rewrite this title Rick and Morty: Zack Snyder & James Gunn voiced themselves in a recent episode

The most recent episode of Rick and Morty featured appearances from none other than Zack Snyder and James Gunn, with both filmmakers lending their voices to… themselves.

“They were good sports,“ Rick and Morty executive producer Scott Marder told Variety. “Both of those guys sort of implied that this is the show they watch when they have downtime. So they were thrilled to get to be a part of the world, and there was no pushback or bristling. If anything, they laughed at anything we threw at them. There were probably, frankly, even more digs and more silly things we could have used. All they did was laugh it off.“

The episode, Ricker Than Fiction, follows Rick and Morty as they express their displeasure with the creative direction of the Maximum Velocitree movie franchise. They head to the Warner Bros. lot and confront James Gunn. A later scene finds Snyder giving Gunn advice after viewing the new cut of Superman: “He’s the Man of Steel, not the Man of Conversation. Do more shots of him punching!“

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“We were like, if we’re going to do a movie and we’re going skewer Hollywood, we feel like we have to include our bosses,” Marder said. “So we started thinking about Warner Bros. Who’d be a good face to be kind of the villain here? James Gunn just seemed like such a good choice. We were all pretty sure that whenever Schrab reached out to Gunn he would be a million percent in the middle of doing ‘Superman.’ But he not only did he respond instantly with a yes, but I think he ran it up the chain at Warner Bros. that same day. We had people on our production side who were like, ‘How is it that James Gunn and Zaslav and all these people already know about this episode?’ We didn’t think it would actually move this quickly.“

Gunn and Snyder recorded their lines back-to-back and even took a picture together, which went viral online as fans tried to figure out why the pair would be meeting up. “I appreciate that we were able to keep it tight lips until now,” Marder said. “We’re pretty Fort Knox over here, we’re really clamped down. Anything that goes out into the public we see, and we get approval on because the fans look at everything, like the Zapruder film or through a jeweler’s lens.“

Both filmmakers are big fans of the animated series, and Snyder in particular was ready to return immediately. “I direct all the voices, so I directed both those guys, and Snyder left, and he came back like a fan, saying, ‘I’ll do anything for the show. Throw me a tag. Throw me a thing,’” Marder said. “It was just cool to hear such enthusiasm from him.”