“Awkward”’s Beau Mirchoff and Brett Davern: The Batman & Robin of Teen Sex Comedies?

Brett Davern and Beau Mirchoff

“That’s the thing that works about Jake and Matty…Matty and Jake… whatever. You get mad if I say ‘Jake’ first.”

That’s Brett Davern. He plays Jake Rosati on Awkward, the new MTV series that’s been renewed for a second season. In the latter part of that quote he’s speaking to Beau Mirchoff (AKA Matty McKibben), his co-star on the show. I’m in the midst of interviewing them poolside at the Beverly Hilton, and they’re arguing – again.

“You say ‘Matty and Jake’,” responded Mirchoff. “[Like] ‘Batman and Robin’. It’s not ‘Robin and Batman.’”

All right, so they aren’t really arguing. Just playing around – you know, like any good bro-mantic couple would. But that Batman and Robin reference… well, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get the gears turning.

“Well, I have the utility belt, so…” Davern countered.

Okay. Like I said, Beverly Hilton. Poolside. We’re at a cocktail party put on by MTV following the network’s series of panels at the TCAs, which the two young actors had participated in along with several of their Awkward co-stars and creator Lauren Iungerich.

Davern is blonde, about 5’10”, with wide-set blue eyes and an open face. He’s the more talkative and serious one. Mirchoff, taller and with curly brown hair, is the class clown with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

On the show, Jake is the popular, kind-hearted class president and Matty the attractive, self-conscious jock who starts social outcast Jenna Hamilton (Ashley Rickards) on her road to teenage humiliation in the pilot episode. In a nutshell: he likes her enough to sleep with her at summer camp, but not so much that he’s willing to be seen with her.

Nevertheless, he and best friend Jake (who, by the way, is dating goody-goody abstinence queen Lissa, played by Greer Grammer) have both fallen for Jenna, who is really quite fetching despite her former designation as “persona non grata.”

Let the love triangle commence!

“Hey, every good teen show has to have a love triangle!” said Mirchoff. “That’s mathematics, man!”

Except that Awkward isn’t just another teen show. For one thing, the critics love it – widely praising the series for taking an honest and relatable look at high-school life. Indeed, the characters here aren’t facile “types,” but teenagers we can actually recognize.

In a lesser TV series, Davern and Mirchoff’s characters would’ve surely been portrayed as A) the mean jock (Matty) and B) the socially-inept nerd (Jake). Awkward skirts the cliché by making both boys popular, and then diving beneath the surface to highlight just how essentially different they really are.

“They are similar in the fact that they’re popular, but I think that’s kinda where it ends,” said Davern. “Jake is not afraid to go his own way. … Just in the pilot alone, [Lissa says to Jake when he’s talking to Jenna] ‘come with us.’ And he’s like ‘hold on, I’m having a conversation’, you know? Whereas two seconds before [the popular kids] say ‘Matty, let’s go’, and he’s off and running. I think Jake kind of…if he wasn’t popular, he’d be fine.”

“I think having the cliché with the popular jock who’s only an asshole…it’s like, it’s been done a lot,” said Mirchoff, whose character is presented as less malicious than fundamentally insecure. “And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I don’t know about your guys’ high school experience, but I don’t know if we had someone who was like that, you know? The really good-looking dickhead…”

“It’s not like ‘jock,’ ‘nerd’, ‘bully’, ‘person who’s picked on,’” said Davern. “[The characters] are three dimensional.”

“3D, baby!” exclaimed Mirchoff.

“‘Awkward goes Avatar’, yeah,” said Davern. “Giant robots take over.”

Did I mention they also get to curse?

“What's cool as an actor is that goes into your performance, because instead of having to say like, you know… ‘oh, shoot’, or something like that, we're able to say, you know, ‘shit’,” said Davern. “They've given us the freedom as actors to say like, 'no, say it, cause we're just gonna bleep it later.' And you're like, 'great!’ And you just go for it… it makes the performances so much more real.”

“By episode six it's gonna be like South Park, the earlier episodes,” said Mirchoff. “’Bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep!'”

As far as the show’s “AfterElton-friendly” content is concerned, outside of future gay character Clark (mentioned by Rickards in my earlier interview with her) and the questionable orientation of Jenna’s friend Ming, Mirchoff revealed another intriguing tease near the end of our conversation.

“[In] Season 2, Jake comes out of the closet,” he asserted, grinning broadly.

Ok, that was a joke. (I think.) Of course, Davern couldn’t let it go without a full-circle retort:

“Batman is writing Robin's storylines right now.”

Aaaand the gears keep turning.