Margo Martindale and Chris Diamantopoulos said the desperation of their criminal characters is what made The Sticky, on Prime Video on Friday, funny.

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The crime comedy is inspired by a true story of a 2012 heist of maple syrup from Quebec's national reserve.

The cast plays fictional characters. Martindale, 73, plays Ruth Landry, a maple farmer in danger of losing the family farm while her husband is in a coma.

"Desperation equals, to me, the funny," Martindale told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "The more desperate you are, the more real, the funnier it is to me, sometimes."

Diamantopoulos, 49, plays Mike Byrne, a Boston mobster who thinks the maple syrup heist will be easy money. When it gets complicated, Mike panics.

"His real character starts oozing out of his pores like maple syrup through a degraded waffle," Diamantopoulos said. "It's a chance for that reality, even though grounded, to lend itself to some pretty great humorous moments."

Martindale and Diamantopoulos are joined by Canadian actor Guillaume Cyr as Remy Bouchard, a security guard Mike and Ruth tap as their man inside the syrup warehouse. Cyr, 42, remembered the real heist.

"The show is 'inspired by,' so it's not really important to know the real facts of the story," Cyr said. "The Boston mobs were not involved."

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The Sticky was created by Brian Donovan and Ed Herro. Diamantopoulos appreciated that Donovan and Herro told about a Canadian caper without mocking the country, as other American comedies have.

"They crafted a really unique world that we haven't seen on screen before - - a non-parodied Canada," Diamantopolous said, adding that The Sticky shows "a Canada with a criminal underbelly, this northern French Canadian gritty world that I think we haven't seen."

Diamantopoulos and Martindale have portrayed criminals before. Diamnatopoulous recently played an arms dealer in the movie Red Notice and a Greek mobster in the Netflix series True Story.

Martindale played Kentucky druglord Mags Bennett on TV's Justified, a much more experienced criminal than Ruth in The Sticky.

"Mags could rule a mountain," Martindale reflected.

The animated comedy Bojack Horseman even made Martindale a criminal. She voiced herself in the Hollywood spoof in which she escaped from prison after staging a bank robbery.

"Wikipedia said that I'd been in jail for the last year," Martindale said. "It did. 'Margo Martindale spent the last year in jail for armed robbery.'"

Cyr said he enjoyed his foray into crime comedy.

"I love watching comedy action and we don't see that genre that much," Cyr said. "So I was really, really happy to be in that kind of project."