Will Arnett is one of Canada’s most versatile comic exports. He’s played the incompetent magician Gob Bluth on “Arrested Development,” the cynical equine philosopher of “BoJack Horseman” and the gravel-munching Batman of the “Lego” movies.
And yet the Toronto-born actor has until recently avoided one of the most obvious outlets for his fast-quipping talents: standup comedy, the catalyst for marital analysis in his new movie, “Is This Thing On?”
It wasn’t due to a fear of bombing, he told the Star during a recent hometown visit that included braving a record early-season snowstorm and taking in a Maple Leafs hockey game. It was the fear of having to try.
“It wasn’t something I ever considered,” confessed Arnett, 55. “It always seemed superhard, which it is. And I thought I probably didn’t have the guts to do it, if I’m being honest — sit down and write a bunch of jokes, and then I could really fall on my face. It seemed kind of scary.”
Even tougher is playing a character who bears some comparison with his own life, which is the case in “Is This Thing On?” which opens Dec. 19 in Toronto theatres. The dramedy cuts so close to the bone, Arnett felt at times he couldn’t bear to do certain scenes, although ultimately he did. Many painful moments were shot in close-up with a hand-held camera, amplifying the emotions.
The film is very much the hands-on project of director Bradley Cooper (“A Star Is Born”), a multiple Oscar nominee and Arnett’s friend and former roommate. Cooper also co-wrote the film with Arnett and Mark Chappell and has a supporting role as a quirky friend.
The movie follows Alex, a New York father of two working in finance whose marriage collapses quietly, almost without him noticing. He stumbles into standup comedy as a way of confronting the pain he’s avoided. The result is Arnett’s most vulnerable performance to date, one shaped as much by his personal discomfort in the role as by the emotional beats of the script.
Arnett’s marriages to actor Penelope Ann Miller (in the mid‑1990s) and comedian Amy Poehler (the early 2000s) ended in divorce. He’s the father of three sons, two of them with Poehler, and a third with former partner, business executive Alessandra Brawn, from whom he split last year. He’s currently in a relationship with supermodel Carolyn Murphy.
On a snowy November afternoon, the Leaside-raised Arnett was clad in blue jeans and white T-shirt under a green quarter-zip sweater — a look so unfussy it seemed a nod to the film’s inspiration: unlikely British comedian and actor John Bishop, who was a salesman until a have-a-go experience in a comedy club changed his life.
Arnett says the idea for the script came to him seven years ago, after meeting Bishop during a lunch with friends on a canal boat in Amsterdam: “He told me how he became a standup, which was he went to a pub and didn’t want to pay the cover because they were having an open mic.”
Bishop put his name down just so he could get in for free but ended up doing a set anyway, Arnett recalled. “He told me that story and what it did for him as a person. And then his wife ended up coming and seeing him at a comedy club performing months later. She was like, ‘Wait, what’s going on?’ And then they started having what he called an affair. And that story really stuck with me.”
Arnett’s Alex, whose marriage to Tess (Laura Dern) has collapsed not with a bang but with a series of tiny whimpers, is an unusually earnest role for the actor, who freely admitted he’s as unused to displaying emotional sincerity as he is with performing at open mics.
Welcome home to Toronto. I’m glad you didn’t let yesterday’s record early-season 10-centimetre snow stop you.
No, and I landed in a snowstorm! It’s not my first time.
How has Toronto changed for you since you moved to the U.S.?
I haven’t lived here for 35 years, but I come back a few times a year. So I guess it has changed, but it’s probably more subtle, just because I do have such a connection. My family all live here, but it’s different from the Toronto I grew up with. It was sleepier when I was a kid. There’s just so much more of a restaurant scene and all these kinds of things. It’s just alive.
The thing that amazed me about “Is This Thing On?” was that you’ve never done standup before. Considering how bold so many of your characters are, it just seemed like a natural thing for you.
Over the years, many people have asked, “Have you done standup?” Doing it was a wake-up call for sure. It was scary. But weirdly enough, since we shot the movie, I actually went back to do standup for no reason. We were in New York doing a thing and then I texted Liz Furiati, who runs the Comedy Cellar and who’s in the movie playing herself. I said, “Hey, if I show up tonight, can I go up?” I went down with a bunch of stuff that I worked on and went up and did 10 minutes. It was awesome.
So you like it now?
I do like it. By the way, when I say it was awesome, I don’t know if the set was awesome — I mean the experience. But certainly there is something about when a joke lands. I get it, it’s intoxicating for sure.
I like how real this movie is. You could have easily played a slapstick kind of character, but you didn’t do any of that. You and Bradley wanted to keep it extremely authentic, and it made it much more emotive that way.
That was definitely by design. Bradley is such an awesome filmmaker. He had such a vision for this from the first moment he read it and said that he wanted to direct — and he wanted to rewrite it. Mark and I wrote the first few drafts, and we always say that if we had made the film we were planning to make, we probably would have made a fairly decent rom-com. Bradley brought it down and said, “No, we’re going over here. We’re going to do something really real and stripped-down,” which was great.
He forced us to dig deep. We wanted to make something that felt authentic and like a real reflection of what it’s like when a marriage falls apart, a relationship, whatever. It’s not always throwing clothes out the front window of the house and slamming doors. It happens on a Wednesday in the bathroom when you least expect it and somebody says, “What’s going on?” and the other person says, “I think we’re done.” It’s the banality of it.
There’s a scene in the subway between Alex and Tess where they’re parting and she says, “Are you going to be OK?” and he replies, “Yeah,” but without conviction. That was such a perfect encapsulation of the defeated feeling of a relationship ending. For you personally, was the experience filming this painful or therapeutic?
It was therapeutic in the sense I was really out of my comfort zone acting in a role like this and having to be vulnerable in a way I’d never been before. So weirdly, while Alex is going through this kind of therapeutic moment, doing the standup and telling his truth in front of strangers, I was going through the same thing as a person, being vulnerable in this way about these kinds of subjects.
I would say it’s more cathartic than anything. It allows you to process a lot of that stuff. So I was on a personal level and also as an artist, for lack of a better word, going through that process. I’d show up and be like, “I don’t know if I can do this scene,” and Bradley would talk me through it, talking to me while we’re rolling and having to readjust and be honest. It was tough for me.
This is a very honest film and you don’t want it just to be entertainment. Do you feel there’s any kind of message? Not to get too pompous about it, but what do you want people to take from it?
Yeah, I never want to be heavy-handed about it at all. But there are a lot of themes in here: communication, our ability to communicate with people we love, all these kinds of things. Something that we also wanted to explore was to take a look at different ways that men communicate with each other in a way that maybe doesn’t get reflected a lot.
Without giving away the ending, we leave it a little open-ended, but there’s this idea that there’s room for hope as well. It doesn’t always have to tie up in a nice bow, but maybe everybody can be OK.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
