The Greatest Love Story Ever Told

by Nick Offerman

  N: But the thing is, you have respect. So you wouldn’t go up to someone you admire and say, “Hey, could you do a video for my cousin?” I’m with you, and I have learned a lot of that from you, but at the same time, I think people are really rude, especially with their social media. So I don’t want to say, “Oh, yeah, absolutely! Finger me! Touch my beard!” (Laughs)

  M: I let people finger me, but I don’t let them touch my beard.

  N: Well, that’s why we have such complementary personalities.

  M: I have a good story about award shows and how they can be a lot of work, and it involves a glorious movie star. Everybody wins! I was at the Golden Globes. I was nominated, and that year I was also presenting. The Golden Globes is hilarious, because it’s at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, and the room is half the size it needs to be to accommodate the number of people.

  N: You’re referring to Merv Griffin’s Beverly Hilton?

  M: Merv’s place, we call it.

  Everybody’s packed in like sardines. And there’s a caste system, and the movie people are at the top of the heap.

  N: The room is actually terraced.

  M: The movie people are front and center, and the TV people are relegated to the galleys, and everybody’s mashed together. There was one year I almost felt like my ribs might get broken—my stomach was mashed up against the table, and the back of my chair was mashed up against the back of someone else’s chair, and that person’s rib cage was also mashed up against their table. It’s close quarters, I guess is what I’m saying.

  That year I was seated very close to the stage left exit to the backstage area. And when it got to be the segment before I was supposed to present, they came to get me. I’m not a drinker, but that night I had a glass of wine. It was in my hand when they said, “We have to take you backstage.” So I said, “OK,” and gave Nick a kiss and said, “See you later.”

  As I entered the backstage area, I came around the corner, with my wine, and Meryl Streep was standing right there, just by herself. I had never spoken to her. I had only seen her in the front row one year at the SAG Awards when I won and I was walking up to accept the award, and I was so excited to see Meryl Streep that I fell on my face on live television. It was worth it. Believe me.

  So I turned the corner, and there is Meryl Streep. I said, “Hi,” and she said, “Hello.” I said, “I don’t know why I brought my glass of wine, but here it is.” She just looked at me, raised one eyebrow, and said, “How else are you going to get through it?”

  I thought, “I knew you were going to be amazing, and you are.” But that story really sums it up.

  N: There it is.

  M: Let’s just recap. Things don’t go from point A to point B in an unbroken straight line. You might have dreams or aspirations, but it might not happen in the timing you’re expecting, and it also might take a circuitous route. But I really believe that if you really want something, and you hone your talents and skills and persevere and seize opportunities when they come your way, eventually it will happen in some way, shape, or form. It’s just really interesting—all the different things we’ve been able to do, and the cool people we’ve gotten to meet and work with. And it’s fascinating how few crazy people we have encountered—because I know they’re out there. There have been a couple of doozies, but for the most part, everyone is surprisingly cool.

  N: Knock on wood. We’ve had a very friendly ride so far.

  M: Somebody told me a long time ago that a lot of people who have had longevity in their careers are also relatively nice, normal people, because producers don’t want to hire crazy people. And if it’s between two people, and one of them is not a bummer, they’re going to hire that person. And I do think that actually holds some water.

  N: Sure, I think it’s probably true in all walks of life.

  M: Peace.

  N: Peace out.

  M: This has been fun. (Laughs) But I think something else that you and I have in common is that we don’t want to feel limited. We want to do more than one thing.

  N: Yep, I agree. Even though I didn’t start out with the talents that you did.

  M: C’mon, buddy.

  N: I loved playing the saxophone, but I never had a teacher who was an inspired musician.

  M: Cut to: Your music teacher hangs himself.

  N: So I never had anyone teach me beyond the rudiments. But your artistic—I’m going to take a swing at a word here—polymathy. Is that a word, “polymathy”? Like “polymath”?

  M: I’ll allow it.

  N: I think that I, too, understood that the theater was a place where you can do a whole bunch of different arts.

  M: I agree.

  N: You can dance there, you can sing there, you can build scenery there, you can choreograph fights there, but for both of us, apparently, our main thing was, “Let me perform good writing.” That became clear to me. That’s what I wanted to do. When I did Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, I was twenty-five, and that was a very seminal moment. I thought, “If I can just speak writing like this to an audience, that will be a pretty satisfying life.”

  M: That’s something we decided a few years ago. I had a bad experience—the only really bad experience I’ve had in the arts, actually—with somebody who if I say anything specific will have me disappeared. But I had a very bad experience with someone in a creative endeavor, and I resolved the situation in my own way. And ever since then, Nick and I have said, “We want to work on good projects with nice people who are good at their jobs.” That’s the bottom line. You want the project itself to have integrity in whatever way—either the funniest thing in the world, or the saddest, or somewhere in between. And you want the people you work with to be nice people, good people, with integrity. But you also want them to be really, really great at what they do, in all departments. So if you’re doing a movie, you want the best boy to be the BEST best boy ever in the whole wide world. So that’s what we aim for, but of course that doesn’t always happen.

  I’ve always been such a late bloomer. I didn’t even get Will & Grace the first time around until I was almost forty, and there’s so much more I want to do. In some ways, I wish that I had gotten to start a little bit younger with things hitting success-wise, so that I had a bigger body of work, as they say. But it is what it is. I’m childlike in my optimism and the feeling that there are so many great things that lie ahead, probably to the point of naïveté. But that’s how I feel.

  N: I shouldn’t be at all surprised. You can’t stop one of the greats.

  M: (Laughs) You know, we’re talking about all of this, but then you have to put it into context. It’s not Dame Judi and Olivier talking, it’s just us chickens. But there is something mysterious about the creative process. At least to me, anyway.

  N: Not to me.

  M: (Laughs)

  N: I think we’ve touched on this in other sections, but I can’t help looking at our careers without being so aware, in Megan’s history and my own, and also in our present lives, that we’re the perfect laboratory experiment for how sexist Hollywood is. Because I think I’m perfectly entertaining enough to do a passable job in acting roles, but Megan is such a ridiculous package of talent in a way that I’m not. She has gifts. And that’s why, from an early age, she was cast. She’d be up for a show, and they’d say, “Freshmen don’t get cast, but you get a lead role and a song.” And I didn’t. It’s because Megan is a star.

  M: No. Oh, wait a minute, maybe I am the shit.

  (Both laugh)

  N: So to live in a house with a star and a donkey, and the donkey . . . There seem to be a lot more roles for authoritarian white guys—principals, coaches, soldiers, ex-athletes, cops—than there are for women over thirty-five.

  M: Well, I do think there’s more that I have to offer, sides that I haven’t really had opportunities to show so far. But I still think I’ll get to sho
w them, which I said earlier. I don’t know if I’m particularly an optimist. Maybe I am, or maybe some other word would describe it better. A dummy? But I feel like eventually I’ll get to show more. But it’s all sort of academic, because I’ve gotten to do a lot of great things. I’ve been lucky. It’s funny when people say, “You’ve never even had a real job,” and I say, “What are you talking about? What we do is hard, bro!” But in another way, we’re just crazy lucky, because it is also 100 percent like playing. But if you’re doing what you love to do, it’s going to feel like play no matter what career you’re in.

  N: Yup.

  Nick: The topic is . . .

  Megan: Keeping it fresh.

  N: Keeping it fresh.

  M: Are we talking about vaginas? Or . . .

  N: Yes, please. Let’s cross vinegar off the list, for starters.

  M: Let’s keep this douche runner for sure. It’s too bad we didn’t start that earlier.

  N: It’s going to be a big hit. In 1976.

  M: We’re supposed to talk about puzzles. And dogs. And other fascinating ways we keep it fresh.

  It’s pretty easy to keep it fresh when we have 17,000 different jobs a year.

  N: When I think of the situation where a married couple needs to keep it fresh, it’s where you have lives . . .

  M: You’re in a rut.

  N: You have lives where there’s repeatability, where there’s a pattern. You’re working at the bank, or taking the kids to soccer, if that’s what it is. But we have really strange lives in comparison to nine-to-five households, as in it’s all we can do to GET to our house.

  M: We’re not in our house right now. I don’t know if we’ve been in our house for any part of this book. I think we’ve been in different hotels for every single chapter.

  N: We’re in a Georgian-themed bedroom in a fancy hotel in Newport, Rhode Island (Both laugh), because we just played the Newport Folk Festival.

  M: I played a couple of shows with Nancy And Beth, and Nick did a bunch of stuff, including two big dance numbers in our Nancy And Beth show!

  N: But that’s typical. Tomorrow Megan flies to LA, but I have to drive to Brooklyn to work on a movie. She has to go start the new Will & Grace. So our lives are kept fresh to a fault. And so we just kind of hang on to each other for dear life and make sure that we place our relationship as the top priority before our jobs. As previously mentioned, we have our two-week rule, but we rarely have to invoke it. Maybe a few times a year, we’ll spend a week apart. But because of Will & Grace and this movie, we’re about to have a twelve-day thing. Then we’ll see each other two weekends in a row, then we have a two-week-apart time.

  M: Then we’re together a chunk. But after that we’ve decided to take a lot of time off. Once every year and a half, we take about two months off. We’re doing that this year around the holidays. We’re taking a break to have real time together.

  N: Again, I feel like we do a pretty good job—we took a pretty amazing month-long trip through Europe.

  M: That was when we were fingering each other at the Vatican.

  N: Yeah. So we’ve come full circle.

  (Both laugh)

  M: What do we do when we have time off? I think we’ve already covered a lot of this. On Nick’s side we have woodworking, guitar playing, singing, fashion. . . .

  N: Yeah, those all have to do with how I have survived, or sometimes thrived, while trying to get acting work, by turning other things that I love to do into a remunerative pastime. Or just a place of solace and productive consumption of time versus sitting in the bar. For me, because I was a theater guy in Chicago, I was brought up to go to the bar. I love the pub. I like to drink pints of beer and listen to music and tell stories. I love bar life. I had to really wean myself off of it in my thirties because it was just not healthy.

  M: We’re recording this in a bar, by the way.

  N: In our household, I feel like our hobby, our life preserver, has become doing jigsaw puzzles while simultaneously listening to audiobooks. And it’s particularly because of all the fucking noise that exists today. We’re both lucky enough to be busy with all kinds of jobs, but those jobs bring with them so much noise. Like, we did a photoshoot recently and it was rife with emails and scheduling. We had originally actually passed on it, in fact, because we were taking time away to work on this book. And they came back and said, “If we change the shoot to San Francisco, will you come in from your writing retreat for a day?” And we agreed, because we thought it would be a fun thing to take part in. But there’s just so much noise.

  M: It’s the story of two introverts who can’t say no.

  N: So doing puzzles and listening to audiobooks are two things that require us to turn off. You can’t do either of those things and have your phone turned on, or any other media. You have to completely put yourself in a vacuum. That’s what’s so great about hobbies and disciplines: for us it’s a matter of health. It’s not like we’re sitting around asking each other, “What do you want to do this weekend? Let’s do a puzzle and listen to a book.” We say, “Next week we have four days. We’re going to do two puzzles and listen to two books.”

  M: (Laughs) Well, maybe not that much. It usually takes a few days per puzzle, depending on the number of pieces.

  N: Yeah, don’t hold me to those numbers.

  M: Now we’re just writing a puzzle book. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. We’re writing a book about jigsaw puzzles. Anyway, we do that when we can. This last Thanksgiving Nick and I went up to Big Sur. We actually checked our cell phones at the reception desk of the hotel the night we arrived. We said, “Take these and don’t give them back to us no matter what happens.” Like that scene from Young Frankenstein: “Do not open this door, no matter how much I beg or plead.” And we didn’t have our cell phones for eleven days. We didn’t go online, we didn’t check anything. We did a lot of puzzles and we listened to a lot of books. We read books in hard copy. We sat outside and looked at the ocean. The stars.

  And it was also right after the election, so we watched a lot of CNN and MSNBC and railed at the gods. It was great. I would throw my phone out the window right this second if I thought that I could get away with it. I’ve now pretty much completely given up my computer. I rarely use my laptop unless I absolutely have to. If I have to go through and choose photos from a photo shoot, if it’s something where I have to have a big screen, I’ll use it, but otherwise I never use my computer. I do everything on my phone. But of course I resent my phone at the same time that it’s this great convenience.

  N: It’s a conundrum.

  M: I look back with longing to the years that I lived on Harper Avenue in that duplex, the last three of which were with Nick. I lived there for sixteen years, and I think about how simple everything was, because it was pre-everything-digital.

  N: You didn’t know what people were doing in New York.

  M: Yeah, it didn’t matter. And when you were in your car, you were just in your car; you weren’t going to get a phone call. There was no reason to be crashing your car because you desperately needed to text somebody. Because you’re in your car, it’s your private time, you’re alone. And at home, the same thing. I loved that. I drive down Harper all the time. Every time I’m in that neighborhood, I drive down Harper and I slow down in front of that building because I loved living there.

  N: It was a great home.

  M: And it was a simple life, and in many ways richer because we had time for things like, oh, I don’t know, a social life. Going out to dinner. Just hanging out and doing nothing. Can you imagine? (Laughs)

  But ultimately, you just have to do the things that you love to do. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the fact that Nick and I get to do so many of those things professionally. If our goal is to work on good material with nice people who are good at their jobs, the amount of times we get to do that, with all three of those
boxes being ticked off, is pretty incredible. Sometimes only one or two of the boxes are ticked off, and then it’s maybe not as great. Or none of the boxes. But that’s the life of a betting man.

  N: That’s the exception, not the rule.

  M: Clearly, you haven’t yet done an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter commercial.

  Also, I just want to say that no one should be discouraged from trying their hand at any discipline that they’re attracted to. You have the freedom to do it. Whether you’re going to be amazing at it remains to be seen. But you should be able to try yourself out, and it’s nice to have a lot of little fun things at hand to take your mind off of all the stresses of daily life.

  N: It is.

  M: Anything you can lose yourself in, do it. Whether it’s going on a hike, or drawing a picture, or calling your best friend on the phone, do that. I guess I’m done.

  N: The end.

  * * *

  —

  M: I have a new topic.

  N: The topic is . . .

  M: Dogs!

  N: Dogs.

  M: We have good dogs. We’ve always had good dogs.

  N: Yeah, we met partly over Willa, who was our first dog that Megan rescued a few months before . . .

  M: Before I rescued you.

  N: Before you rescued me. And we were both bedraggled, in need of nutrition.

  M: Both wearing golden overalls. It was very strange.

  N: Wasn’t there something to it? When you brought Willa to rehearsal, I was good with her?

  M: Yes, I had to bring Willa with me a few times to rehearsal because I lived by myself. Nick was the only one who really played with her, which I thought was very sweet. Little did I know he was trying to get into my pannies.

  N: It wasn’t the only play I was making. . . . I love dogs. If somebody’s got an animal around, I want to be friends with it.