Episode 225 - Rainn Wilson
Marc:are we doing this really wait for it are we doing this wait for it pow what the fuck and it's also what the fuck what's wrong with me it's time for wtf what the fuck with mark maron
Marc:Okay, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fuckstables?
Marc:What the fuckericans?
Marc:What the fuckanadians?
Marc:What the fuckanucks?
Marc:You know what?
Marc:I can't.
Marc:I can't.
Marc:I keep getting new ones.
Marc:I'm done.
Marc:This is Marc Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Welcome to the show.
Marc:Thank you for being here.
Marc:I'm happy to be talking to you.
Marc:I just got back from San Francisco.
Marc:I'm a little queasy, a little lightheaded.
Marc:Don't know what's going on.
Marc:I think I'm just getting older.
Marc:Not that those are conditions of being old, but I'm starting to have the inevitable realization that perhaps there will come a day where I will no longer exist.
Marc:I know that's a given, but I try to avoid it at all costs.
Marc:And it's not until I feel a little weird, feel a little something wrong that all of a sudden I realize, oh my God, this doesn't last forever.
Marc:Man, is this it?
Marc:Is this it?
Marc:Things are going okay.
Marc:But is this it?
Marc:Is there more to be had?
Marc:Obviously there is.
Marc:Obviously.
Marc:I had a great time in San Francisco.
Marc:We sold out five shows at the Punchline.
Marc:Thrilled about that.
Marc:So happy that you what the fuckers came out.
Marc:Thank you very much for the considerate gift of a low carb muffins.
Marc:Very thoughtful for those of you who bake.
Marc:And I understand, I'm sorry, I don't have your name at the top of my head, but I am grateful that you brought me baked goods that I could eat.
Marc:Now, I don't know if I needed to eat six of them, you know, in a 20 minute period as if I'd never eaten muffins before.
Marc:And I know you felt a little bad about the muffins because, you know, cooking that kind of style of food, it's hard to make an amazing thing.
Marc:But I think you made an amazing thing for what you did.
Marc:And I enjoy them.
Marc:I ate all of them in about 14 minutes.
Marc:And I don't know if that's on my diet.
Marc:I think the idea with a diet is we'll make you this appropriate decadent thing.
Marc:And perhaps you have one, you know, in place of something you can have that's similar to that.
Marc:Not nine to replace one bad thing.
Marc:That's what I did.
Marc:So what?
Marc:That's it.
Marc:Rainn Wilson is on the show today.
Marc:Had a very thoughtful conversation with Rainn.
Marc:I tell you, man, themes are coming up between Norm MacDonald, Rainn Wilson, themes of faith, themes of religion.
Marc:They keep coming up.
Marc:And I'm a little hazy on this, man.
Marc:Me and Norm talked about this book, The Denial of Death.
Marc:I had to pull it off the shelf and start poking around in it because I hadn't looked at it in a while.
Marc:And I love the book.
Marc:And obviously, it's massively underlined, as I do with all of my books.
Marc:Massively.
Marc:There's a large...
Marc:chunks, swaths of words underlined that were so essential to me at the moment I underlined like most of the fucking book is underlined.
Marc:Very important.
Marc:Get to that in a minute.
Marc:I worked with NATO Green who up there in San Francisco, who is a union, a union organizer by day and a comedian by night, which means he's on top of things.
Marc:He's on the pulse of things.
Marc:He's down there with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Marc:He's he's moving things around.
Marc:He's making a difference.
Marc:And I work with him and I feel bad.
Marc:I feel bad when I work with NATO Green.
Marc:He was very funny, very smart, but he's engaged.
Marc:And I start to feel like an asshole.
Marc:I used to be much more political.
Marc:I used to be very angry about politics.
Marc:I still am, but I also realized I'm just angry.
Marc:So I should deal with the baseline anger and then move through politics as I see fit, which I do.
Marc:But I felt bad.
Marc:I felt bad.
Marc:I'm not apathetic.
Marc:I'm not apathetic.
Marc:I am inactive.
Marc:Like I'll say I support the Occupy Wall Streeters.
Marc:But that's where my support ends.
Marc:Saying that.
Marc:And saying it to you.
Marc:So I'm inactive.
Marc:And I feel guilty about it.
Marc:I hate myself for it.
Marc:I beat myself up about it.
Marc:So that means I'm still fighting the good fight.
Marc:Because clearly I am part of the problem.
Marc:So I feel like I'm doing something by beating myself up for not doing more.
Marc:I hope you can relate to that.
Marc:The denial of death.
Marc:Look...
Marc:I'm getting older.
Marc:There's no way around it.
Marc:I'm glad I feel a little more comfortable as I get older.
Marc:I'm 48 years old now.
Marc:I'm not going to ever have a washboard stomach.
Marc:Not that I ever aspired to that, but I do hold on to that.
Marc:I do not have a faith that I can count on.
Marc:And I start to realize that obsession is really my faith.
Marc:Focus on singular things is how I feel better.
Marc:I think obsession and spirituality are very similar.
Marc:Spirituality can be a little more vague and maybe something more ethereal.
Marc:But if you're obsessed with something to the point where it gives your life purpose and you can't see anything else, including your problems, beyond that obsession...
Marc:that that's spiritual and if you pick a good object to transfer all of that fear onto for as long as it takes then maybe that's helpful i'm completely obsessed with these pants i i think about them constantly i've talked to you about it i'm not washing them this is the new pair that i got because i fucked up the other pair and they're holding my attention for a while they are staving off the fear of death and mortality
Marc:my commitment to the ideology and the mythology of these fucking pants I bought.
Marc:So now I pull off the denial of death.
Marc:I pull it out, pull it out of the bookshelf, poking around, lots of stuff underlined.
Marc:And it's always interesting to see what the younger Mark underlined at a different part of his life.
Marc:Towards the end of the book here, let's just pop open a page.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Underline the creative person becomes then in art, literature and religion, the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a new way to triumph over it.
Marc:He reveals the darkness and the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it.
Marc:This has been the function of the creative deviant from the shamans through Shakespeare.
Okay.
Marc:Man, that's fucking great.
Marc:That still is good.
Marc:Oh, see, this book is helping me.
Marc:It's all about other things.
Marc:It's all about transference.
Marc:It's all about having faith, surrendering, letting go, being part of something bigger than yourself to benefit you and the bigger thing, to feel like we have a purpose in this world.
Marc:Huh.
Marc:Let's see.
Marc:What else we got?
Marc:The whole thing boils down to this paradox.
Marc:If you are going to be a hero, then you must give a gift.
Marc:If you are the average man, you give your heroic gift to the society in which you live, and you give the gift that society specifies in advance.
Marc:If you are an artist, you fashion a peculiarly personal gift, the justification of your own heroic identity, which means that it is always aimed at least partly over the heads of your fellow men.
Marc:After all, they can't grant the immortality of your personal soul."
Marc:There is no way for the artist to be at peace with his work or with the society that accepts it.
Marc:God, man, you're preaching to the choir there.
Marc:As much as an audience likes me and I like them, there will come a moment where I'll think, why do you guys like me?
Marc:No, seriously.
Marc:All right, wait, let's just look at a couple more.
Marc:A couple more.
Marc:oh my god look look at this underlying thing the essence of normality is the refusal of reality holy masticate that in your mind for a while what we call neurosis enters precisely at this point some people have more trouble with their lies than others the world is too much with them and the techniques that they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself
Marc:This is neurosis in a nutshell, the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality.
Marc:God damn it, what does that even mean for me?
Marc:To lie to oneself about one's own potential development is another cause of guilt.
Marc:It is one of the most insidious daily inner gnawings a person can experience.
Marc:Guilt, remember, is the bind that man experiences when he is humbled and stopped in ways that he does not understand when he is overshadowed in his energies by the world.
Marc:Fuck, my brain's going to explode.
Marc:Is this too much for a Monday?
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:I just make excuses for myself, you know, that I need my world to be small and that it's okay if I live a life of the mind as long as I'm sitting in my garage and I'm speaking my heart and I'm speaking my soul.
Marc:But eventually that just is going to compress me.
Marc:It's going to make my world small.
Marc:I'm not going to get out.
Marc:How much can I spiral inside of myself?
Marc:See, I'm missing a perfect opportunity to do some hands-on transference and be part of something bigger.
Marc:I should just go down to Occupy Wall Street.
Marc:I should go down to Occupy LA.
Marc:I should go do something that'll make me part, be part of something bigger than myself that will transcend mortality and maybe have an impact for the community.
Marc:And for everybody involved, a good thing.
Marc:Why am I not doing that?
Marc:Because we judge it.
Marc:We sit and think like, oh, look at all those freaks, man.
Marc:They're just freaks out there, you know, playing, you know, hacky sack and drums and white dudes with dreadlocks cooking vegetarian meals.
Marc:You need those people.
Marc:That's how a movement starts.
Marc:You have to have the freak.
Marc:Someone's got to do the camping.
Marc:Who's going to do the camping?
Marc:They're going to do the camping.
Marc:They need to be there.
Marc:They need to become some sort of anarchist collective tourist attraction in order for people to realize that they mean business and that it's a real deal.
Marc:And then other people get on board and then maybe some justice can come out of this.
Marc:Living wages, more support for unions, maybe some punishment of the banking system.
Marc:Who knows?
Marc:But don't judge the freaks because someone needs to do the camping.
Marc:I sort of analogize it to the Jews, the Hasidic Jews at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
Marc:They have to be there.
Marc:Look, you know me.
Marc:I judge Hasidic Jews very harshly.
Marc:There's probably some secret envy that I have because of their insane commitment and discipline.
Marc:But, you know, I've been to Israel.
Marc:You go to the wall.
Marc:They're there praying 24 hours a day, keeping those ancient channels, those ancient channels of arcane poetry open.
Marc:to the supposed almighty around the clock.
Marc:And I just think that let's consider it.
Marc:I'm a Jew.
Marc:I'm not a Jewy Jew.
Marc:I don't do much Jew-ness.
Marc:But think about it.
Marc:If one day those Hasidim who were at the wall just said, you know what?
Marc:Fuck it.
Marc:I'm done.
Marc:I'm done with this.
Marc:Let's just all go.
Marc:Let's all go.
Marc:Let's go.
Marc:We're wrapping up here.
Marc:It's a wrap.
Marc:I mean, how long would it be really before every Jew everywhere said, what, those guys quit?
Marc:Well, can we, I mean, can we all stop?
Marc:So that's why you need the freaks.
Marc:And that's why I need to go get down there.
Marc:I got to go, I got to go out, do something, become part of something bigger than me that has some meaning.
Marc:You know, look, I do the podcast.
Marc:Isn't that something?
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:What have I done?
Marc:I've spiraled myself.
Marc:I've corkscrewed myself into the ground of me.
Marc:What were you going to say about nicotine?
Guest:Well, you were bringing your nicotine lozenges.
Guest:Yeah, into the garage as usual.
Guest:And I asked if you graduated from nicotine gum to nicotine lozenges or how that works.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you thought the nicotine gum was like ruining your mouth or what?
Marc:Well, look, you know, I haven't really smoked a cigarette in about 10 years, and I can't seem to get off the nicotine, and I know I should, and I know these can't be good on some level, but they're not as bad as smoking.
Marc:And then the gum, because I have a fucked, this is a long story, not really, but I have a fucked up bite, so like constantly chewing on something is bad for my gums.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So the lozenges seem better, but then I went online and they don't seem good either.
Marc:Anyways.
Guest:I got a solution for you, though.
Marc:What?
Marc:Stop.
Guest:Inject nicotine into your veins.
Marc:I always said, even when I did real drugs, I'm not going to shoot anything.
Marc:I've stayed away from shooting this long, and I think if I started shooting nicotine, that would be horrendous.
Guest:We all said that at one point in time, didn't we?
Guest:What I was saying is that I had this crazy theater director when I was going to NYU named Liviu Chule, who was this famous Romanian theater director, and he would quit smoking all the time, and then when he would start to direct a play,
Guest:And he would chew the gum and he would start to direct a play and he'd get more and more stressed out.
Guest:He'd start smoking again, but he'd have both going at the same time.
Guest:The gum and the cigarettes.
Marc:Well, that's bold.
Marc:You know, with addiction, you get to a point with anything where your need is going to overtake your ability to be prudent.
Guest:So you just need to keep jamming shit into your cells.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:I quit caffeine a little over a year ago and I drink, I think I drink a gallon of decaf a day.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, because it has a little bit of caffeine, so I might as well just drink a cup of coffee.
Guest:Why did you stop coffee?
Guest:I mean, what was... Man, I was so addicted to caffeine.
Guest:I mean, it was crazy.
Guest:We would shoot the office and, you know, we called so fucking balls early and I would, like, be at the Starbucks at, like, 5.20 a.m.
Guest:and I would get a quadruple latte.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:which I would guzzle on the way to work, then I would get there and I'd have a cup of coffee, and then I'd have a cup of half-calf, and then I would have iced tea at lunch, and then I would start my afternoon with Diet Cokes, all the way till around 6 p.m.
Marc:Did it cause you, like, stress?
Marc:I mean, were you over, like, because I find that if I jack up on too much caffeine, I get overwhelmed and I can't handle shit.
Marc:Was it good for your character?
Guest:No, it really had nothing to do with Dwight, really.
Guest:I wasn't playing like a really caffeinated character, but I'm just powerless over caffeine.
Guest:Yeah, there you go.
Guest:You know, it's like, you know, I just, my life had become unmanageable.
Marc:Well, thank God it was just caffeine.
Marc:I know.
Marc:In the garage, Rainn Wilson from The Office, from The Rocker, from the part in Almost Famous, we were in the same movie, you and I. That was my first movie.
Marc:I know.
Marc:And then we met.
Marc:I have a couple of weird connections.
Marc:I was in Atlanta, Georgia.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And my buddy, Matt Davis, lent me his car.
Marc:And he said, this was Rainn Wilson's car.
Marc:And I said, come on, dude.
Marc:Is that a joke?
Marc:And he somehow had your car.
Guest:He had my car.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was trying to sell it, and I was going through Atlanta, and I signed his car.
Guest:I mean, this was a Nissan Pathfinder.
Guest:My wife and I drove from New York City out to L.A.
Guest:when we moved to L.A.
Guest:in 1999, filled with our stuff and our pit bulls and chock-a-block, and we were poor, broke.
Guest:And then we drove it into the ground and then sold it to Matt.
Guest:And then he drove it to Atlanta, and then he was driving it all over.
Guest:And he was trying to get more money out of selling it on eBay with my signature in it.
Guest:Did you sign it?
Guest:You did?
Guest:I signed it.
Marc:Well, you know what?
Marc:That weekend he lent it to me because I was doing the shows there.
Marc:It sort of died.
Marc:And then apparently somebody vandalized it and it's gone.
Marc:It's over.
Marc:So I don't know that he got any extra money.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Who's going to believe that?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:A signed car.
Guest:Well, he had a photo of me signing it.
Guest:But, you know, who knows?
Guest:It's so stupid anyway.
Marc:But.
Marc:Well, so that's one connection.
Marc:The other connection is we, I think the first time we really met that I remember was we were involved in a pilot that didn't go by the same guy that did The Office.
Marc:If I'm not, is that right?
Marc:No, maybe it wasn't the same guy that did The Office.
Marc:That pilot with Janine and me and you.
Marc:Remember we did that big reading.
Marc:It was built around Janine and it was about a- Slice of Life it was called.
Guest:Who did you play in that?
Guest:I don't remember that you were involved in that.
Guest:Because all the extent of it, we didn't actually shoot it.
Guest:We just did a table read.
Marc:We were so close to shooting it.
Marc:I was so close to being so excited.
Marc:I had my bags packed.
Marc:Yeah, I had plane tickets.
Guest:Yeah, I had plane tickets.
Guest:I was going to fly to Vancouver.
Marc:I was Janine's assistant who used to be a big, powerful Wall Street lawyer who decided he wanted to change his life and be her assistant on this segment for a local news show.
Guest:And Bob Odenkirk was going to do it?
Marc:Bob Odenkirk was in it, and you were there, and who else?
Marc:It was like a pretty big cast, and we did that big table read out there.
Marc:I don't remember.
Marc:I think maybe it's CBS for all the executives.
Marc:And it went, I thought, well.
Guest:It went terrible, dude.
Guest:Your barometer for comedy is completely off.
Guest:I don't know what you're thinking.
Guest:It went bad?
Guest:It was terrible.
Guest:It was ABC.
Guest:I'll never forget it.
Guest:ABC, okay.
Guest:She came in, Janine, bless her, she's such a major talent and the sweetest person in the world, but she came in wearing a ripped up t-shirt, her arms are covered in sleeve tattoos and spiky jewelry all up and down and just totally punk rock, playing the pleasant news journalist lead of this show that they kind of wanted to be like a modern Mary Tyler Moore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And for ABC executives, that's so stupid.
Guest:I mean, it's like, and then she had just come out, I forget, it was 9-11 or something, and she was coming out against the Iraq War.
Marc:Yeah, it was like 2002, probably.
Marc:And her politics, I think, got in the way of that.
Marc:But it seemed like a pretty good script.
Marc:I thought it was a good script, yeah.
Marc:But we all signed in and was pay replaced.
Marc:We got paid anyways, but I would have liked to have shot the show.
Marc:But apparently, it was just one of those things for you.
Marc:You'd been through that before, right?
Guest:I had done a number of pilots.
Guest:And actually, this was walking to that.
Guest:This is so amazing that you brought this up, because walking to that read-through, I remember running into some...
Guest:stupid executives or something that I had met before and they were like oh man we just got we just landed as choice property we got the rights to the American office yeah and I was like oh wow and I was I was such a huge fan of the British show I was kind of bummed out I was like oh I'd much rather do that than this
Guest:Ginny Garofalo thing, which I liked, but I had a tiny, teeny, tiny part.
Guest:You were like some sort of managerial position, or I can't even remember, can you?
Guest:Honestly, I think I was like the sound guy.
Guest:Oh, I think you're right.
Marc:I think you were one of the, there were two wacky guys that would be running around with booms and mics.
Marc:Exactly, I was one of the wacky guys.
Marc:But when I talked to you then, even though you don't remember the experience, I know that you were in New York, and you seem to know me from Luna, and you seem to have been part a little bit of at least taking in that Lower East Side scene.
Marc:I mean, where did you come from originally?
Guest:I had asked you this before when I called you on the phone.
Guest:Had you performed at Dixon Place?
Guest:I may have performed at Dixon Place once.
Guest:I mean, I did not do it regularly.
Guest:Yeah, I know you didn't do it regularly, but I saw you perform there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm not kissing your ass here on your WTF podcast, but I thought you were so fucking brilliant.
Guest:Does that fly show up on the microphone?
Guest:That would be really cool if it did.
Marc:It did.
Marc:Oh, no, everything shows up.
Marc:I'm just happy I actually turned my phone off and my computer sound down.
Marc:But a fly is fine.
Marc:It's texture, Rain.
Guest:Yeah, texture.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:I saw you perform at Dixon Place, which was this hole-in-the-wall Lower East Side club.
Guest:It was like someone's apartment.
Guest:It was an apartment.
Marc:You went upstairs and there were couches and shit, right?
Guest:She lived on one half of the loft.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Ellie Kovan, Kovacs?
Marc:It was a pretty important place, like Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian.
Marc:It was a premier, it was part of the cutting edge of performance art in the mid 80s, I think, and that kind of stuff.
Marc:I'm making that up, but I hope I'm right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:you're absolutely right but I saw you do stuff and you were just amazing and it really blew my mind for what you could do with stand-up comedy because back then it was the days of like Tim Allen and you know stuff in terms of stand-up which I didn't I just didn't really get you know catch a rising star kind of stuff that still happens
Marc:I mean, I got an email from a fan just the other night saying that she went to the Comedy Cellar with her friend thinking like this was the place to go.
Marc:And the Comedy Cellar is pretty down and pretty dirty and pretty, you know, hardcore, you know, mainstream, if not pushing the envelope of what people can tolerate.
Marc:But there's definitely two schools now.
Marc:And I have to assume that now as you've evolved as a performer, you realize that that the comedy nerd community and the nerd community in general is now the dominant paradigm of our entertainment culture.
Marc:And that must be, yeah, good timing.
Guest:It worked out good for me.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Because growing up, guys like us just got the shit kicked out of us.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Where did you grow up?
Guest:Suburban Seattle.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I did regularly.
Marc:You got the shit beat out of you.
Marc:I did.
Marc:Now, let's characterize a young Rainn Wilson.
Marc:You're walking down the hallway of your school on your way to what club and what books are you carrying?
Guest:I was in high school, Shortcrest High School in Seattle, Washington.
Guest:And I was carrying...
Guest:uh, whatever book I was assigned to read for English.
Guest:And I was also carrying whatever science fiction book I was reading at the time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Robert E. Henline or something like that.
Guest:And, um, and then, uh, I was on, I was after school and I'm on my way to one of these, one of these clubs, which ones, uh, pottery, uh,
Guest:computer yeah chess chess model united nations or marching band you were full on and i was also in um a woodwind quintet what'd you play bassoon i was a bassoonist no yeah yeah how did you pick that one i i was i was suckered into it i wanted to i started on clarinet and i wanted to play tenor sax because all the cool kids played tenor sax and they were like we have enough you know what my music teacher he just bamboozled me
Guest:He was like, there's the coolest instrument.
Guest:No one else plays.
Guest:It would be so awesome if you played it.
Guest:It's so cool.
Guest:It's called the bassoon.
Guest:Let me show you the magical world of bassoon.
Guest:And he showed me, like, photos of bassoons, and he put one together for me, and I was like, wow, this is rad.
Guest:And bassoon is ginormous.
Guest:It's huge.
Guest:I mean, it's huge, but it makes a sound.
Guest:It's like you assemble this thing.
Guest:It's seven feet tall, and then you blow into it, and it sounds like this.
Yeah.
Guest:It sounds like an anemic fart.
Guest:It sounds like Mozart farting.
Marc:But it's like the bassoon is a huge thing, and it's got that little pipe that comes out of it with the reed on it.
Marc:It's a double reed.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:And you sit on the strap.
Marc:Well, that was the tricky thing about playing the bassoon, right?
Marc:The double reed.
Marc:Wasn't that what distinguished the sound from other woodwinds?
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:The oboe and the bassoon are the double reeds.
Guest:And you couldn't do it in marching band, so I did other stuff in marching band.
Marc:What did you do in marching band?
Guest:I played bells.
Guest:I played whatever they needed.
Guest:I even played baritone, even though I wasn't really a brass guy.
Marc:You played bells?
Marc:You mean you had a triangle?
Guest:Yeah, I had bells.
Guest:Try and pick up a girl at age 16 with bells.
Guest:And also, our band, we were the Highlanders.
Guest:We were the Short Coast Highlanders, so we had kilts.
Guest:I had a kilt and a xylophone strapped to my chest and trying to joke around and flirt with the ladies.
Guest:How angry were you?
Guest:I was a disturbed angry boy.
Marc:No, but I mean just in the sense that like... What's that?
Guest:I told my pilot to land after 12 o'clock.
Marc:He said he was going to circle a little bigger radius.
Marc:You didn't make it clear that we were going to be... I should have.
Marc:Oh, shit.
Marc:Do you need to call him?
Marc:He'll be all right.
Marc:Sounds like he's out of range.
Marc:No, but I can't imagine because... And I've talked to... I don't know as a defined nerd as you characterize yourself to be, but I've had Patton on and...
Marc:Hardwick sure yeah but like in my memory you know I wasn't a bully but I was also one of those middle people like you know I kind of went back and forth in between groups yeah but I never played chess I never had the focus to do anything that would you know make me a nerd but it just seemed like there was such battle lines drawn in that that being I mean I hear you like I watch you tweet and I watch you on the show and I have a hard time separating you from the character in some respects but I know that there you just must have hated
Marc:The jocks.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I think it was very different back then as it is now.
Marc:How old are you?
Marc:Like, were we the same age?
Marc:I'm 45.
Marc:Oh, yeah, okay, so we're around the same age.
Guest:But back then, it really was, yeah, there were the groups.
Guest:It was just like, you know, it was Freaks and Geeks, you know?
Guest:It was really, you know, that show just hit it right on the head, you know?
Guest:And nowadays, I think that the lines are much more blurred.
Guest:I don't think people... No, there isn't those lines anymore.
Guest:And I don't think that nerds just get the shit kicked out of them for no reason.
Guest:No.
Guest:But I would, there would be, you know...
Guest:I would go like into my required metal shop class and and, you know, Eric Mittman would pick up a wrench and hit me in the stomach with it just because I was because he knew I wouldn't fight back or whatever.
Guest:I was a nerdy guy.
Guest:And I started to picture you in metal shop.
Guest:I had to.
Guest:I had you had to take one of the shop.
Marc:I took I took printing.
Marc:yeah like book binding no like silk screening and offset printing like that was my option you could do the woodshop i would have been all over that because then you could make a cool artwork and you know business cards is what they wanted you to do i made fireplace tools you did welded it yeah but i sold it to my uncle dougie oh yeah for 40 bucks yeah what did he buy it out of charity or he really used them i think some of both so what was it what was uh what kind of family business did you come from
Guest:I grew up in a weird suburban bohemian home.
Guest:My dad was a sewer truck dispatcher.
Guest:A what?
Guest:A sewer truck dispatcher.
Guest:He managed the office of a sewer construction company.
Guest:It used to be called Erickson Brothers in Seattle.
Guest:Now it's called Jim Dandy Sewer.
Guest:But that was just his job.
Guest:That was his job.
Marc:It wasn't his dream.
Guest:It was not his dream.
Guest:He was also an abstract oil painter.
Guest:And he wrote science fiction books on the side.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Was he a good painter?
Guest:Because that's a hard one to pull off, the abstract.
Guest:It depends on if he's listening to this podcast.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:No.
Guest:I wouldn't tell him.
Guest:He had a lot of potential, and he still does.
Guest:And he's actually, right now, he's doing, I think, the best work of his career.
Marc:That happens, right?
Guest:How old is he?
Guest:He's, I don't even remember.
Guest:Old.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:70 years old.
Guest:Something.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And your mom was what?
Guest:Well, my mom was my stepmom.
Guest:She was a housewife.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, nothing.
Guest:She was a weird little housewife.
Marc:She didn't have any weird hobbies or... She watched soap operas and vacuumed for real.
Marc:And you don't talk to your real mom?
Guest:My real mom, she left and I stayed with my dad when I was two and then I got back in touch with her when I was 15.
Guest:But we're close now.
Guest:We talk a lot.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Does that have anything to do with your fame?
Guest:I feel like this is therapy session.
Guest:Sure it is.
Guest:Um...
Guest:Does it have to?
Guest:Yeah, it does have to do with my fame because, you know, that messes up the head of a little kid, you know.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And my dad is on his fourth wife.
Guest:My mom is on, I think, her fifth husband.
Guest:I lost count.
Guest:Your real mom.
Guest:My real mom.
Guest:wow mom went through two and she's really alone now so um you know it was a real fractured home and when i found acting like all of a sudden i i took to it it was the weirdest thing like i i really took to acting and my dad was very weird about it he supported me in all the arts but acting he was just kind of weird about it he didn't really completely support me and i didn't find out later that he supported you in bassoon he loved me playing the bassoon
Guest:He wanted me to take ballet classes, opera, anything.
Guest:He loves all those arts.
Marc:But acting scared him.
Guest:Acting scared him for some reason.
Guest:It freaked him out for some reason.
Guest:And then I found out later, I was in acting school at NYU.
Guest:I was like 20 years old.
Guest:I found out that my natural mom had been an actress.
Guest:And she had left my dad to have an affair with a theater director.
Guest:Oh, shit.
Guest:So she had this whole, and she was doing abstract experimental theater in Seattle in the late 60s, and being naked and covering her torso with blue paint and stuff like that.
Marc:Yeah, sure, sure.
Marc:And so my dad- Crying for no reason.
Guest:Yeah, my dad, for some reason, acting, he associated with that.
Guest:But I never knew that growing up and I took to acting.
Guest:And so it's part, you know, it's part genetic that my mom had been an actor.
Guest:But I also think that, you know, I kind of I took to it and I was pretty good at it right away in my first acting class.
Guest:The girls started to like me because I made them laugh.
Marc:Do you remember the play or no?
Marc:Or just a class?
Guest:I remember doing a public and private moment where you have to pretend to have a private moment and everyone is watching.
Guest:And I...
Guest:put on elvis costello's mystery dance yeah and i i rocked out to it as if i was alone in my room yeah and it brought down the house and afterwards everyone like came up and i had moved to this new high school at the time and in suburban chicago was it within the first six months of being at the new high school oh yeah it was the first first month you got your territory all of a sudden and then and then i got the lead in the in the school play and then i was i was off and running you
Marc:You're a star.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But it's interesting.
Marc:But counter to that, did you find that your real mom reached out to you more since you were a celebrity?
Marc:Oh, no, no.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It had nothing to do with that.
Guest:She made a concerted effort to get to know me when I was about 15.
Guest:And then, you know, we had a good relationship all through college.
Guest:Did she stay with the theater director?
Guest:She did not stay with the theater director.
Marc:It's so funny that your father, because it's rare the parents are that supportive of the arts, but more so than not, the people I talk to in here, they do have supportive parents, but it was conditional based on heartbreak.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Guest:I know how those people are.
Guest:He would be so thrilled if I was a professional bassoonist for the Cleveland Orchestra right now.
Guest:No, but he's pretty psyched that he actually wears Dwight Schrute paraphernalia around so that people will go up to him and go,
Guest:hey, I love that show, or I love that character, and he'll be like, that's my son.
Marc:It's kind of shameless.
Marc:No, that's sweet.
Marc:My dad doesn't even know how to get my podcast.
Guest:What?
Marc:Internet?
Marc:Yeah, where is it?
Marc:How do you do it?
Marc:What can I do?
Marc:Is it on the Wi-Fi?
Marc:Do you do the science fiction thing?
Marc:What do you find that, because I am not that guy.
Marc:I mean, you know, when people have recommended, I know science fiction friends.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they've been like, you know, you got to read, what's his name?
Marc:Harlan Ellison.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And I tried to read.
Marc:Philip K. Dick.
Marc:Well, that one, those ones.
Marc:Ballard and Dick seem to be the ones that were like, those are cool, even if you're not a science fiction person.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:It's pronounced Ballard.
Marc:Is it really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Ballard and Dick.
Guest:Ballard and Dick, they're the one-two punch.
Marc:Yeah, and I tried, and I did a little bit, but what gravitated you towards science fiction?
Marc:I mean, what do you think it was?
Guest:You know, I was an only child and pretty reclusive, and when I discovered reading, I remember going to the library and I started reading.
Guest:What did I start?
Guest:I really started with...
Guest:What's his name?
Guest:Isaac Asimov?
Guest:No, the invisible man.
Guest:No, the illustrated man, Ray Bradbury.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So Ray Bradbury, he was part Twilight Zone, and he was part science fiction, and he kind of opened up this whole world for me.
Guest:And I was off to the races, and I read...
Guest:hundreds and hundreds of science fiction, fantasy.
Marc:It was just a retreat.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Were you brought up with any religion in the house?
Marc:We were Baha'is.
Marc:I grew up a member of the Baha'i faith.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:I know nothing about that.
Marc:And I took a trip to Israel, and when we took the tours of the different headquarters of religions of the world, that one seemed to be one of the more practical religions.
Marc:It's pretty practical.
Marc:I mean, like, because it's sort of like, if I'm not, if I, do you still practice?
Guest:I left it, I vehemently left it for a long time, for over a decade.
Guest:I've come back in the last, you know, eight to 10 years.
Marc:Angry at the church or just at the idea of God?
Guest:All of it.
Guest:You know, I went from, you know, I went from kind of active practicing Baha'i youth to, you know, to living in Bohemia.
Guest:I lived on the Lower East Side of New York and I was 20 years old.
Guest:And I was just like, screw this, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I dyed my hair black.
Guest:I just, you know, stayed up all night.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Reading, smoking weed and reading Kafka.
Guest:And I was just like, screw God.
Guest:There's no God.
Guest:I don't need religion.
Guest:I don't need morality.
Guest:So you write it.
Guest:You know, it was really a rebellion against my parents, I think, more than anything else.
Marc:Sure, you were right on schedule.
Marc:The 20 is about the right time to do that.
Marc:You got the full juice to do that.
Marc:But it seemed like to me, what I know about Baha'i, it takes a little bit from all the religions and sort of mashes it up, doesn't it?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it's its own independent world religion, but it absolutely, Baha'is believe in the divinity of Jesus, and they believe in the divinity of the Buddha and of Muhammad.
Guest:Oh, all of them.
Guest:Abraham and Moses and everybody.
Guest:So the Baha'is believe that all of those people are divine teachers that are sent by God to humankind throughout the ages to mature us as a species.
Guest:And so we read the writings of the Buddha.
Guest:We read the writings of Jesus.
Guest:We don't necessarily believe what the Christian church does or the Catholic church.
Guest:But we love the writings of Jesus himself.
Guest:Isn't that interesting?
Guest:Yeah, and the stories of Jesus.
Marc:It's a very diplomatic religion in the sense that it's sort of like, these are all messengers of the guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And is the guy vague, or is there a name for the guy?
Marc:For God?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, just God.
Guest:Oh, that's nice.
Guest:Plain old God.
Marc:I like that when it doesn't have any- There's no fancy names.
Guest:But Baha'is also believe that God has sent a new divine teacher whose name is Baha'u'llah,
Guest:He lived in Persia.
Guest:It means the glory of God in Arabic.
Guest:And he lived in Persia in the mid-1800s.
Guest:So Baha'is are also followers of Baha'u'llah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I've never even heard of Baha'u'llah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And a lot of people probably haven't heard of him.
Guest:Well, they should check him out.
Guest:But not on the Wikipedia.
Guest:You actually have to do some reading.
Marc:Now, is there going to be a new guy?
Guest:Are they open to new guys?
Guest:According to the Baha'i faith, not within the next thousand years, but absolutely.
Guest:From the beginning of time until the end of time, God will not leave man alone.
Guest:God will keep bugging us with kind of moral, spiritual, mystical updates.
Guest:It's kind of like Windows.
Guest:You've got to go from Windows 7 to Windows 7.5.
Marc:I just find that interesting because I like any sort of religion that sort of honors the actual text of all the different sort of wisdom.
Marc:That's cool.
Marc:And you're practicing again?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:i am yeah that's cool is the church nice it really is i mean it's a bunch of weirdos don't get me wrong and one thing the thing i love about the baha'i faith is that it's completely democratic there's no clergy oh really no priests no rabbis no big hats no gurus no guys in funny hats so everything is kind of like it's the inmates are running the asylum yeah everything is elected from within you know so the baha'is of you're here in eagle rock the baha'is of eagle rock are gonna
Guest:elect their local assembly to kind of govern their affairs and stuff like that, but no one has any power over anybody else.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:And it's not a recruiting or proselytizing faith, really?
Guest:Well, people are certainly welcome to join it, but Baha'is are specifically not allowed to proselytize or try and convert.
Marc:Oh, interesting.
Marc:So they're not allowed to be annoying, which is why so few people really know about them.
Guest:That might be.
Marc:And they're pretty comfortable with their numbers, I guess, if that's the case.
Guest:Well, no, we'd certainly like the faith to grow, you know, and I'm allowed, you know, like now you're asking me about it.
Guest:I'm to talk about it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Welcome to check it out.
Guest:But, you know, we're not going to knock on people's doors and like.
Guest:um you know in try and insinuate in their lives you know when bahais go to other countries when i was a kid we lived in nicaragua you did yeah why well it was for the bahai faith because my parents were bahais so but they're not missionaries they weren't there to like quote unquote convert the natives they were there to to work in the local community and and to you know start schools and be of service and work with the bahai community no kidding yeah
Marc:What age were you in Nicaragua?
Marc:That sounds interesting.
Marc:I was there from three to five.
Marc:So it's a little vague.
Marc:You couldn't enjoy the coffee or perhaps feel the tension of the political struggle of the area.
Guest:I could enjoy the malaria and the dysentery.
Guest:You got those?
Guest:And I had worms, yeah.
Marc:You got worms?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Good for you.
Marc:That's something Americans don't really appreciate.
Guest:Big-ass worms.
Guest:And when you take the medication, they come out of your butt.
Guest:These things are enormous.
Guest:They're like garter snakes.
Yeah.
Guest:And I'm a little five-year-old boy, and they're dropping out of my butt.
Guest:I remember squiggling around in my underpants, and then my stepmom got a shovel and then chopped it in half.
Marc:Wait, you shat out a live worm?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's got to be the most traumatic thing I've heard.
Marc:A number of live worms.
Guest:And then I got back to the States.
Guest:We moved back to the States, and I moved into first grade, and I was shitting out more worms.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:In class?
Guest:No, just in the toilet bowl.
Oh.
Marc:I guess you couldn't tell the other classmates about that's a unique childhood experience I had a lot of them oh my god live worms in your underwear yeah so now okay so let's talk about the move to New York you you tapped out Seattle you did the local theater scene or what I was I was going to University of Washington in Seattle where I met my now wife in an acting class how long you been with her
Guest:Um, we've been together for 20 years.
Guest:We've been married for 16.
Guest:Look at that.
Marc:You beat your parents.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You won.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You changed the wiring.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Good for you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:And we have a six year old son, Walter, and you know, it's good.
Guest:We've had our ups and downs.
Guest:We've had our struggles, but life is really good.
Marc:So that's amazing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you have success in your life and money and a nice house and you can provide for your family and do it.
Marc:Holy shit.
Marc:I do.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:You won.
Guest:Yeah, well, it's never as easy as it looks on the outside.
Guest:That's for sure.
Guest:But yeah, I'm doing great.
Guest:I'm very grateful.
Guest:The Office is an amazing show, and I'm lucky to be on it, and it gave me a career, and it's awesome.
Guest:Very funny on it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And people love The Office, and they love the character.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:Is there a concern, though, before we go to New York?
Marc:I guess I could ask you this since it's on my mind.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Because I know you want to do movies.
Marc:I know you're a real actor.
Marc:And there is a certain amount of typecasting going on around you.
Marc:You are that guy, a little nerdy, a little high strung, intense, smart.
Marc:Do you fear typecasting and do you fear in any way that you might not have a future in movies?
Marc:Is it something you think about?
Guest:Yeah, I think about that all the time.
Guest:You know, my movie career has been pretty crappy, you know, and, you know, most of the movies I've done.
Marc:Well, The Rocker was fun.
Marc:I mean, didn't people like it?
Guest:The Rocker was really fun, and it opened to a box office of around like $2 million on like 2,000 or 3,000 screens.
Guest:It was one of the biggest box office busts of all time.
Marc:Well, that's something.
Guest:But, you know...
Marc:I could wear like a badge of honor.
Marc:Hey, I got a story for you.
Marc:I got the number one box office dud.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I think we were taken out by a couple other films, but I think we're definitely in the top ten.
Guest:But the great thing about The Rocker is most people haven't seen it and kind of roll their eyes at it because it had really shitty ads and a shitty trailer.
Guest:But the movie's sweet and it's fun.
Guest:And more and more, like on Twitter and Facebook and people that I meet...
Guest:They just love the rocker.
Guest:And it's really cool that it's kind of found a second life.
Marc:Well, that's what's interesting about the culture we live in because you're a fairly advanced human being.
Marc:I mean, you're very active on Twitter.
Marc:You've set up this website that I want to talk about in a minute.
Marc:But that, you know, despite whatever box office models or however it was promoted or whatever, you know, people went to see in the movies, anything can have a life.
Marc:And you certainly have a big enough fan base for that thing to have a life for the rest of your life and perhaps after.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And it's hard to really judge the success of anything outside of these old standards.
Guest:But the problem is in Hollywood is that, you know, for the studios, it's like, you know, did that.
Guest:And then Super just came out last year, this indie film that I did.
Marc:People love that movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's terrific.
Guest:It's a terrific film.
Guest:I'm really proud of it.
Guest:Again, very small box office.
Guest:It's doing really well on video on demand on the DVD.
Guest:It's going to have a long life.
Guest:But, you know, the studios look at that and they're just like, you know, oh, move on next.
Guest:You know, and the highway is littered with TV stars who have tried to break into films and had poor box office.
Guest:And they're like, OK, who's next?
Guest:What's the new show?
Guest:So you feel like there's a little stink on you?
Guest:There's definitely stink on me.
Guest:And it's, you know what?
Guest:It's, it's all good.
Guest:You know, when I came to LA as a theater actor, I've been working, I've been doing nothing but theater in New York for 10 years.
Guest:And I moved to LA.
Guest:I was like, look, anything I can get going in LA is gravy.
Guest:You know, it's fucking icing.
Marc:And you knew the game.
Marc:I mean, if you're at it for 10 years in New York, you know, when you choose to move to LA, it's to get into movies or TV.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But basically, I think most people think like, well, I'd like to hold off on doing commercials if I can.
Marc:I'd like to get one shot at something that would define me as an actor.
Guest:I did a ton of commercials.
Guest:Did you?
Guest:And a ton of really crappy guest stars.
Guest:I didn't do any TV or film in New York.
Guest:I did a little thing on One Life to Live.
Marc:Let's talk about this.
Marc:So New York, you're 20 years old.
Marc:You're smoking cigarettes.
Marc:You're getting high.
Marc:You're reading Kafka.
Marc:You got into the Tisch School of the Arts.
Guest:Is that where you went?
Guest:I went to the graduate acting program there and did classical theater.
Guest:And for three years, it was fantastic.
Guest:I had a blast.
Marc:Who were your favorite parts to play?
Marc:Did you play like Cyrano?
Guest:I did a ton of Shakespeare.
Guest:I really liked to play.
Guest:I played Hamlet in my third year.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was really awesome.
Marc:You must have been a really intense, uniquely aggravated Hamlet.
Guest:I was, yeah.
Guest:That's a good way of putting it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:it was it was cool it was a great experience you know i did a lot of roles like that and i got out and i did shakespeare in the park and i did a bus and truck tour of shakespeare for two and a half years with a company called the acting company can you tell me for yourself because i you know i've been too lazy in my life to to really engage in the in the full uh shakespeare thing and like what makes it so great as an actor and as somebody who's a an intellectual person
Guest:Well, first of all, I'm not like Mr. Shakespeare handjob guy.
Guest:Some people just think anything Shakespeare's written is just like a gift from God.
Guest:I don't feel that way.
Guest:I think Shakespeare wrote about 10 great plays and a lot of middling plays and a lot of stinkers that have no reason to ever be performed.
Guest:But his great plays, the comedies are really funny.
Guest:They are taking situations from Commedia dell'arte.
Guest:I mean, you can trace the lines of comedy from Commedia dell'arte through to Shakespeare, then through Moliere, and then to vaudeville.
Guest:And then to Warner Brothers cartoons and then to the Marx Brothers and on up to the Farrelly Brothers.
Marc:So Comedia dell'arte preceded Shakespeare?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Shakespeare used to watch the Comedia troops would come travel around Europe and Shakespeare and all the companies in England would watch the troops doing their Lazzies and their comedic routines with these classic clown characters.
Marc:And basically the Comedia dell'arte, because it sounds like you can explain it a little better to me because I'm sort of, I'm mildly obsessed with it, but clearly not obsessed with it enough to do the research.
Marc:There were types, right?
Marc:It was not broad clowning, but there was a series of types of clowns.
Guest:There were 10 or 12 clowns.
Guest:Clown types.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there were, you know, Arlequino's the main, you know, the trickster clown.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And there were the dumb clowns and there were the young lover clowns and there was Pantalone, the cheap, miserly, grumpy father clown.
Guest:The crank.
Guest:The cranky clown.
Guest:That's amazing because you still see it in stand-up.
Guest:I see types.
Guest:There are types.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And it all started there.
Guest:I mean, most of Commedia came from, you know, the Greek comedies and the Roman comedies.
Guest:you know, which those types kind of percolated through there.
Guest:But they moved it to the streets.
Guest:It was a populist.
Marc:It was vaudeville.
Marc:It was taking, you know, what theater and comedy was and bringing it to the people.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And it was in vaudeville, you know, they spray the seltzer in the face and the pies in the face.
Guest:In Commedia, they use the slapstick, which was literally a stick with a spring and another stick.
Marc:And that's where that came from?
Marc:Like that.
Marc:That's where that came from.
Guest:from yeah and they would run around beating people with the quote-unquote the slapstick and that's where slapstick came from I had no idea yeah does everyone know this so they do now and so Shakespeare took this yeah and and really ran with it and his comedies are so great because they're filled with these
Guest:just brilliant.
Guest:I mean, you could take all the, you could take all the great comedians here.
Guest:You could take Patton and Chris Hardwick and Tom Lennon and you, and you could do a comedia play with various guys playing various clowns and it would be amazing.
Guest:It would be amazing.
Marc:Why don't you do that?
Marc:Do you have time?
Guest:I don't got time.
Marc:Because the weird thing about being in stand up for as long as I have, which is coming on 25 years, is that they're there.
Marc:And even in the pantheon of movie stars, there seems to be this repetition of types that someone will come in to fill the role of the crank.
Marc:of the leading man, of the clown, the buffoon, the fat guy, whatever, it seems to repeat itself.
Marc:And I don't think it's a device of the comedy industry or the movie industry.
Marc:I think it is almost genetic that this Della Arte thing tapped into the fact that there are these modes of comedic behavior.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:There's the oddball, the complete goof.
Marc:Because there's always a guy doing the Kaufman schtick, like, oh, he's so weird.
Marc:Whether it's on purpose or not, I know in stand-up comedy that that role will be taken.
Marc:by Neil Hamburger or Brent Weinbach or whoever.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:And so when you did Shakespeare, did you get great reviews?
Marc:Were you inspired about it?
Guest:I mean... Yeah, I was pretty good at it, and I did all right with it.
Guest:I played a clown in The Two Gentlemen of Verona called Speed, who's a kind of classic Arlechino, kind of talks a mile a minute and...
Guest:Uh, he's, uh, and I got a great, uh, I got good reviews from that and had some good success at that.
Guest:And, but I, you know, I, then I moved on and I really didn't want to do so much Shakespeare anymore.
Marc:What was the moment that you sort of said, like, I got to get the fuck out of here theater.
Marc:Did you have a moment where you're like, either I'm going to have a career in theater, which is hard because there's literally, you know, what, seven people that do that.
Guest:Yeah, it's true.
Guest:Well, you know, there's more that do in New York.
Guest:But the problem is this is was really simple.
Guest:I went to L.A.
Guest:to get on a TV show so that I could go back to New York and get cast in a lead part on the stage in New York.
Guest:In Broadway.
Guest:That's what they would always do.
Guest:You would go to like, you would see, they would announce the new season at Manhattan Theater Club.
Guest:They'd have some cool new play being done.
Guest:And there would be Andrew McCarthy in the lead.
Guest:And you're like, why does Andrew McCarthy have the lead in this show?
Guest:Well, because he did some movies in the 80s.
Guest:He can sell tickets.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do people really go like Andrew McCarthy?
Guest:Maybe at that time.
Marc:Maybe at that time.
Marc:They've tried that before.
Marc:They keep trying that.
Marc:It's sometimes it works.
Marc:Sometimes it doesn't.
Marc:So that was your plan.
Marc:Like I'm going to go get recognition and become a bonafide seller of tickets and come back and take over Manhattan theater.
Guest:And then I got sucked in by the bitch of Hollywood.
Guest:Oh, fuck.
Guest:The sucking.
Guest:the siren song.
Marc:That whore.
Marc:But what was that moment like?
Marc:So you said, fuck it, I'm going to Hollywood, I'm going to do it.
Guest:Well, you know, to tie all this together, one thing that my friends and I did in New York is we did a show called The New Bozina.
Guest:And The New Bozina, that was part of my connection.
Guest:I kind of remember that.
Guest:Yeah, it was.
Guest:What year?
Guest:93, 95, 98.
Guest:We did it a bunch of different times, so in the mid-90s.
Guest:I remember this.
Guest:What was that?
Guest:It played at the Cherry Lane, but we also did a lot of downtown theater stuff.
Guest:We performed all over.
Guest:I got to know all those guys from the state, Upright Citizens Brigade.
Guest:We were all kind of hopping around doing plays down there.
Guest:What was the new Bozina?
Guest:It was clowns.
Guest:It was like a really fucked up Pee Wee Herman.
Guest:It was like clowns.
Guest:We called it a slacker vaudeville.
Guest:It was like clowns on acid.
Guest:And someday we're gonna revive it.
Guest:It's a truly great stage show.
Guest:These bunch of friends of mine, we put it together and it just kept rolling and we did an off-Broadway production.
Guest:And the reason I moved to LA is that we had an opportunity to put the new Bozina up on stage in LA and then to try and turn it into a TV show.
Marc:Where'd they do that?
Marc:What space did they give you?
Marc:Hudson Guild.
Marc:The Hudson Theater?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Which is now the Comedy Central Theater?
Marc:Over there on... Yeah, it's on Santa Monica.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's where that all happens.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It was right over there.
Guest:So that was in 99, 2000.
Guest:We came out here, we did it there, and we actually signed with Three Arts, and we actually got a TV deal at 20th, and we wrote a really terrible comedy pilot, and we did a pilot presentation for Fox.
Guest:That is terrible.
Guest:And...
Guest:Are you still with Three Arts?
Guest:I am, yeah.
Guest:With Dave?
Guest:No, no, Dave.
Guest:Mark Schulman and Michael Rohnberg.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I used to be over there.
Guest:But we, yeah, it was, they tried to turn the show, it was about these weird, almost nonverbal clowns, a lot of physical comedy.
Guest:They tried to turn it into ALF.
Guest:So they tried to take these weird postmodern clowns and, like, live with a typical family.
Guest:Like, they're living in the closet.
Marc:But isn't that interesting, though?
Marc:Because you knew exactly where you were coming from.
Marc:I mean, you were coming from a history of classically trained theater, and also you were entrenched in the Lower East Side sort of art theater scene, like Surf Reality and all those fucking places.
Marc:Dixon Place.
Marc:Nada.
Marc:Oh, Nada 45.
Marc:Yeah, and S122.
Marc:Nada 45 was Kirsten Ames, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the Aaron.
Marc:Oh, Aaron.
Marc:Right.
Guest:It was Aaron and Kirsten.
Marc:Aaron had it originally.
Marc:And Kirsten was his girlfriend who produced Jerusalem Syndrome, which was my first show at that little space.
Marc:I'm 40.
Marc:I remember that.
Guest:That ran for a long time.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It ran off Broadway at the West Beth.
Marc:But I was doing it at Nada, which was six flights up on like 45th Street.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I was originally at Nada was down on like Rivington Street on the Lower East Side.
Marc:Oh, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But Aaron Bell is who you're talking about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Great guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you're talking about this.
Marc:You knew it's somewhere in your in your heart.
Marc:You knew that if I'm going to go to L.A., the terms are going to be different.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:You must have had some sense that the disappointment was possible.
Marc:You weren't going to be able to sell a postmodern clowning show that was beyond Pee Wee Herman to Fox.
Guest:Yeah, well, it was, yeah, it's a long, complicated story.
Guest:I mean, we had, we also, USA was trying to branch into comedy, and they wanted to do like a weirder single camera, but there was a vote taken in the group, and I was the dissenting voice, and the group wanted to go with the big money to 20th.
Guest:What was your reason?
Guest:What was my reason for dissenting?
Guest:I wanted to do something weirder on cable.
Guest:You know, I thought like this honor the actual spirit of the thing.
Guest:Let's let's really try and live for a long.
Guest:Not to say that a weird clown comedy on USA Network in the year 2000 would have done very well.
Guest:I'm sure it wouldn't have.
Guest:But that's what we did.
Guest:And then I came out to L.A.
Guest:and it was weird because I'd really struggled in New York.
Guest:But immediately I started to get work.
Guest:I got into Almost Famous, my first movie with you and Galaxy Quest right away.
Guest:Then I did House of a Thousand Corpses with Rob Zombie and then some bunch of TV pilots and guest spots.
Guest:And I started I started rolling.
Guest:I had way more success in L.A.
Guest:than I ever did in New York.
Marc:And what do you attribute that to?
Marc:A skill set or that you got good management?
Marc:I mean, obviously, you're talented.
Marc:And I'm just curious, Seth, because there's a lot of people that don't get a role going.
Marc:Is it because of a type?
Marc:Have you thought about that?
Guest:You know, I had a lot of experience in theater and a lot of experience doing acting and transforming into roles.
Guest:And the guys I was going up against were mostly stand-ups and improv guys.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Who some of them are some of the most brilliant actors that I've ever worked with.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Steve Carell is one of the 10 best actors that's ever lived.
Guest:And he comes from straight up improv, you know.
Guest:But a lot of those guys are not so good at creating real, believable, grounded characters.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I was playing weird comedy characters that I tried to fill.
Guest:I tried to make three-dimensional.
Marc:You'd construct them and it wasn't so much.
Guest:You didn't have.
Guest:I wasn't playing a character like in a sketch.
Guest:I was playing like a character like in life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's what I think has worked with Dwight Schrute is that, yeah, is he a nerd?
Guest:Yeah, is he an annoying guy?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:He's a lot of different archetypes.
Guest:But he's also, he's kind of real.
Guest:You could kind of, you've met guys like him before, you know, and there's no pocket pen protector and there's...
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:There's no nerdy voice or anything like that.
Marc:There's also a sort of seemingly ever-evolving, you know, backstory that always is a good mind for funny.
Marc:That, you know, that part of that character, it seems, is as the show went on, you're like, oh, my God, that's part of his backstory, too?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:The beet farm.
Marc:Right, yeah.
Marc:And it all seems to fit because the guy's so, you know, off...
Marc:The grid, you know, personality-wise.
Marc:But I guess in terms of, so you leave New York, and who were the other guys in the Bosina?
Marc:Anyone we know?
Guest:They all work in theater.
Guest:One of the guys is in the Blue Men group.
Guest:He was one of the original Blue Men.
Guest:His name's Michael Dolan.
Guest:This other guy, Kevin Isola, does theater in New York.
Guest:And David Costable, you've seen him on Flight of the Conchords and Damages and on Breaking Bad.
Guest:He was in The Office.
Guest:He's like a character actor that you see everywhere.
Marc:Now, do you find that, like, it's interesting that a guy like you who has the chops that you have and can play a variety of parts, that you have a defined character, and you are a defined actor and a defined comedic presence.
Marc:You could have been a character actor.
Marc:I mean, character actors, like, they work a lot, and you may not know them by name.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But you somehow, because of your talent and your humor, you transcended that.
Guest:Well, I did just because of The Office, because it happened to be a great show and a really memorable character, but...
Guest:I still consider myself a character actor.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:I just get to do a little bit better than playing a nerdy lab guy on CSI Fresno or something.
Marc:Have you had opportunities recently?
Marc:What would be your dream?
Marc:Would you like to play a character completely against type?
Guest:Well, the last couple of movies I've done have been... Super was, right?
Guest:Super was.
Guest:I did this movie, Hesher, this indie film with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natalie Portman, where I just played a dad.
Guest:I played a regular dad who was grieving, and I spent most of the movie being depressed and crying.
Guest:And that was really challenging, really fun.
Guest:An hour ago, you'd asked about, am I afraid of getting typed as Dwight?
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:I will be known my whole life as the guy who played Dwight.
Guest:that's just the way it is but it's also a fun challenge for me to try and spend the rest of my career you know fighting fighting dwight yeah fighting dwight playing different kinds of roles and showing people what my range is and what my capability is i'm always going to play kind of i'm kind of weird looking i'm always going to play weird looking oddballs you know that's that's fine i'm not you know i don't need to be a you know play captain america or something like that but
Marc:Maybe that's the name of the documentary, Fighting Dwight.
Marc:You'll do it in like five years.
Marc:Oh, I love it.
Marc:I love it.
Marc:Let me ask you something basic about comedy because the one thing I notice about The Office and about Carell, certainly, and you, and really everyone who's on there, is that you do play it straight, but there's something like I cannot look at you or look at Steve Carell without laughing to a certain degree, that there's something emanating there because I know that when I've talked to comedians that do...
Marc:comic, you know, comic acting.
Marc:I mean, it's a comedy, but you're all playing it very straight on The Office today.
Marc:And the artifice of The Office is to make it seem, you know, straight.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:But I can never really define what it is that makes it inherently funny on an intellectual way.
Marc:Like, you know, because you're, you know, when you deliver the lines as Dwight, you know, how is that character elevated to comedy?
Marc:Like, are you, I mean, it's an innate awareness that you're getting laughs, right?
Marc:I mean, you've got, you've got to be playing it for comedy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Can you understand what I'm asking?
Guest:In my mind, the kind of comedy that I hate is the kind of comedy where you watch it and you know that the actors think that they're being really funny.
Guest:So the actors kind of have their tongue in their cheek and they kind of have that glint in their eye and like, we're being really funny, aren't we?
Guest:I like to see characters with high stakes really fighting for life and death and allow the comedy to come out of that.
Guest:And I think that that's one thing that we do on The Office well is, and the writers do really well, is to set those things up.
Marc:And a lot of it outside of Krasinski's character is that your character and Carell's character have an almost narcissistic lack of self-awareness.
Marc:And that creates a type of clown in a way.
Guest:I think if you do really absurd stuff and you take it really seriously, that's gold.
Guest:I mean, that's the Marx Brothers.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But there's no... Because there are just some guys... And that's Peter Sellers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I think it comes back to this Comedia dell'arte idea that there are some intrinsic clowns.
Marc:Because I can never figure out why, if I look at Will Ferrell, that I'm already waiting to laugh.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And that's, it's a magic.
Marc:It's not something that, you know, and you got it and Corral has it and there's other people that have it.
Marc:There's just something, you can't manufacture it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you're aware of it, right?
Guest:Yeah, there is that ineffable thing.
Guest:Like I have that with Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis just makes me laugh just kind of looking at him.
Guest:There's something just wrong in the eye.
Marc:you know that there's something the eyes are the window of the soul and there is something fucked up in there and you just don't know what's going to come out of that person's mouth next yeah and it's delicious yeah i guess that's it it's it's part of the magic so now tell me about this uh the website because i i've seen you uh tweet about it and uh i what was the soul pancake what is it and what is what was the inception of it and why'd you do it and
Guest:Well, as I got well-known for The Office, I wanted to do something positive on the internet.
Guest:I really wanted to.
Guest:The internet, especially back then when we first started talking about investigating this, there's more positive stuff now than there was five or six years ago.
Guest:But we just wanted to do something positive.
Guest:This was part of my other nerd past, which was I was going to be a philosophy major.
Guest:And I loved philosophy and I loved, you know, I grew up a Baha'i, so I was interested in religion.
Guest:I was really interested in all the different arts.
Guest:And my dad, we had such a bohemian household.
Guest:So the interconnectedness between creativity, the arts, religion, faith, belief, life's big questions, philosophy.
Guest:I wanted to make something just fun and vital and irreverent that dealt with all of that stuff.
Guest:So...
Guest:the way in that we found was through Life's Big Questions.
Guest:It's a place to wrestle with and connect with people about Life's Big Questions.
Marc:And how does it function?
Marc:I mean, what's the interactivity element?
Marc:I mean, it's a basic, I went there a bit today, but it's just people engaging each other?
Guest:We, about twice a day, we put up our own content.
Guest:So we have creative challenges, and we have Life's Big Questions, and we have columns from columnists, bloggers,
Guest:And you can interact with those and give your opinion.
Marc:So you built a community.
Guest:We built a community.
Guest:And on the side, there's a question collective.
Guest:You could post your own life's big question.
Guest:Your comedy question is like, what is it about the archetypes of comedy?
Guest:Why do we laugh at Will Ferrell?
Guest:What are the classic clowns?
Guest:You could post that on there and people from all over the world could answer you.
Guest:Chime in.
Guest:They chime in and you can dialogue about that.
Marc:Have you learned anything from it?
Marc:I mean, have you been surprised and shocked?
Guest:I mean, what do you... Here's the thing that I learned is that people are really awesome.
Guest:You know, we get really jaded.
Guest:Oh, people are such assholes.
Guest:And Twitter proves, like, what assholes people can be, you know.
Guest:But on SoulPancake, we have born-again Christians.
Guest:We've got atheists, agnostics...
Guest:People have never thought about religion, Buddhists, Baha'is, every stripe.
Guest:And there are civil discussions about all of these things.
Guest:And there's people like having respectful conversations.
Guest:And that's what we were going for.
Guest:And that's what happens there.
Guest:And it's pretty astonishing.
Marc:You don't get any of the occasional, like, you guys are pussies.
Guest:You know, you can, yeah.
Guest:We get a little bit of that.
Guest:But those people are, they can be flagged and blocked and stuff like that.
Guest:But it's a good community.
Guest:And we did a book based on the website, which was a New York Times bestseller.
Guest:And now we're doing a bunch of webisodes and interstitial stuff for the Oprah Winfrey Network based on, you know, we want SoulPancake to be a brand about, you know,
Guest:thinking about what it is to be a human being on a larger level in a fun, fresh, young, irreverent way.
Marc:Well, how do you feel about, because I struggle with this almost on a daily basis, that being who I am and having been in stand-up for years and sort of straddling the two worlds of guerrilla, drunken, weird audiences and the aggravated kind of...
Marc:disenchanted, bullying element of our culture.
Marc:And then you have a sort of more embracing, hyper-intelligent culture that is really a dominant force in pop culture now.
Marc:But they still coexist almost like being beat up when you were in high school, that there was always those sort of like apes that were like, you're fag, you're pussy, you're so smart.
Marc:I mean, is this a timeless struggle?
Marc:I mean, is there a winning?
Guest:It's the battle of good versus evil.
Marc:Is it?
Guest:Listen, here's what's happening in the world right now.
Guest:There are forces trying to tear the world apart.
Guest:There's forces out there that are trying to rip people apart and cause divisions and make the world a worse place.
Guest:They're selfish.
Guest:They're materialistic.
Guest:They're racist.
Guest:They're nationalist.
Guest:They're all of these things that just try and disunite people.
Guest:And then there are people that are trying to make the world a better place.
Guest:quality podcast is making the world a better place.
Guest:You're bringing people together.
Guest:You have hundreds of thousands of, of view listeners, you know, coming in and learning about comedy and thinking about the world in a new way and hearing people's stories.
Guest:And you're a storyteller as a comedian, you're a storyteller as a podcaster, you're a storyteller.
Guest:And so that's how I see it is like, it's all about trying to make the world a better place.
Guest:But before you die, like do your part to just try and make the world a better place.
Guest:And that can be out of making a fucking canoe.
Guest:You know, you can make a beautiful canoe.
Guest:That's fine.
Guest:But we do what we can with what God has given us.
Guest:And so that's what we want to do on Soul Pancake.
Guest:And, you know, I just try and ignore the haters and just try and make my own weird comedy.
Guest:I get, you know, weird projects going on and I play my weird characters and also do Soul Pancake.
Guest:And, you know, I've been doing some charity work and I'm able to help raise some money around that.
Guest:And that's just what I'm trying to do.
Marc:I'm trying to be a good dad.
Marc:How's that going?
Guest:Good.
Guest:Yeah, it's great battleship with my son for the first time the old original battle We got the old original battleship and then we've downloaded the iTunes iPad version And of course he fell in love with that.
Marc:He doesn't want to play the old school one Well, I'm glad that you have it and now you can put it on the shelf as some sort of artifact Yeah, your childhood But are you able to as a spiritual person as somebody who is you know enlightened around this stuff?
Marc:Are you able to have empathy for those fucking idiots?
Guest:No, no, I'm not.
Guest:I'm working on that.
Guest:But I want to say this too.
Guest:I'm not a spiritual person.
Guest:We're all spiritual persons.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Marc:Well, you think about this stuff.
Marc:Philosophically, you think about it.
Marc:But we all think about this stuff.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Even the tongue chewers, even the tea party tongue chewers, they think about this stuff too.
Marc:Well, they fight it in themselves.
Marc:And, you know, I just it's very hard to like I struggle with empathy, too.
Marc:I go back and forth like a really interesting thing happened.
Marc:I tweeted something and I've not been able to to shake it that, you know, I was at an airport and I had I tweeted something along the lines of it's sometimes it's hard not to see.
Marc:you know, people as just, you know, needy monsters sleepwalking through life.
Marc:And then someone tweeted something to the degree.
Marc:It's like, yeah, I love monsters.
Marc:You know, that there's just such a fine line between, you know, fuck that guy and like, oh, he's just a guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And do you deal with that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What you're talking about is the most basic building block of what spirituality is, and that's compassion, and to be able to see yourself in the other, no matter who that is.
Guest:Empathy, huh?
Guest:If there's a mongoloid guy eating a cheeseburger in the waiting room of United Airlines or something like that, and drools running down his chin, I'm there.
Guest:I'm right there with you.
Guest:We're all in this big cesspool together.
Marc:Let's call him a Down syndrome guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:It's so funny that some of us, because we grew up when Mongoloid was okay to say.
Guest:Oh, that's not okay.
Guest:I lose track of what's not okay to say.
Marc:No, but that's funny, because I've had that thing, I had Tabalowski on here once, and he actually used the word colored, because he's like a 60-year-old dude who grew up in the South, and he didn't even think, he had not updated his resources.
Marc:My apologies.
Guest:Down syndrome guy.
Marc:No, but I know what you mean.
Marc:But that's easier than dealing with some angry asshole who is putting nothing but hate into the world.
Marc:My issue is there's a part about compassion and empathy, but then there's that other part of you that's sort of like, well, how can I help him find his heart or change the way he's looking?
Marc:And why does he got to hurt me?
Marc:Then all of a sudden, it's not empathy.
Marc:It's like, let me help you.
Marc:And then they're like, fuck you.
Marc:You don't know anything.
Marc:And then you're right back where you started.
Guest:But you're doing it, man.
Guest:You're doing it.
Guest:You're the comedy.
Guest:You're the truth-sayer.
Guest:The comedians have an important role.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what other fun things you do with your kid?
Marc:Do you go to the Disneyland and stuff?
Marc:You have one kid?
Guest:Yeah, one kid, Walter.
Guest:Walter.
Guest:We've been playing some tennis recently.
Guest:I'm kind of really into tennis.
Guest:How old is he?
Guest:He's six, almost seven.
Guest:We play video games together.
Guest:We watch movies.
Guest:We do all the basic stuff.
Marc:Has he ever blown your mind?
Marc:In the sense of when they say things?
Guest:Because I know guys that have kids are like, where did he come up with that?
Guest:He said something the other day that was just amazing, and I'm completely blanking.
Guest:But yeah, he blows my mind all the time.
Marc:Well, I'm fucking thrilled that things are going well for you, and I really appreciate you coming by here.
Guest:This has been really fun.
Marc:Do you drink coffee?
Marc:Do you grind your own coffee at home?
Guest:My own decaf?
Marc:I only have decaf.
Marc:I'm going to give you a mug, though.
Guest:Oh, awesome.
Guest:I want a mug.
Guest:All right, man.
Guest:Thanks for talking.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:You got anything else?
Guest:I was going to say that on the back of your toilet, you have two magazines.
Guest:You've got Bon Appetit and you've got the American Airlines Departures magazine, which you subscribe to.
Guest:No, you subscribe to it.
Guest:They sent it to me.
Guest:Your name and address is on there.
Marc:I know, but I didn't do it on purpose.
Guest:But why would someone, you're taking a shit.
Guest:Why would you read Bon Appetit?
Guest:That's what you're shitting.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:You're looking at what you're shitting.
Guest:I'm looking forward to the future.
Guest:That's macabre.
Guest:All right.
Marc:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:That's macabre.
Marc:Thanks, Ray.
Marc:Bye.
Bye.
Marc:Okay, that's it.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:Rainn Wilson, very interesting conversationalist, I must say.
Marc:Had no idea what I was going to talk about, and we ended up talking about that stuff.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com.
Marc:New merch for Christmas!
Marc:yes for all the what the fuckers in your life I got a whole I got package deals over there there's buttons there's stickers there's a new tote bag you can get a little package with the stickers and the buttons and my new CD you can also get my new CD if you haven't gotten that I recommend it not in a cocky arrogant way but I'm proud of it this has to be funny available on iTunes it's also on Comedy Central Records and you can get it at the website wtfpod.com get on the mailing list okay pick up an app stop asking me who's been on the show
Marc:Go to wtfpow.com.
Marc:There's an episode guide there, and you can figure out what you can and can't get.
Marc:You can get it all with the app.
Marc:And look forward to the fact that we're putting out a DVD with the first 100 episodes available on MP3, hopefully for Christmas.
Marc:That's hopefully happening.
Marc:I will be at the Neptune Theater in Seattle on November 25th, day after Thanksgiving.
Marc:And right now, I have to go outside.
Marc:I need to breathe some air.
Marc:Boomer in here?
Marc:Boomer!
Marc:I really like the Boomer sign-off, but it's very inconsistent.
Marc:Boomer!
Marc:Boomy!
Marc:This is where cats are definitely not like dogs.
Marc:Boomer!
Marc:Come on, buddy.
Marc:If he were a dog, he'd be here.