Patton Oswalt on his most memorable roles and giving life advice to Dane Cook
Sex And Death 101 (2007)—“Fred”
PO: That was written by the guy who wrote Heathers [Daniel Waters], and it was directed by him, too. It was a super-low-budget production. I just have a lot of respect for that movie. It goes to the weirdest fucking places. It’s just as weird and ballsy as Donnie Darko. But for some reason, it didn’t build a cult following. And what I’m realizing as I get older is that a movie’s mainstream success is just as unpredictable as a movie’s cult success. Plenty of movies that are truly odd and deserve cults, don’t have cults. It’s just as much of a crapshoot to be a cult hit as it is to be a mainstream success. Isn’t that weird?
Reno 911 (2004-2009)—Various characters
PO: The show and the movie were as fun as you would think they would be. Those guys are open to anything. What was brilliant about that show was that with improvisation, you’re supposed to say “yes, and…” instead of “no, but…” But in Reno, they turn that around. And not only are they saying “no, but…” they are also saying, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll mace you.” The scene is based on them trying to shut people down. It’s so brilliant. As the series went on, they would talk to off-duty or retired cops, and [the cops] would tell them stories about even-crazier shit than they had on the show. It got to this point—as ridiculous as the show is—that they realized that Reno 911 actually clings to the reality of police work, which is just drudgery and dealing with lunatics. We shot the movie in Miami, with the final helicopter standoff. And for some reason, I got the worst food poisoning of my life. So the helicopter was hovering, and I was running into this house and puking my guts out, then running back out to do a take. I was amazed I got through that scene.
The King Of Queens (1998-2007)—“Spence Olchin”
PO: I lucked out getting that role. That’s where I learned how to act. Hanging out with Kevin James; he’s just an amazing comedic actor. Especially in terms of TV acting, which is really hard to pull off in a sitcom format. Also Jerry Stiller, who is such an old pro. He would go over the lines a million times like he thought he wouldn’t get it, but then he would nail it every fucking time. That’s where I first met Bryan Cranston, who was a regular for a while. And Jere Burns was there. For some reason, they didn’t fire me after the second season, when they were thinking about writing my character out because I was just such a shit actor. I just got to go down and watch Kevin doing his scenes and learn that way, and luckily I didn’t lose the job.
AVC: You were able to learn on the job.
PO: I did. It was learn or get fired.
Ratatouille (2007)—“Remy”
PO: They had a lot of different people read for that role. And Brad Bird was driving around one night listening to satellite radio, listening to a comedy station and they played a cut from my first album. So he took the track in to Pixar, and they did a pencil test of Remy doing that bit. And they brought me up, and I was a bit of a foodie at the time so we bonded about how chefs work and how restaurants work. We really got along. We’re still friends. I see him all the time because we share all the same interests. I thought I was going to read for one of the random rats. It took me a day to realize that they were having me read for the main guy. Then the next day, I got a call from my manager saying, “They’re making you the lead.” That was in 2005, and it came out in 2007. And I wanted to surprise my fiancée, so I didn’t tell her what I was doing until they sent me a copy of the trailer. Brad and his wife took us out to dinner and my fiancée was still pitching to Brad, like, “He would be really great for this movie.” So I had to tell her I was the lead.
AVC: That was your first lead role in a film, even if it was a voice role.
PO: Well, they had some guys come film me doing stand-up, and they put a lot of my mannerisms into the character. So there are a lot of scenes that even though I’m not talking, Remy is acting and walking the way that I do. They wanted to put that in the character. But the animators at Pixar are also amazing actors.
Big Fan (2009)—“Paul Aufiero”
PO: That was another one where they brought me the script. Robert Siegel wrote The Wrestler. But before that, he wrote Big Fan, which was originally just called Paul Aufiero. And nobody would do it. Then The Wrestler got him all this cachet, so he used the money to shoot the film. He wanted to do a low-budget thing. And that’s how I’ve always thought movies should be made. If he’s putting up his money and time, then I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, too. I stayed in Staten Island for a month. It was pretty intense. There were no trailers, no catering. We just went out and shot stuff. And it turned into something really amazing. It’s just absolutely his vision and his writing. And he picked the best cast. Marcia Jean Kurtz is my mom. She was amazing.
AVC: After Big Fan it’s hard to look at soy sauce the same way ever again.
PO: [Laughs.] I can’t say enough great things about that movie. And about a year later, I was doing a thing for Funny People with Judd [Apatow], and we did a show as a bonus on the DVD. And Adam Sandler was talking and he was like, “I almost did Paul Aufiero back in the day, but I thought it was too dark.” They really offered it to everybody. But the actors kept falling through.
AVC: Were you intimidated to be carrying an entire film by yourself, especially with such an intense role?
PO: I was more intimidated by… It wasn’t, “Oh, a studio is putting all this time and money into this, and it’s on my shoulders.” What I was intimidated by was I had been given this amazing script. It’s mine to fuck up, and I don’t want to fuck it up. That’s the thing that intimidated me. I wanted to preserve the writing and make sure this guy that busted his ass on the script had somebody who was going to work hard to deliver it. So that’s really what I focused on.
AVC: Were you into sports when you made Big Fan?
PO: No, no. It was more like, “Okay, find an equivalent obsession in my life, because it’s the same spark.” It’s just different fuel that creates these kind of engulfing infernos of obsession in people, so I put a lot of my pop-culture, science-fiction, apocalyptic obsessions into this guy’s, which is the rising and falling fortunes of a football team.
AVC: Did you listen at all to sports radio?
PO: No, no I didn’t. I didn’t listen to any sports radio, because I don’t think this guy listened to a lot of sports radio. I just think he listened to his own voice; there’s nothing penetrating that bubble. And if you notice at the end, the entire movie he speaks to the world through a telephone and he has one best friend, Kevin Corrigan. In the final scene he’s talking to his best friend on the phone, so he’s finally completely shut off.
Observe And Report (2009)—“Toast A Bun Manager”
PO: [Laughs.] That’s one of those movies I think will get the Office Space, Zoolander cult treatment a few years down the road; it’s just going to take some time. It’s so fucking good, and it’s so weirdly realistic. What’s really kind of creepy is, this guy is a little bit unhinged, and takes it into his own hands. It’s not that the same level of horror, but, like, the Trayvon Martin case reminds me a of a guy that’s like, “I’ve gotta just step the fuck up here!” You know what I mean? How many more of these incidences are we going to have? You look at this admittedly goofy comedy, but there’s so much darkness in it. I think it’s based on the guys [writer-director] Jody Hill grew up with.
The Informant! (2009)—“Ed Herbst”
PO: Oh, yeah. My manager/agent called and said, “Yeah, [Steven] Soderbergh is doing this movie.” I read the script long before I even heard that they were casting it, and I loved the script. I love the conceit of a guy who wants to be in a John Grisham thriller, but unfortunately he’s in our reality, which is just drab and boring. [Soderbergh] wanted all of the serious roles to be played by comedic actors, so he just gathered up all these comedians from L.A. and had us come in and just basically assigned us different parts. Then Matt Damon is playing who he thinks… I think the performance is so brilliant; he has the rhythms of a guy who is being very serious, but everything he’s saying is so farcical. It’s kind of extraordinary.
Caprica (2010)—“Baxter Sarno”
PO: That was very frustrating, because I got a glimpse of what the second season of Caprica was going to be, and the stuff they had planned for that show was fucking amazing. Beyond the stuff I was going to be getting to do, what they were going to do with that world, and with its darkness, would have been so thrilling. But I love the fact that even in a show as dark as Caprica—and in a lot of ways, that show was as dark as Battlestar Galactica—[Sarno] was very aware that people want their fucking distractions. Even in a future science-fiction world like Caprica, they’re going to want their Jon Stewarts, they’re going to want their Bill O’Reillys and their Rachel Maddows and their things to get all up in arms about, their Jay Lenos and their Lettermans. So I was playing that role, and I would talk to [series creator] Ronald D. Moore about what happens to a guy like this who is kind of aggressively shallow in a lot of ways. When he’s engineering that whole fight between Eric Stoltz and Stoltz’s rival, it’s not because [he cares] about technology and where humanity is going; it’s great fucking ratings. So what happens when the shit comes down? It reminds me of that moment in Cabaret when they’re singing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me,” and they cut to the Emcee from the Kit Kat Club just smiling and nodding in his dressing room, you’re like, “What happens to that guy when the Nazis rise to power? Why is he smiling? Why is he nodding?” That stuff is really intriguing to me.
The United States Of Tara (2009-2011)—“Neil”
PO: Oh man. That show. What was amazing about that show was not only getting to work with Rosemarie DeWitt, who is such an incredible actress that when she’s up getting her Academy Award, I’ll be thinking, “Yeah, I did a TV series with her.” But it was Toni Collette, when we did the table reads… For the show itself, they cut back and forth between her and her alternate personalities, but that was done with camera angles and makeup. But we’d be sitting at the fucking table reads, and she’s got a Starbucks drink in front of her, and she’s got the script in front of her and her presence would go into five different personalities, even when we were cold reading the script for the first time. Getting to see that was remarkable. I don’t know why they never filmed that as a DVD extra because witnessing that was so un-be-fucking-lievable! Just have her sitting in a chair and doing that. I will always, always be so grateful that Diablo Cody thought of me for that. When they sent me the script, it said, “Neil, an affable Patton Oswalt-type.” Like, what? And they said, “Well, we wrote ‘Patton Oswalt-type.’ Can we just see if he’s available?” And then they called me, I went, “Toni Collette, are you kidding? I’ll do this!”
Young Adult (2011)—“Matt Freehauf”
PO: I went in because I’d become friends with Jason [Reitman], and we bonded over the fact that we’re such movie buffs and we both own French bulldogs. So he said, “Can you come in and just read this script that we’re trying to figure out, as a favor?” He did say there’d be some cold readings with three different actresses who were being considered for the lead, and I was there for each. And he kept asking me to come back, and then they had Charlize [Theron] come in, and she really wanted to do it at that point. He said, “Why don’t you come back and read for this role again,” and we just clicked. There was something about it, we just started making fun of each other in between the read and just got along, and he’s like, “Yeah, that’s it. You guys are doing it.” I saw how amazing Charlize was just sitting at the table read that that’s the first time that I ever hired an acting coach and really started doing the fucking work. That was a huge evolution for me because that was about the time that I was going back to see more Broadway shows, and was really getting into Breaking Bad and watching Bryan Cranston. And I realized all these actors that I really liked are the types where they’re like, “Let’s just get the highlighter pen and do the fucking work and make this great.” That’s so much what Charlize was about. “Let’s do the work and make it great.” So I thought, “I’m going to show up with the work fucking done and ready to go.” I have some projects coming up where it’s like, “Here’s your script; you better go sit down with your coach and be ready.” And I’m so glad that Young Adult gave me that experience.
AVC: Did Young Adult give you more confidence in yourself as an actor?
PO: It didn’t give me the confidence to say, “I can do it.” It gave me the confidence to say, “I can put the work in,” which, weirdly enough, a lot of people don’t. And for a long time, I didn’t really have the confidence to do that either, because I had come up out of that whole alternative scene, which was all about, “Don’t try it, man. Just go up and wing it.” I think a lot of that comes from insecurity. It’s that fashion of improv and amateurism that comes from the insecurity of saying to the audience, “Well, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t go well, because I didn’t even try that hard to begin with.” It’s like, “Oh, that’s why you’re not [trying]. If you actually tried hard and it sucked, then you’ve got to blame yourself.” So that’s what makes it hard for some people to sit down and actually just do the fucking work, because doing the work means you’re making a commitment. I’m giving this my all. Now my all might not be good enough—and I’m just now seeing that with some movies I’ve done—sometimes your all is not good enough, but that’s a scary risk to take. That’s what Young Adult gave me the confidence to do, and working with someone like Charlize, who just gives her fucking all.
AVC: It takes real humility to say, “I’m going to work doggedly at my craft because I need to.”
PO: It’s real humility and not that false, “I’ve been doing this for 22 years. How hard could this be?” Just think of yourself as starting from zero every time. That’s what I do with every new role. I’m at zero, and I’m going to do the work.
The Heart, She Holler (2011)—“Hurlan”
PO: That came about when I was in New York a few summers ago. Vern Chatman and John Lee, who I’ve known for so long, were like, “Can we take you to breakfast and pitch an idea to you?” And it took me about five minutes to be like, “Yeah, I love this idea.” It was essentially seeing what the worst hipster in Brooklyn thinks the South is. The levels of satire in that show are fun to play. And in that initial meeting, I brought up a book by Michael Lesy called Wisconsin Death Trip, and they said, “Oh yeah, that’s kind of the basis for the whole show.” And then I was doubly in. I couldn’t have been happier.
AVC: It seemed vaguely inspired by an episode of Wonder Showzen called “Horse Apples.”
PO: “Horse Apples,” yes. If you can imagine that “Horse Apples” could be even more mutated, that would be The Heart, She Holler.
Bored To Death (2009-2011)— “Howard Baker”
PO: I played a guy running a spy shop in Brooklyn. I was a right-wing holdout in this neighborhood of hipsters. Zach [Galifianakis] and I had known each other for a while and it wasn’t in the script, but we just started being really vicious with each other. Then they just kept bringing me back to have these scenes where Zach and I are just at each other’s throats.
Community (2011)—“Nurse Jackie”
PO: I had known [series creator] Dan Harmon for a while, and I’ve always been a fan of his writing. Back when he had a MySpace blog, his blog was 10 times more entertaining than most shows. He would wrestle with his life in a hilarious way. And it was just a MySpace blog, for Christ sakes. Community and Louie were on at the same time. And Louie was a perfect documentary of how life in New York was in 2011, and Community was a perfect snapshot of life on the West Coast, especially L.A., in 2011. In Louie the world is just assaulting him and breaking into his person bubble constantly. And Community is about people sealed in their own post-ironic pop-culture bubbles and trying desperately to reach each other. Dan is oftentimes sealed in a bubble of references and irony and postmodernism. To see the humanity in that is a really hard thing to do, bringing humanity to those characters. And when he wrote the character for me—if you look at his nametag, his name is Nurse Jackie—I got to be another part of Dan Harmon’s amazing gallery of over-reaching C-minus people. [Laughs.] It’s totally a pop-culture reference, but it also gets to the heart of this guy’s tragedy. He does sort of see himself as past the expiration date. Everyone else on that show has so much more import. But these are all very damaged people trying to reach out to each other. That’s why [Dan Harmon’s] Community was so amazing week after week. They would do these very complex constructs and time streams—the claymation episode, the videogame episode—and get a human arc in each one of them. It was kind of beautiful.
Dollhouse (2009)—“Joel Mynor”
PO: Oh man. I wish I had some cool story. I got the offer to go audition, and I’d been a [Joss] Whedon fan for so long. I think I worked on that scene for about three days straight. And when I went in to do it, I just really went for it. It was the first time I had done anything that deeply dramatic, now that I think about it. That was just before I did Big Fan. But he wrote it so that the monologue was both funny and tragic. And I am just so fucking flattered that he hired me and that we’ve become friends. We email all the time. He’s just really engaged and effortlessly intelligent.
AVC: Could you talk about the character that you played?
PO: He’s doing a villainous thing for a heartbreaking reason. He was a computer developer who was always a step behind things like Google and Facebook. And he looks like me. In his past, he met a woman who was way beyond his pay grade in terms of looks and intelligence and grace and wisdom. But she saw something in him. And before he could finally break through, she died. Before he could show her the house that he had bought her. So once a year, he re-creates the moment that would have taken place when he showed her the house. He’s still hiring a brainwashed girl, but it’s to relive something that is very beautiful. But that’s Joss Whedon in a nutshell: The heart is still attached to other parts of the body that are not as poetic, and he is very aware of the push/pull between them.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2010)—“Dr. Demento”
PO: Funny Or Die called me up. It’s weird how back in the day, American International was the breeding ground for new talent, and now it’s Funny Or Die and Five Second Films. People are just working and learning how to make movies by making them. And God, did Eric Appel nail the Oscar pace of those trailers that come out in the fall. It’s like, “Oh, time for the Oscars.” That can be applied to any subject. And getting to work with Aaron Paul was great. I grew up listening to Dr. Demento; that’s where I first heard Weird Al. I knew all of his vocal rhythms. Those just drilled themselves into my head growing up.
AVC: You definitely nailed his cadences and his personality.
PO: Weird Al would never take credit for this, but he has been weirdly influential on comedy in the early ’90s. Especially sketch and parody. When I was growing up, there were certain R-rated movies that my parents wouldn’t allow me to see, so I’d read the Mad magazine parody and feel like I saw it. They nailed every memorable detail. If you’ve never seen Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” but you’ve seen “Eat It,” you actually have a pretty good sense of what the “Beat It” video was. If you look at the stuff that Mr. Show did and the stuff that’s on Funny Or Die now, they just nailed the absurd details. And I think a lot of that comes from watching Weird Al videos.
AVC: He was a prescient comic personality, a linking figure between vaudeville and the comedy world we live in, which is pop-culture obsessed and very self-referential. Weird Al has a gift for being ahead of the curve.
PO: And what’s so amazing about the Weird video is that it’s not about making fun of Weird Al; it’s about making fun of movies that are trying to get an Oscar. So there’s a whole other level. That last shot of me as Dr. Demento, it’s like Dr. Demento seems like a hero, but really he’s just a guy making fart sound effects. They do that pull-in with the music swelling, and it makes you realize that anyone can look like a hero.
Flight Of The Conchords (2009)—“Elton John Impersonator”
PO: [Laughs.] I’d always loved those guys, and I’d always loved that show. They asked me if I wanted to do it, and I was like, “Fuck yeah.” Me playing Elton John seemed like a no-brainer. Especially an older, bloated Elton John. We were doing it as a goof, but it’s a serious thing. Bono’s impersonator actually plays Bono in some public situations. And he was telling us some pretty fucking hair-raising stories about it. People are very snobby about the best period for Elton John impersonation. Same thing for Elvis. No one wants to be the bloated Elvis.
The Batman—(2006-2007)—“Cosmo Krank” / “Marty Slack” / “Toymaker”
PO: I was very happy to get to do that, but I was torn. It was one of the few animated things I’ve recorded where the entire cast was in the room going back and forth. I was bummed that I didn’t get to play an established villain. They made up a new one specifically for the series. I wanted something from the comic books. At first I was like, “Awesome, I’m going to get to be the Penguin or something.” But I was a fucking new guy. Goddamnit. [Laughs.] I still had a lot of fun, though. Having everyone in the room for an animated series is pretty rare.
Balls Of Fury (2007)—“Hammer”
PO: I was friends with [writer] Tom Lennon for a long time. We had kids just a few weeks apart. And we met on Osmosis Jones like a million years ago. We have all the same interests in movies and music, so we became friends. And they just told me to go for it, so I was just fucking around on camera, and they used it. It all worked. When you riff at work, sometimes it’s death, but that one worked, and damn if they didn’t use it.
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011)—“Santa”
PO: I was in New York doing something. Or maybe it was Chicago. But I got a call asking if I wanted to go to Detroit and film one really fun scene where I was a Santa Claus selling weed. I knew the writers. So I just said yeah. I blew the second 3-D puff of pot smoke in film history. Someone needs to add that to my Wikipedia. [Laughs.]
Two And A Half Men (2012)—“Billy Stanhope”
PO: They are kind of making me a semi-regular on that. It’s five minutes from my house. Getting to work with Jon Cryer is great. Anything that keeps me out of airplanes is fine with me. I can get up in the morning and take my daughter to breakfast and school. All my friends are working over there, too. So I just go hang out with all these people I like, and then I do a few lines and have a snack and go home. It’s perfect.
