How Dicks: The Musical created Megan Thee Stallion's alpha anthem (and other soundtrack secrets)

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Dicks: The Musical.

Listen, not even the minds behind Dicks: The Musical have an answer for how their outrageous movie got made. "We're still not quite sure," creator/star Josh Sharp tells EW, while creator/star Aaron Jackson admits, "We were lucky."

A24's first musical (now playing in theaters) is based on Sharp and Jackson's half-hour Upright Citizens Brigade stage production F---ing Identical Twins. This expanded, queer, provocative, and extremely R-rated feature film follows two arrogant dueling salesmen, Trevor (Jackson) and Craig (Sharp), who discover they're actually identical twins separated at birth, and so they decide to reunite their parents (played by Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally) to finally have the normal family they've always wanted. "We're borrowing the plot of the Parent Trap," Jackson admits. "But the Parent Trap of it all gets resolved in the first half of the movie, and then it takes a bunch of left turns."

Those "left turns" include the brothers falling in love, having marathon sex, and getting married in an incestuous ceremony led by God (Bowen Yang) — yeah, you read that right. "There were lots of conversations the whole time of, 'Is this too far?'" Sharp says. "Because yes, it's offensive, but it's also just very absurd and very queer. It was always supposed to be like a runaway train and a movie you can go to a packed theater and all be screaming together."

But expanding the stage show into a feature film meant writing, composing, and recording an entire soundtrack of original songs for legends like Mullally, Lane, Yang, and even rap icon Megan Thee Stallion to perform ... and that was no easy feat. Here's how some of the biggest, wildest, and best songs came together.

"I'll Always Be on Top"

The massive opening number introduces Trevor and Craig as they brag about their lives, from how many properties they own (one of which is just for masturbating!) and how much money they make to how many women they sleep with. As with every song, Jackson and Sharp wrote the lyrics while Karl Saint Lucy and Marius de Vries composed the score, and this number was based on the original stage production's opener, "Only in It for Me," now turned into an extended montage with lots of jazzy choreography.

"These are two big arrogant dicks who both think they're the best," Sharp says. "Because these guys are very arrogant and cocksure, it's very brassy and kind of ugly even, full of swagger and big band music. That kind of feel was important to us."

"I remember a lot of walking bass, because these guys are always moving," Jackson says. "You're seeing the montage where you meet them and then they're out wooing women and they're at the top of their jobs and they're jumping on desks. We kept describing it as a very 'groiny' song, where it's leading with the pelvis."

As one of the bigger numbers in the movie, it was filmed over a long period of time in multiple locations throughout the 20-day shoot. But some of it ultimately was left on the cutting room floor. "Very sadly there was a huge dance number that got cut just for time, and that was so fun to film because the dancers are incredible," Jackson says.

"Evelyn Song"

In the original two-man stage production, Jackson played their mother Evelyn while Sharp played their father Harris. Their dream was to cast Mullally and Lane for the roles in the movie, and they still can't believe that came true — especially when they watched Mullally perform "Evelyn Song," revealing just how unhinged Evelyn's life has become in her apartment as a shut-in. "That is the most absurdist song," Jackson says. "Everything is a non sequitur, everything is wild, because that's her character, and she just nailed it. She's brilliant."

It was Mullally's idea for Evelyn to speak with a lisp, and coupled with the fast-paced, complicated lyrics, the team wasn't sure she could pull the song off. "Once she realized what she was going to sound like, we did wonder whether we'd created something that was a bit busy for an accent like that and it might not be readable, but she gave such a good account of it in spite of the artificialness that all of her strange mannerisms," de Vries says. "We owe a massive debt of gratitude to the work that she put into, first of all, making it very difficult for herself, and then making it look easy on top of that."

But Saint Lucy regrets losing one particularly hilarious moment. "At one point, she was playing air drums and using a fish as a harmonica," they reveal. "And Marius in particular worked really, really hard to make the fish harmonica work, so it was very sad to lose it. Maybe, at some point in the future, we'll get to see a version with Evelyn playing a fish."

All four creatives know that audiences might miss a lot of the best lyrics of this song during their first viewing due to loud laughter in the theater, but they all agree that's not a bad problem to have. "We can't wait for when they do the inevitable midnight singalongs," Sharp says. "That's a song that almost yearns for the words on the screen, because every line you're like, 'Wait, what did she say?!'"

"And it's so fast," Jackson adds. "That's the patter song we wanted where she's like, Gilbert and Sullivan but from hell."

"Gay Old Life"

The other solo parent song, "Gay Old Life," is Harris' way of coming out to his son Craig (not realizing it's actually Trevor disguised as his twin). It's also the debut of newly minuted gay icons the Sewer Boys — diaper-wearing, mind-reading creatures who Harris feeds baby-bird style. The latter is what gave Lane pause when he first read the script for Dicks: The Musical.

"Listen, I thought it was very funny and outrageous, but I wasn't sure I wanted to be the person to do some of those things in the film," he says with a laugh. "Finally I said, 'I should just have a dinner with these two young guys to see what they're like,' and we had a dinner and I fell in love with them. They're like the gay sons I never had."

Lane laughs again as he admits that since he had "pretty much retired from the musical form," he's essentially coming out of retirement to spit chewed-up deli meat into the Sewer Boys' mouths — but that was actually thanks to his own suggestion. "In the original show they just referred to the Sewer Boys; you didn't actually see them," Lane says. "And it was intimated that perhaps he might be having sexual relations with these creatures. I said to the guys and Karl Saint Lucy, 'You have to give some sort of explanation for how I wound up with these two creatures in the cage.'"

Lane's push for the Sewer Boys' origin story opened up a whole world of possibilities, and the team ran with it. "They wrote that section of diversion in the song where I go off and I explain that I'm an adventurer in my spare time and I was exploring the sewers and found these two creatures and took them home with me, like rescue dogs," Lane says.

But figuring out who/what the Sewer Boys are wasn't easy. "There was a great deal of discussion of, is it going to be played by two gymnasts from Cirque Du Soleil? Or puppets?" Lane remembers. "And that's where the higher-ups drew the line — if they were people, they were worried by that notion that anyone might think I was having sex with the Sewer Boys, so they had to be puppets. And preferably not the most realistic-looking puppets. And that's how we wound up with those two things you see in the cage with diapers."

Lane pauses, laughing, "I love that they wear diapers. And I know it's hard to believe with this film that a line was drawn anywhere, but that was where the line was drawn, which was fine with me."

"Gay Old Life" accomplishes a lot in just one song, but Lane wishes they had added in one more thing: any explanation for why Harris named the Sewer Boys Backpack and Whisper. "Well, Whisper is obvious," Lane adds after a pause. "But that's what will separate the people who want to see this and the people who don't, is if they understand Backpack and Whisper."

"Out Alpha the Alpha"

The biggest showstopper of the musical comes halfway through when Megan Thee Stallion delivers the instantly iconic anthem "Out Alpha the Alpha." The rapper plays the twins' boss, Gloria, and after they call her a bitch, she puts the two formerly top-performing but now low-earning salesmen in their place with this powerful anthem, telling them to "suck my f---ing dick."

The song was originally very different since they had no idea who would play the role. "Karl and the boys had created a fantastic kind of cabaret number, but once Megan entered the conversation, we looked at each other and thought, 'That's just not going to work,'" de Vries says.

"That was the last piece to come in and we always had it as a placeholder song that we then rewrote for her pretty close to her filming," Jackson reveals. "Dates finally got locked and it was like, 'Okay, you've got to turn this into a Megan Thee Stallion song today. She needs it for next week.'"

"We stopped all work on everything else and locked ourselves in a room for a day or two, which is literally all the time we had," de Vries remembers. "Because failure wasn't an option, we managed to turn out some kind of a demo that we felt not horrifically embarrassed to present to her. We sent it to her and she responded promptly, and within another 24 hours, we had a first pass of the entire lyrics performed by her, at which point we were astonished that we pulled it off. Three days later, it was shot."

Jackson and Sharp wrote lyrics they thought fit the rapper's style but were fully prepared for her to come in and change it. "Of course, she could do whatever she wanted, but then she just rapped every wild line," Jackson says. "She was like, 'People know I'm dirty but y'all are dirty.' We couldn't believe she did it. She was very much down to clown, on board, didn't question anything, and was just like, 'I want to do this crazy stuff y'all wrote. Let's do this dumb thing together.'"

But it almost fell apart when Megan arrived for her only day of rehearsal. "There was a moment where communication had clearly not been as efficient as it had been," de Vries says. "[Director] Larry [Charles] sat her down and said, 'We want to show you the blocking we've done for the choreography,' and she looked a bit strange for a minute or so, and she said, 'I have to dance?' She really didn't know that she needed to dance and that she had all of those lines of dialogue. We were like, 'Oh, god, what are we going to do?' And then she just stood up and said, 'Right, we better get to work.'"

The team was so grateful and relieved that Megan was down for anything — including learning how to fake slap. "The first time we see her in the movie, she's slapping someone and telling them, 'healthcare is a luxury,' and that person she's slapping is the partner of Kori Adelson, our producer. It was fun to watch her get to learn to do a stage slap that day."

"I was quite frightened that she wouldn't make it a stage slap and that she would make it a real slap," de Vries says with a laugh. "Because she was really getting into it."

"All Love Is Love"

The final song is one that's sure to cause some controversy, as God marries the brothers in front of a church full of protesters who all end up singing, "God is a f----t."

"I like the song very much, but we're taking a really bizarre turn," Lane says. "Look, you would have to be an idiot to take any of this seriously. Of course, this country is filled with idiots. Nevertheless, it totally made me laugh. The use of the word f----t, I'm not very fond of, but they come from another generation of this queer comedy community where it's a different mindset. It's maybe a little like the Black community taking the N-word and reclaiming it, I don't know."

"We do understand that it's a naughty little song, but we're not intentionally trying to piss anybody off," Jackson promises. "That's Josh and I's comedic point of view and philosophy: Everything's absurd, nothing is real, everyone is wild. And this is just a succinct way to say that."

Sharp adds, "The whole film is, take The Parent Trap and pervert it and blow it out and maximize it and make it absurd. So, similarly there, it's so funny to take the beautiful 'all love is love' message and blow it out and make it the craziest, wildest, most perverse version of it. At the end of the day, to us, it's just funny, and we understand that things might make certain people offended, but we really did write this film thinking of the people who it would work for and not the people who it would work against. It's all coming from this absurdist, queer, goofy place."

He laughs before continuing, "But we get it. We understand some people will be mad, but I would say it's actually a beautiful and affirmative and positive statement on God. For me, the intentions of the creators are to celebrate God."

Dicks: The Musical is currently playing in select cities and expands nationwide on Oct. 13.

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