Behind Milton

Milton was actually based on a former co-worker that Mike Judge had worked with during his days as an engineer. One day, Judge went to the co-worker and asked him how he was doing. The co-worker began talking about how he was going to quit his job because he had been forced to move his desk around too many times. The film is loosely based on Mike Judge's animated shorts entitled "Milton", which ran on Saturday Night Live (1975) and MTV's Liquid Television (1991) in the early 1990s. When he was pitching the project, Mike Judge arranged a table read of the script for executives at 20th Century Fox, and recruited several actors from his animated television series, King of the Hill (1997) for the reading. Stephen Root read several parts, including Milton. Judge loved his take on the character, and cast him to play Milton in the film. Milton reveals his intentions to burn down the building nineteen minutes into the movie. During his and Peter's phone conversation as Peter is trying to clean up his desk to leave, Milton tells him that "if they take my stapler, I'll have to...I'll set the building on fire." Milton Stephen Root