AIMEE GARCIA: Dying at Four Years Old, Losing DOLLY PARTON & the .0001% Chance That Saved LUCIFER

Jon Lovitz (Saturday Night Live, A League of Their Own, The Wedding Singer) joins me this week for a conversation that keeps flipping between hilarious and genuinely heavy. Jon busts my chops for a solid hour, then opens up about losing Phil Hartman and still thinking about him every day 28 years later, the last phone call with his mom before she passed at 97, and everything he tried to do to pull Chris Farley back. We also get into the craft he takes far more seriously than people assume, the acting coach who wrote him off in front of a class, and why the hardest year of his career is the one that made him.

Tara Strong (Harley Quinn, Teen Titans, The Powerpuff Girls, The Fairly OddParents) joins us this week for a conversation that goes a lot deeper than cartoons. Tara talks about how voicing Harley Quinn became her actual therapy, saying lines in the booth that she wished she could say to her then husband, and how the character grew into her own power at the same time she did. We also get into the heartbreak of being recast on shows she helped make huge, the marriage she finally walked away from, crying behind a music stand while playing a happy Disney character, and why she believes every one of us is here to make somebody else feel like they matter.

The band is back together. Tom Welling (Smallville, Lucifer), Kristin Kreuk (Smallville, Murder in a Small Town), Erica Durance (Smallville, Saving Hope) and creators Al Gough and Miles Millar join me to celebrate 25 years of Smallville. We get into the casting stories nobody has heard end to end, the network that flat out said it did not want the show, and the renegotiation that nearly wrote Lex Luthor out. Tom opens up about spending ten years in survival mode, Kristin gets honest about the super stardom she never wanted, and Al and Miles name the one thing they would change about the show. We also cover the secret Spider-Man 2 job, John Glover asking Tom for acting advice, and everything coming to Nashville this November.

Michael Jai White (Spawn, Black Dynamite, The Dark Knight) joins me this week for the longest conversation I have ever had on this show, and I did not want it to end. Michael opens up about growing up in Brooklyn and Bridgeport where violence was right outside the doorstep, being on his own since 14, and the lunch with a friend who served 30 years in prison that made him realize how close he came. We get into where his anger really came from and the mindset that ended it, his honest feelings about Spawn, what Heath Ledger was like when cameras were not rolling, playing Mike Tyson, and the night he got jumped by five men and walked away. He also breaks down the generational conditioning he caught working on himself, and why he calls poverty a gift.

James B. Jones and Shelley Wolfe (Love on the Spectrum) join me this week and I fell for these two the same way everybody else has, fast. What surprised me was how much this conversation goes beneath the show. We talk about what filming is really like, five or six hours of cameras for a few minutes of footage, and how the version people see is only one side of them. Shelley opens up about the comments that hurt, the people who assumed she had no voice when she is a senior advertising manager who presents in English and Japanese, and James gets honest about growing up bullied, the special education program he was once ashamed of, and how proud he is of it now. Add in their love story, their surprising love of heavy metal, and a running gag about who the best Lex Luthor really is, and this one left me rooting for them harder than ever.