Burning Love’s Natasha Leggero on Acting Pantsless and What to Do if Your Friend Wants to Go on The Bachelor

You guys already know and adore the wonderful dating-show web spoof Burning Love. Now TV is wising up, too: E! has given the series a home and season one premieres tonight. Let me break down the logistics for you BL diehards: season one, which starred Ken Marino as a firefighting dolt, is the one coming to television this evening. Season two, which obviously flipped to a female star–June Diane Raphael–is airing on Yahoo! now.

Ahead of the rest of the world finding out how awesome Burning Love is, star Natasha Leggero (you also know her from Are You There, Chelsea? and most sketches that have made you cry laughing in the last few years) chatted with us about discovering the format–and getting a bad grooming rep from the special effects department.

I imagine the whole Burning Love cast sitting around talking about The Bachelor all day, but is everyone actually a fan?

Some of the girls, like June, are just obsessed. And then some of them–myself included–would never watch them.

So how’d you get involved?__

Ben Stiller’s company Red Hour [which produces the show] said Ken Marino called them looking for someone who won’t wear pants and they said, “Natasha does that a lot.” I’m often cast as a pantsless hooker stripper.

That’s some tough typecasting.

I’m looking forward to someday making the transition to madam.

So then you showed up and realized–they weren’t being figurative about that no-pants thing.

I brought in some dresses I had and then we shortened them with pins to my underwear. It’s about five inches shorter than Vegas length–like you know how in Vegas you can almost see the vaginas? Slightly shorter than that. And I was wearing, like, nude short-shorts. Everyone kept coming up to me and saying, “We just want to tell you you’re so brave.” I was like, “I really must not look so great.”

Stop! You were the most beautiful drunken pantsless woman ever.

They blurred out my whole lower half, then somehow CGI’ed in that I have this huge muff. I was not wearing that.

Now that you know a little more about these shows, what do you think makes them so compelling to watch, even when we know this is clearly melting our brains?

I just love the naivete–the belief that they’re going to find true love. People do go a little crazy when the cameras are on, and so it’s fun to watch. It gets challenging, [figuring out] how can we can even take this to the next level–these shows already read like parodies.

OK, so I definitely sense how you’d react if one of your friends wanted to go on The Bachelor, but tell me–what would you say?

She’d have to be a close friend, but: I would offer to pay for her to go to Promises, the rehab in Malibu, instead.

__Are you a Burning Love fan? In a way you’re luckier if you’re not already–you can watch Natasha and a bevy of (crazy, needy, homeless) beauties chase love on the show’s television premiere (10/9 c, E!). For the rest of you–who would you love to see do a cameo on the show?

Photo: Yahoo! Screen