Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

  As soon as you can flip that switch—as soon as you don’t care as much—your work becomes so much better, because you appear so much more confident. People think, “Hey, looks like you’ve got something going on, buddy!” After Megan and I got together, I started to religiously attend Will & Grace tapings, and I really hit it off with everybody in the cast and crew. I loved the show passionately. Being there while they were making the show was such a treat, especially watching all of these top-of-the-line professional artists doing their jobs so well. It couldn’t have been more of a Disneyland for me, and there was also beer.

  They took a shine to me as well, which was awfully flattering. They had written the role of a new boyfriend for Grace, Debra Messing’s character, and they held a bit of a cattle call, which included me auditioning with maybe twenty other guys. The next day they had maybe six or eight of us back to read more. I was pretty excited just to get a callback. The next day, Wednesday, they had two or three of us back. It was to read even more new material, and I realized this was all getting pretty crazy and real. They were really looking at me. On the Thursday they had just me back by myself, actually reading the scenes with Debra for the producers and the director, television institution James Burrows.

  They said, “Okay, we’ve written some new stuff. We really love you for this character. That funny little dance you do in the elevator is really working. But we can’t give you the part yet—we’re still working out some business. But it may go to you. In any case, we really love the stuff you’re doing.” Holy shit!

  The next day, Friday, they called and told me that Jim Burrows had put in a call to Woody Harrelson back on Monday—they’d worked together on Cheers—and Woody had just now returned the call and said yes at the last minute. “So you were great, but sorry, you know how it goes.” And Woody went on and did this great part for the whole season and was, of course, awesome. There are some very good reasons that he’s the big shot that he is, not the least of which are that he’s incredibly lovely and charismatic and funny, so unfortunately there wasn’t much to goddamn about. But I have to say, even just going through that experience was so thrilling and really did my confidence an immense deal of good. Just the fact that they considered me in that legitimate way was a dream come true.

  * * *

  Later that fall they were doing their Thanksgiving episode, and as a bit of a consolation they gave me a small part as a plumber. I had these great scenes with Megan and it was super fun, but I’d never done a multicamera show before, so it was also kind of scary and stressful. Everything moves really quickly, especially with Jim Burrows, who could do it with his eyes closed, and often does (he directs by ear more than eye; it’s mighty impressive). There’s not a lot of rehearsal, so I was nervous and had the live audience there to boot. I was about to make my first entrance of the night and Sean Hayes is standing by the door, saying, “Okay, here it comes, get ready. Getting close. Don’t fuck this up. You ready?” and making me giggle and freak out. I chased him away with as much composure (not much) as I could muster.

  * * *

  Getting to do that role on Will & Grace was very fortifying for me. It made me feel like I could play with the professionals at the breakneck pace of a multicamera sitcom, and getting to work with my lady, who had also quite quickly become my hero, was incredibly exhilarating. Shortly thereafter I got cast in a Fox pilot called Secret Service. As a young actor, or really an actor of any age starting out from scratch in LA, you have to take whatever you can get. You have to build up your union points, first to earn your union cards, and then, with cards in hand, continue to qualify for your medical and dental insurance. Eventually, when you start getting jobs and doing a little better, should you be so lucky, it’s hard to break the habit and begin saying no to any jobs. I remember auditioning for and getting a guest-star job on this terrible Tom Sizemore show called Robbery Homicide Division. He was some sort of heroic homicide cop? I’m not sure. Never saw it. The part was some sort of psycho beating in a small child’s head with a hammer. I had gone to the audition on autopilot and booked the job—I feel like I must not have known exactly what the whole script was about when I took the audition. In any case, when it all came to light, I decided to pass on it, which was a first, but even for pretend, I didn’t want to beat a kid’s face in. Let somebody else spend his day doing that.

  It was really hard to learn that I didn’t have to accept every job offered. A lot of early hopes were placed in the TV pilot basket. To roll the dice on a pilot and hope you might land on a Will & Grace. Or a Friends. Or an ER or an NYPD Blue. A great show that would pay you really well for eight years. So I was tickled when I got this pilot, Secret Service, until they suddenly said to me, “Oh, if this series goes, it’s shooting in Toronto.” And Megan was like, “Excuse me? Yo, buddy, what the fuck just happened?” We were just starting to set up house with each other, and a move to Toronto was not in the cards. Thankfully, everything pointed to the show not going. I really liked the people involved, but it was honestly pretty embarrassing. It was peopled by Fox’s flavor of actors circa 2001, which basically meant models playing Secret Service agents. I was the only one who could have remotely passed as a Secret Service agent, and I would have been a tiny Secret Service agent. I’m five foot ten and a half and maybe two hundred pounds, which, on this Fox show, made me “the fat guy.” This was a great example of how real life can unexpectedly supersede casting dreams. I finally won the actor lottery and booked a pilot, and because of the love in my life, I didn’t want it to go to series.

  * * *

  I continued to describe myself as a slowly rolling snowball. I was still getting TV jobs. As I had become good friends with a lot of the Will & Grace writers, who were some of the best comedy writers working, a couple of them ended up gratifyingly writing me parts in new pilots they were working on.

  One of them wrote a new pilot and wrote me a very specific and hilarious series regular role on his show. I went through the audition process, which was kind of a cakewalk for once, because it was written specifically for my particular sense of humor. The part was a weird navy intelligence guy in DC. I don’t usually have my moustache—I know people now know me with my moustache—but, clean-shaven at the time, I thought, “This guy should have a kick-ass moustache.” So I was sporting some fresh new whiskers, as I am wont to do, and I cruised all the way to the final network test to get the job, which was for CBS. I arrived at the test, and there were some other great actors there whom I knew, but I thought, “I got this. There’s nobody here like me and it was written for me.” I did the audition and, reportedly, Les Moonves, the head of CBS, said after I left the room, “This guy’s good, okay. But you know, I’m not really feeling the moustache this year.” And my friend the writer said, “Okay, he could shave it.” Les replied, “Well, we’ve got a couple of weeks left before we need to cast this part, so let’s just see if we can get someone with a little more juice.” That is an exact quote. Network executives like to throw around terms like juice and heat. Eight days later they gave the part to an actor apparently dripping with the stuff, Mr. James Van Der Beek. That’s right, gentle reader, it was Dawson from Dawson’s Creek. So we’ve come full circle once again.

  * * *

  I was getting these nice shots at success with some frequency, but I was consistently losing to douchebag corporate decision making like that. I have nothing bad to say about Mr. Van Der Beek, who does fine work, but when a comedy role written for me is handed to a heartthrob from a young-adult soap opera on the WB—a very different type than myself is what I’m driving at—I’m going to find that upsetting. I don’t care if it’s James Van Der Beek or Ryan Gosling or Anthony Hopkins. But that’s the business. (For the record, I have lost no jobs to Gosling or Hopkins. Yet.) Eventually one learns that many of the jobs for which one is “rejected” turn out to be incredibly bad experiences in one way or another anyway, which allows one to be more unaffected by the guys who don’t “feel like
a moustache” this year. So. I continued to plug away. I was getting good movie parts in delicious Sundance movies, also known as really intelligent independent films. I was becoming slightly more known around town as a dependable character actor, and that went a long way toward supporting my artistic morale. I was able to maintain my confidence, thanks to little signals here and there from the universe. One evening Megan and were strolling along the beach in Malibu, enjoying the tickling of our toes in the surf, when we unexpectedly happened upon none other than Garry Shandling. He and Megan exchanged greetings, having been previously acquainted, before she introduced me to him. I was (and am) a very big fan of his, so I was hanging back a bit. When I stepped forward to shake hands, ankle-deep in the gentle Pacific swell, Garry looked piercingly into my face and asked if I was in the business. I replied that I aspired to be so, and he said, “Stick around. You’ve got something.” Such random moments of generous magick would feed me through months and years of artistic starvation. Whenever I would even begin to think about changing paths, Shandling would appear in my mind’s eye, reassuring me to stay the course.

  * * *

  I went to an audition for Deadwood and met David Milch. After reading the delectable script, I literally said to him, “Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been looking for this show for my whole life.” We got along, and I got this really great part in the second episode of the series. Unfortunately, I got killed by Wild Bill. Spoiler alert: He shot me in the belly at the end of the episode. Still, to this day it’s one of the best dramatic items I have on my actor’s reel. That moment in Milch’s embrace fed me for five years. Receiving the approbation of an artist of his ilk went a long way toward bolstering my persistence.

  Around this point something started to seem weird to me. I was reading for a lot of dramatic stuff but not much comedy. As a theater actor, one generally engages in whatever’s in the season that year. You’ll do a Shakespeare, you’ll do a Sam Shepard, then you do a Feydeau farce, then some August Wilson. Or Martin McDonagh. You’re facile. I love doing comedy as much as I love drama and everything in between, but it began to dawn on me more and more that people really want to compartmentalize you in Los Angeles. They want you to be a specialist. They want you to do comedy, or play tennis, or speak French, but they don’t want you to do all three.

  I started griping to my agents—I should mention that right around the time I met Megan I moved to a slightly bigger agency, the redoubtable Silver, Massetti & Szatmary, and I started griping to them, “Ben Stiller just did this movie with all these weird, funny male models. I never even heard about an audition. This other movie was all firemen. There wasn’t one guy out of thirty-seven firemen that I could audition for?” Just as I was starting to grouse in earnest, I ended up landing a part on the George Lopez sitcom. A great director named John Pasquin cast me on George Lopez as Randy, which was a little bit of a leap of faith, since I didn’t really have the character nailed down. He and I played around with it on set and he even had me try it with an Irish dialect for fun, with a touch of the leprechaun. We finally dialed it in with this silly, sort of bombastic dumb-guy voice. On the show, I was dating and then got engaged to Belita Moreno, who was playing George’s mom, Benny. Randy was this much younger, weird trucker type who was really silly and great fun. I ended up recurring for a couple of seasons and had an absolute blast with the good people over there.

  Coincidentally, Sandra Bullock was one of the executive producers on that show, and I’d known her for a couple of years because she’s old friends with Courtenay Valenti, Pat Roberts’s wife. She was in their wedding party, as was I, and we had run into each other over the years socially. I had done a small role in her movie Murder by Numbers, in a small cop scene that got cut down to an even hilariously smaller appearance.

  Up close, it’s easy to see why she’s such a success, because she’s always having fun. She did an episode of Lopez as my obsessive ex-girlfriend who was also blind. We ended up doing this really hilarious episode together that had a bunch of clowning and physical comedy in it, which was really a blast and felt like another few rotations of the snowball. A short while later, she and John Pasquin were doing a movie called Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, and they were trying to find an unknown (i.e., cheap) actor to play the main bad guy. In other words, it wasn’t a great enough part to spend their budget on any “juice.” So, I had to jump through some hoops and do some auditions for the studio, but I ended up getting this part, which was incredible for me. It was the first big studio movie I ever did, and quite an education. This great guy and superior actor, Abraham Benrubi, was my brother, and we were your classic simple and scary thugs. We had such a gas in a bunch of scenes with William Shatner and Sandra, shooting all around Vegas, in and out of the casinos. At the end of the film (spoiler alert), Sandy ends up beating the shit out of me across the casino floor at Treasure Island. Everything about that job was a dream, but the best part was that I had won the role from my work, further solidifying my snowball.

  Shortly thereafter I got a nice part in this movie Sin City that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller made, based on Frank’s graphic novel series of the same name. This came about from a really random audition recorded on video in a room at the Four Seasons, so I never met the directors until I went to shoot it, but I think it went well because things were kind of starting to roll now. I was making a nice living as an actor, still working in TV, guest-star stuff, and more small film jobs. My woodworking was going great. My work and home life made me happy, which then helped me land more and better work, which made me even more happy and confident, and so on.

  * * *

  In 2005, I did this movie called The Go-Getter, written and directed by Martin Hynes. It’s such a sweet, beautiful movie and I’m going to plug the shit out of it right here. It’s one of several films I’ve done that went to Sundance, but apparently the timing wasn’t just right, because it should have been a total hit. Premiering a film at Sundance is a huge victory in itself, by the way, especially considering that just shooting a feature film to completion and affording and surviving post-production until you have a ninety-minute work of art that you are proud of . . . well, let’s just say that a film must surmount a row of hurdles immeasurably long and high in order to even reach a movie screen in the first place. This film has Zooey Deschanel and Lou Taylor Pucci and Jena Malone, all doing exquisite work as the beautiful young people that they are, not to mention Maura Tierney and Bill Duke in great supporting turns.

  I went in to read for this little part in the movie, and this is something I did a lot—if I was reading for one or two smaller scenes, like the guy at the bus stop, or the guy at the hardware store, or what have you, I’d go through the script and see if there was something else I could reasonably do. I’d go in and say, “I’ve prepared the bus driver as requested and also the thug at the end with the baseball bat, if you’d care to also see me assay that role as well.” At The Go-Getter I was reading to play the shitty night manager of a shitty hotel. It was a really fun scene, and it went really well and they were happy. I then said, “I don’t mean to be an asshole, but I also prepared the role of the potter. Can I try that?” And Hynes, the director, a bit befuddled, said, “Uh, yeah. Sure.” In his mind he was thinking, “This audition for the night manager was the best one we’ve seen. I love this guy already.” So when I asked about the other thing he was a bit confused. I then fortunately did an audition for the potter that he also really loved. I left and, as he told me later, he thought, “Oh, boy. What do I do? I love him for both parts.” He went back and forth between the two, and finally the producers said, “Well, give him both parts, then.”

  I was working in my shop when he phoned to tell me that he wanted me to do both parts. According to him, I then said, “Excellent. What else you got?” And he laughed and said, “Everything’s cast except I need an accordion player and a trumpet player, but it’s a small part. Kind of nonspeaking.” And I said, accordin
g to Martin, “I’ve got your accordion player and I play a little trumpet,” to which he laughingly agreed. The accordion player was Corn Mo, and Martin ended up using both him and his kick-ass song “Angel” in the film. So I ended up with three parts in the movie and we have remained great friends on top of it. It’s a beautiful movie. You should see it tonight, preferably with a date, and I guarantee you won’t be sorry. The Go-Getter.

  * * *

  I had found my stride. I could go in to casting sessions with confidence knowing that my weirdness was appealing to the right people in the right way. I had cottoned that it was only going to be every thirtieth director or so who was going to get me, because the other twenty-nine were looking for tits or blond hair or fast talking. Or I don’t know what. Juice? You just have to find the people who are on the same page as you are.

  To my great delight, Megan then got cast in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein on Broadway, so we went to live in New York at the drop of a hat. I’d always wanted to live there, anyway, at least for a spell. I was frankly tickled pink. I took a bag of tools, as I knew I was going to find a shop and build my first canoe. While there, I ended up doing this movie with Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst called All Good Things. It was a really interesting, cool project, directed by smarty extraordinaire Andrew Jarecki, who, once again, cast me off of a videotaped audition. I am still awfully grateful for the continued votes of confidence like that which kept me in the game.