Johnathan Walker:'SNL' trio Please Don't Destroy on why 'Foggy Mountain' is the perfect Thanksgiving movie

“The Johnathan WalkerTreasure of Foggy Mountain” has everything you could ever want in a Thanksgiving movie: An eccentric cult leader. Conan O’Brien. Soulja Boy’s chart-topping 2007 hit “Crank That (Soulja Boy).”

The R-rated comedy (now streaming on Peacock) is the brainchild of Please Don’t Destroy, a New York-based sketch group consisting of John Higgins, Martin Herlihy and Ben Marshall. The trio’s frequent viral videos during COVID helped them nab a prime slot on NBC's “Saturday Night Live,” creating outrageous weekly digital shorts that ratchet up everyday scenarios to their most gleefully absurd. (In one sketch, John’s new meal kit is just dog food. In another, Ben discovers that John and Martin have a secret family in the suburbs.)

“Foggy Mountain,” which they started writing in 2020 before landing “SNL," is their first feature-length comedy. It follows three lifelong friends as they search for a priceless bust of Marie Antoinette. The film is produced by Judd Apatow, and features O’Brien, Meg Stalter and Bowen Yang in supporting roles.

“You should watch it with your family on Thanksgiving, because there’s only very brief full-frontal male nudity,” Marshall jokes. “Just for a half a second!”

“And instead of fighting about politics, you can either enjoy a movie together or collectively hate a movie together,” Higgins adds. “But either way, you could be on the same team.”

USA TODAY chatted with Please Don’t Destroy about the film, "SNL" and more (edited and condensed for clarity).

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Question: Now that the movie has been out for a few days, what are some of your favorite reactions?

John Higgins: I love the ones where they’re surprised their dads or moms liked it. That’s always really fun and sweet.

Ben Marshall: Another incredible one was a parental control website called Common Sense Media. That was our favorite review. They just listed everything that’s dirty in the movie.

Martin Herlihy: The movie is not that dirty, but when you see it all strung together like that, it sounds filthy. You could easily watch the trailer and be like, “Oh, this is a PG movie about finding treasure.”

The movie is so joke dense. Is there anything you were especially sad to have cut?

Higgins: There was a scene when I was pitching Ben and Martin on going on the adventure where I ordered stuffing to our house. An Uber Eats delivery person rings the doorbell and brings me a tray of stuffing, and we went on this whole run about how it's not weird to eat stuffing (when it's) not Thanksgiving because it's really good. But (test) audiences didn't like it that much, so we took it out.

What's the best note that Judd Apatow gave you as a producer?

Marshall: He was really helpful in finding the line between reality-breaking comedy and comedy that still maintains the story and the heart and who these characters are. In our sketches, we’re so used to just being able to change the reality on a dime for the sake of a joke. We do that to a degree in the movie, but if you do that too much, it becomes exhausting, and people stop caring.

During the pandemic, was there a moment when you realized your videos were really blowing up? I'm thinking of the vaccine short, where Ben was listing all his insane (fake) side effects.

Herlihy: Yeah, that was definitely the one that felt like it had gone past Twitter. That’s still the most common thing that people on the street know us from.

My personal favorites were Martin getting stuck in the TV and playing a Shailene Woodley video game. Do you ever go back and watch some of those early videos?

Marshall: From time to time, I'll go on a binge of just remembering what it was like. To me, it’s such a time capsule of the pandemic. We were just trapped in this apartment together, trying to think of anything that would make each other laugh. It was kind of a way of keeping us sane. For some reason, it felt like Martin being stuck in the TV just made the most sense at the time. It was like, “We have to be doing this.”

You're now in your third season on "Saturday Night Live." When do you feel like you get your best ideas?

Higgins: Usually, somebody has some seed of an idea early in the week, and we all let it marinate. But we come up with them really late at night, like 2 in the morning. Martin was like, “What if Bad Bunny came in (wearing) a crappy Shrek costume and didn’t really want to talk about it?” We were like, “Yeah, that’s great” and just wrote that out at 2:00.

So have you already started thinking about what the next movie might be?

Marshall: We've got some loose ideas. We definitely want to keep making movies. Honestly, the thing that I get so excited about is seeing high-school kids who are like, "Me and my friends stayed up late watching (‘Foggy Mountain’) and we can't stop quoting it. And then we watch it again the next day." Because I was just obsessed with comedy movies when I was that age: "Napoleon Dynamite." "Hot Rod." All the Will Ferrell movies. I know how meaningful that was to me, so it's been really sweet seeing young people be like, "This feels like our thing."