Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (27 page)

The film was
The Men Who Stare at Goats
, and I ended up in a good portion of the movie as a private in a platoon of psychic soldiers. Mainly, I got to stand there at attention while Jeff Bridges talked to us a whole bunch, then we improvised a session of exploratory dance with him. If you enjoy the man’s voice and demeanor half as much as I do, then you can understand how I was about as jubilant as a pig in effluvia to find myself in this freak-out of a job. I felt like a valued scout in a troop being led by George, Jeff, and director Grant Heslov. Clearly, the moral in this story was to always remember, before turning my nose up at a one-liner, that it
could
result in the unsurpassable delight of dancing with Jeff Bridges.

* * *

R
ight about then, in the fall of 2008, the word was going around town that they were making a spin-off of
The Office
and Amy Poehler was set to play the lead. Megan and I were major fans of
The Office
and watched it religiously. I would often remark, “If I’m going to make it, if I’m ever going to get my shot, it’s going to be on a show like this, in a part like Rainn’s.” I had known Rainn Wilson for several years. We met in the late nineties, reading against each other for “weird guy in the basement” parts. I had always liked him, as he’s such a smart, funny, sweet guy, not to mention he also comes from the theater. We had become buddies just from seeing each other at auditions so much, when he got a great part on
Six Feet Under
for a string of episodes. I believe this was when the world in general really noticed him and I thought, as we all do when such a thing occurs, “Excellent. Well thrown, Wilson. Score one for the good guys.” Then, not long after that, he won his role on
The Office
. The mighty, transcendent role of Dwight Schrute, a portrayal which I am certain nudged the earth at least a quarter degree farther off her axis. My adoration blossomed even more when Rainn commissioned an oak trestle table from me in the style of Gustav Stickley and then insisted on paying me 50 percent more on top of my suggested price, a number which had been, admittedly, too “friendly.” A scholar, a sweetheart, a gentleman, and a clown of the highest order.

Hence, when the word came down about Amy’s new show starting up, I thought, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I’ve got to get on this show.” Allison Jones, one of LA’s most top-drawer casting directors—her IMDb page is gob-smacking, especially for comedy—had originally called me in years earlier to audition for the role of Michael Scott, the lead of
The Office
, among many other things over the years. She brought me in for
Parks and Rec
.

The creators of the show, Greg Daniels and Mike Schur, were initially reading me for a different role, named Josh, and the material was just so funny and so right on the money for my sense of humor. Megan was coaching me in our kitchen, as was our habit, and we were saying, “This is it. This writing. Oh my god, this is it. Don’t fuck this up, fat boy.”(We don’t pull any punches in the kitchen.) I had been in to read with the producers and some writers, and we were getting along great, when we arrived at a hilarious day, in hindsight—they had two guys come in to shoot scenes with Rashida Jones (a “chemistry read” to determine how well two actors play together). The two guys were me and Adam Scott. I had known Adam for about eight years and was a big fan, and I thought, “Oh great. Me and Adam Scott up for the guy who gets to kiss Rashida. He’s devilishly handsome and charming and funny. I’m . . . dry? Husky? Even I—even
my mom
—would cast him over me.”

I knew the producers liked me—I could tell they somehow thought I was special, and the feeling was powerfully mutual. A couple of weeks went by before I got the inevitable call. Sure enough, NBC had literally said to Mike and Greg, “We asked you for someone in the neighborhood of Aaron Eckhart [a very attractive neighborhood], we asked you for handsome, and you hand us Nick Offerman? Um, no.” And Greg and Mike said, “Okay. You’re right, you’re right, he’s really unattractive. But we really want Nick on the show. We have this other part we wrote, the part of Amy’s boss, so we’d like to put Nick in that part. His name is Ron Swanson.”

Greg and Mike had called my agent and told us about the Aaron Eckhart news, which was not unexpected but still crushing. I tried not to let it get to me. I had gone to Big 5 Sports to buy a jockstrap, as I have been known to do of a Tuesday, and I was in their parking lot when I got the call that it was over with Josh. I went inside and glumly bought a pack of athletic supporters. When I returned to the parking lot twenty minutes later, I got the next call: “But we’re trying to put you in this other part of Amy’s boss.” Okay. Crisis averted for the moment. Now, let’s get these jockstraps home to Megan.

NBC said to Mike and Greg, “Look, we love Nick. Historically, we love to test him for pilots and then not cast him; I mean, let’s be real, he’s not handsome—but anyway, that boss guy should be older.”

They then ended up putting me through four more months of sporadic auditions along with every other guy in town. They looked at old guys, fat guys, skinny guys, even handsome guys. You name it. Everybody and their dad read for that part. NBC expanded the search as wide as they possibly could and then slowly narrowed it again until it was finally back down to just me and Mike O’Malley—a splendorous actor, hilarious comedian, and fantastic guy.

I didn’t know he was going to be there, as I had only received a call from my agent saying, “Okay, Amy has moved here from New York. They want you to come in tomorrow and go on tape for the network one last time, improvising with Amy, and this will be the last time.” As you may have surmised . . . I went. I stepped out of the elevator and there sat O’Malley. My heart sank, to see a hilarious and charming proven comedy veteran sitting there. They put both of us on tape with Amy, improvising a couple of Ron and Leslie scenarios, and we went home to wait. After all that, five months total, I found out the next day that I had gotten the job, and not only had I gotten the job, but they hadn’t even turned in O’Malley’s tape to NBC. At the end of all that network hand-wringing, Mike and Greg had obstinately only turned in my tape, which is what I believe the kids today would call a “baller move.”

It was Mike Schur who called me with the news, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried. I cried like a little baby boy who has just dropped his bacon slice in a pile of cow shit. I said, “Listen, Mike. Please keep talking to me, and I am so happy, but I’m just going to cry while we’re talking.” And I just openly sobbed for, like, twenty minutes while he told me this story.

Three years earlier I had auditioned for a small guest-star part on
The Office
. He was one of the five people in the room that day and I didn’t even know it. I didn’t even know that I’d met him. He had wanted me for that role, but I’d had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t do it. Well, he liked something about me, so he went home and wrote my name on a yellow Post-it note and adhered it to the bottom of his computer monitor, where it remained for three years until they were creating
Parks and Rec
, and he said, among other things, “I want this guy on the show.” I mean, come on, after reading this fucking interminable chapter about casting in Hollywood, all of the bullshit, to then have that happen to me after twelve years in town? Megan immediately hit the nail on the head when she said, “If you’d gotten any of that other less perfect stuff, you never would have gotten this. Everything happened for the reason that you were meant to get this job.”

All I can say is that I’m glad I stuck it out without getting sour, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to work with a collection of the nicest and smartest and funniest people I have come across. And also Jim O’Heir, who plays Jerry Gergich on the program. Having borne the pain of so many ugly casting stories firsthand, and having heard secondhand of so many more traumatic, soul-crumbling rejections, I am left with no choice now but to turn squarely into the bright sun, take a deep breath, and mind my manners as hard as I can.

Let Your Freak Flag Fly

When a director, producer, or casting director reads a script, he or she then imagines their ideal actor for each role, just like anybody does when reading a book. You imagine Aragorn for yourself, and maybe yours looks like Viggo Mortensen, or maybe yours looks like your dad, or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, or Gregory Peck. When anyone reads any paginated material containing characters, then that person is required to envision the characters in some way. In casting, then, one is invariably going to develop an idea of what’s “right,” as in “What are the right attributes?” or “What is the right look?” or “Mark Wahlberg is so not right for this,” or “You know who’s right for the role of ‘Susan’? Molly Shannon!” When you are auditioning for a role, you’re essentially presenting your own opinion of the character’s attributes, your “choices,” as rendered through the presentation of your own body and voice, through performance, to some people who will almost certainly have differing opinions from your own, and that’s before you can even begin to address the matter of your skill level and your ability to communicate your opinion effectively.

When I first got to Chicago I was immediately confronted with the harsher side of “the business.” I got hooked up with a sweet but tough agent named Marla Garlin, who undertook the gentle guidance of my fledgling efforts. I started out auditioning for plays, commercials, and the very occasional TV show or film, and almost immediately, casting people started pigeonholing me: “You’re a farmer. You’re a plumber. You’re going to play a lot of blue-collar stuff.” I was fresh out of college, all bright eyed, bushy tailed, and full of piss and vinegar, so I thought, “A plumber? Go fuck yourself. I am amazing, I am going to play an old lady, then an opium-addicted elf, then I am going to play a stick and shove it up your ass, bitch.” (Apparently I used to engage in some pretty tough thinking.)

Marla tried to calm my ire and explain that these things take time and that eventually people would see that I was more than a plumber, but I was not to be mollycoddled by Marla. I was so bent on vindication that I had a headshot taken with a huge foam-latex cock (from the Defiant production
Big Mother
) in my hands and sent it to everybody in town. An audacious statement of defiance the meaning of which no one had any fucking idea. A lot of them thought I was trying to be funny, which I suppose was also what I was trying to do, to an extent.

I did much better in the theater than anywhere else. After a couple of years I became better at acting, reaching the level of “intermediate,” and I started getting film roles, which was exciting because there weren’t that many films coming through Chicago, maybe four or five a year. I quickly learned that any kind of pandering was the wrong idea, but that it was important to simply be myself through the whole casting process. If I just presented myself as sincerely as possible, that was the best way to have a chance of getting hired. And, by god, it seemed to work.

Nineteen times out of twenty they’re just not looking for you, and you have to learn to not take it personally. If the people are nice and you’re prepared, then you can tell when they think you’re good and you can also tell when they think you’re not good. There’s a certain level of trial and error to auditioning, and you must simply try to continue to learn to behave in the way you did when they made you feel that they thought you were good. You also learn what mannerisms turn off a room and then try to subsequently avoid those behaviors. Insincerity, especially “chipper” insincerity, will close down a room faster than ripping a crisp fart, the discharge of which will also, I can assure you, take some of the air out of your credibility. Save it for church.

By the time I left Chicago I was depending upon a few casting directors who were putting more and more faith in me, and having me come in for increasingly great stuff, swinging for the fences. Sure, I struck out most of the time, but that’s how it goes. They were hoping, along with me, that I would get lucky and connect with one of the pitches thrown at me, and I am very grateful that they saw something unique enough in me to keep sending me up to bat. You really cannot begin to do even remotely well as an actor without casting directors who put their faith in you, and once they do, so long as you continue to do a good job, they will keep bringing you back time and time again. The few ladies in Chicago who championed me really got me off on the right foot, and after four years of their benevolence in that magnificent town, I had amassed a very healthy résumé.

That is precisely why, when I tried to transition my song and dance to LA, I had such a shitty pill to swallow, because nobody was really interested in theater work. Some few were, and I think that’s why they are the best, or the least lazy, casting professionals, because they have the wherewithal to examine and utilize the great pool of talent that exists in the small quality theater productions that LA can offer. Other than those exceptional casting pros, nobody really cared that I had done these plays. I was still able to do a good job in my auditions, but I had lost my Chicago advantage, where people more often than not would have seen my work onstage. With or without a leg up, casting is just a brutal process for the initiate. They might be looking at two hundred people, or only twenty people, but either way there will almost always be a few good people competing with you. Even if you do a great job, it might not matter, because maybe they want a taller guy or a more muscular guy or a handsomer guy and you just have to learn to bear that simple hardship.

The better things began to go, the better the auditions I got, until I began occasionally testing for “series regular” parts on TV pilots. A pilot test is the most exciting lottery ticket one can lay hands on, because a TV pilot will generally look at “unknown” talent more seriously than a film will. Therefore, a person can suddenly find him- or herself with a legitimate shot at a show like
Friends
or
Girls
or
Mad Men
or
Parks and Recreation
, shows that value their performers’ relative obscurity, upon which fresh characters can be painted.