah!
Like if I just leave them by the pool, they're going to show up to this...
you know...
(Rachel gasps)
There I am again.
As the alien.
So this house I rented for filming.
And where did you guys stay?
We stayed at like the Ramada.
Get into film! Life of luxury.
You can stay at the Ramada Joshua Tree, too.
(laughing)
So Zombie Joe’s, they've never done anything like this before.
They perform in a theater space here in North Hollywood.
This was in October, so it's haunt season.
It's their busy season.
So... [Rachel] It’s haunt season!
He had to work it around the shows they were doing,
but they were so into it.
Denise is their director, and she worked with me to like curate the performance
and make it funny and freaky.
Here's where we meet Zach’s original ask of a zombie shootout.
Zombie players totally game for this weird ask.
Like, we’re just going to fire at you.
And can he shoot you with Nerf guns?
But look, they're totally into it.
They are into it!
This has all the vibes of Candid Competition’s weirdest day.
(Nick laughing) Yes!
(laughing) You know?
Are Keith and the guys sober?
Uh, for the most part,
I would get somewhere and I would text Keith.
Keith was like my man on the ground with the bachelor crew.
I was like, get Zach a little high for this.
I think after I saw the run-through,
I was like, get him a little stoned.
They had just come back from the Joshua Tree tour,
so I think they're mostly sober.
But yeah, this was a long dinner.
How much weed did they consume?
‘Cause I fully believe this dinner would have murdered me.
40 or 50? 10 per course?
Maybe there's one that was five.
I know.
The chefs are so great that they would check in
and be like, Is everyone feeling good?
If anyone was too stoned,
They were like, We can pull back.
- Yeah.
So they sort of design it to you.
So then the next course would have none or a little.
Yeah.
And this meal was probably 4 hours.
There's a magician intermission break, which was like
A magician intermission!
I always worry about magicians and cameras.
You know, but he was cool.
And of course, they're all high, so.
- Yeah. So he's extra cool.
During this magician performance, you can't really tell in the video.
It got really windy.
Oh.
Some of the lights blew over and I have a shot of Desiree
just holding two lights as she lays on the ground like a human sandbag.
I’m like that's crew doing it for you.
Jonathan, Jack, Desiree, and Phil was the crew.
It was a small crew, and it was a huge team effort.
Once it was going on. - It was a huge effort.
We came the next day.
We did all of their interviews at their house and then we left them
and they had a day without cameras.
A day no one will speak of.
Yeah, exactly.
Did you ever consider getting a stripper of any kind?
I actually.
I don't even know if I told Zach this.
I truly did look into male strippers who looked like Vin Diesel.
And I really wanted to make that happen.
Why didn't that happen, Nick?
It was just too much.
(laughing)
You didn't just plan a normal bachelor party.
You planned an epic, ultimate bachelor party
that not only wanted to become a viral video,
but also was real for Zach.
Yes, also real. Which is the scariest part of all.
Yeah, I know.
Everyone walked away happy and I just laid down the next day.
Yeah, you were dead. I remember. I was dead.
I was dead. Yeah.
Just that feeling of, like, planning this for several months,
I mean probably the first time we talked about it was seven or eight months prior.
Yeah.
Having one plan kind of go South, and recovering with this.
It's definitely one of the videos I'm most proud of for those reasons.
But it was, it was a lot of work.
Any one of these events could just be a whole shoot and a video unto itself.
So all of them together feels somewhat impossible to me.
And yet here it is. - Right.
And we were so separated through this that I remember at the end
when you finally saw the first cut, you were like,
You did so much stuff! - What did you do?
Well...
Producers react!
I hope you gained a little bit of insight into the process
and I'm looking forward to what Rachel's going to show me.
(upbeat outro music)
And I will happily be your work wife.
Yes, you are my work wife.