When talking to Jay Chandrasekhar and Kevin Heffernan, two-fifths of the Broken Lizard comedy troupe, about Super Troopers 3, there’s really only one question to ask. How long does it take to grow those signature moustaches? “For me, it’s about three and half weeks,” Chandrasekhar said. “For Kevin, it’s about three and half months.”
Regrowing that signature facial fuzz is an essential part of the process for return of the misfit state troopers of Spurbury, Vermont, who are back in cinemas now with the third film in the stoner cop comedy franchise. Director and star Chandrasekhar said, “You get the crew cut, you slim down a little, and you grow the moustache.”
Super Troopers 3 isn’t just the third in the franchise, it’s also the eighth feature from the five-man comedy troupe (and that doesn’t include the multiple offshoots, plus cameos in each other’s projects). Yet what you get on screen between Chandrasekhar, Heffernan, and fellow Lizards Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske is rooted in their offscreen reality. These are real friendships and close bonds that go back to college and predate them doing comedy together. Chandrasekhar, who plays the mischievous Thorny, said, “It’s not a marriage of convenience, it’s a marriage.”
Heffernan, who returns as knucklehead Farva, described their approach to working together as “very collaborative, [and] amongst five things, it’s a tough thing to do. It’s essentially similar to a writer’s room. We know what other people in the group might find funny, and we sit down in a room and we riff.”
Out of all their collaborations, it’s the adventures of New England’s most inept cops that have become their most lasting and popular. Heffernan said, “We always joke that, when we do live shows and live appearances, our audiences are made of two groups of people. There’s cops and there’s stoners, and we’re bringing them all together in the same room to laugh at the same jokes.”
“We’re trying to catch a Smokey and the Bandit vibe,” said Chandrasekhar, who suggested that there’s a certain appeal because “it’s got a sense of rebellion while still being about a bunch of people who are not supposed to be about rebellion.”
There’s one other essential element to the Super Troopers films, and that’s the presence of the honorary sixth member of Broken Lizard: Brian Cox as Captain O’Hagan. Best known for heavy dramatic parts in projects like Manhunter and Succession, Chandrasekhar said that Cox doing comedy is less unlikely than people think. “When he first started his career, he thought he was going to be the next Jerry Lewis, and he ended up in all these dramas and horrors, and he never really got the chance until Rushmore with Wes Anderson, and then we were the next comedy. He really approached us, and we were surprised that such a good actor wanted to work with us. But a film like this needs someone to yell at you.”
Cox is also responsible for some of the best moments in the mid-credits blooper reels, often featuring him making the cast and crew burst out laughing with his deadpan brilliance, “and there were many more,” Heffernan noted. “There’s some great ones of him yelling at Jay, Logan Roy-style.”
For the third film in the series, Chandrasekhar said that the core quintet tried to put worries about what the audience expected from them and come up with a story that they wanted to tell. “It starts with liking it yourself. If we really like it, our assumption is that there are other people out there who will like it too. … Is that confidence real? No. But it starts with liking it yourself.”
The original script was “a more traditional crime caper,” Heffernan said, but the team wanted to “expand the universe. … We get a little more personal. You’re seeing a part of my character, Farva, you’ve never seen before. You’re seeing Thorny’s family, you’re seeing where people live.”
That more personal take finds its biggest expression in Farva. Once the idiot butt of almost every joke, now he’s entering a new stage in his life as he finally finds the woman of his dreams. Unfortunately for Thorny, it happens to be his sister. Chandrasekhar said, “We were thinking of who would be the funniest character for their sister to be sleeping with Farva, and because of our animosity in 1 and 2 we landed on Thorny, and then we upped the stakes and said, maybe it’s more than sleeping with but an actual wedding, and if it’s a wedding, maybe it’s an Indian wedding, and it all snowballed from that idea.”
The rom-com side of the story actually started as a B-plot to that traditional crime caper side but, Hefferman said, “as we were writing it was so fruitful and had so many elements. ‘Well. We’ve got to have a bachelor party and we’ve got to have an elephant and we’ve got to have a dance number [and] in the writing process we moved the B-plot into the A-plot hole.”
That shift in direction meant new demands on the cast. “Cut to me spending my weekends with a choreographer,” Heffernan said. “It was two sentences in the script, ‘Farva does a Bollywood dance number!’ and then all of a sudden there we are. We spent a full day shooting it, multiple days preparing for it, we had Indian choreographers. But that’s the fun part of these movies, doing things you wouldn’t normally do.”
Part of the troupe’s success has been in physical comedy and “ouch!” inducing pratfalls. Yet in the intervening 30 years since the first Broken Lizard movie, Puddle Cruiser, the Lizards have all got 30 years older. “We did all our own stunts in [Super Troopers],” Chandrasekhar said, “a few fewer in 2, and a lot less in 3.”
“That’s what stunt men are for,” Heffernan laughed.
“But we did some of our own things,” Chandrasekhar added. “The stunt men always want to do it, but the stunt coordinator wants you to do it, just to prove how macho you are.”
Heffernan grinned. “I proudly passed my work on to the stuntmen.”
Super Troopers 3 is in cinemas now.
This article appears in August 14 • 2026.
