Nick Offerman Is Way More Than Just Ron Swanson
It doesn't take spending a ton of time with Nick Offerman to realize the former Parks and Recreation star keeps a pretty level head—he doesn't get irked by much. We're having coffees in Bar Bacon, a bacon-themed bar in New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and the music is playing just a little too loud. While we're trying to talk about, you know, culture, and the world, and, like, things, instead all we really hear are the voices of The Weeknd and Doja Cat blaring from above. Personally, I'm annoyed. But Offerman never breaks eye contact. He's unbothered.
It's the kind of minor annoyance that Offerman, who turns 50 later this year, has no time in his budget for. He simply does not care. The actor has established himself over the years as someone who, to put it simply, doesn't play by the same rules as most others in the film and television game. His answers aren't sanitized, pre-scrubbed for damage control. What he says is 100% real, and when he says he's got no interest in any bullshit, well, he means it.
Part of that bullshit, naturally, is born online. When you’re a famous actor—Offerman has 1.7 million followers on Twitter—it comes with the territory. So he’s used to hearing from fans, and hearing from young people, and hearing from anyone watching Parks and Recreation for the first, second, and fifteenth times. But that doesn’t stop him from getting irked.
And when you sense how cool-headed he is, when you find something that truly irks him—it speaks volumes. One of those things is what he calls a “mistaken presumption”; when he hears from some of those online people who say that Ron Swanson would have voted for Donald Trump for president.
“To me, that is one of the most idiotic takes, and that’s really offensive, because you’re completely subverting the wholesome and decent values of our show and my character, and accusing him of literally the opposite of what has been so painstakingly written,” he says, his intonation familiar to anyone who's ever seen him in anything. “People love that character specifically because he’s not that kind of dipshit.”
Offerman talks like his characters, but what he’s saying is 100% him; he’s not Ron Swanson. He’s not his latest character, the tech genius Forest from Devs. What he is—and what he says his goal for each role is—is to totally transform, be “totally unrecognizable” on a project-by-project basis. And it’s hard to realize just how good he is at doing that until you actually get a feel for how down-to-earth and warm the man himself actually is.
“The sort of Tom Cruise model of, like, always playing a different version of the same guy in everything...I’m so not interested in that,” he says. “I want to play a completely different person every time.”
In the five years since Parks and Rec left the air, Offerman has made a major dent of his own; Devs, his current project, is the prestige TV sci-fi series from director Alex Garland.
Airing on the new FX on Hulu collection, Offerman calls the project “the highest-level job” he’s ever had as an actor, feeling the full pressure of the responsibility to carry the emotional weight of Garland’s heavy, wide-reaching auteur vision.
As Forest, Offerman plays the founder and CEO of the show’s in-world tech giant company—"a genius, like, twice as smart as Elon Musk. That guy’s an idiot compared to Alex Garland’s tech genius." For the role, he was required to learn quite a bit of jargon and technological know-how to ensure that he understood exactly what he was saying and expressing in any given scene. And Garland was able to explain some of the more advanced theories and mechanics at play so that Offerman, and the rest of the cast, were able to understand it.
When the project wrapped, though, it was a different story.
“In real life, I absolutely don’t give a shit about the subject matter, and so I was not interested in retaining it,” he says between sips of coffee. “I think it’s fascinating, and amazing, I just...my life is much more analog, I guess. I want to just do my work. I’m a donkey—I want to haul my load, and then receive my carrot, and then make love to my donkey wife, and go to sleep.”
When wondering how, exactly, Offerman ended up getting the role in a series like Devs—so fundamentally different from the things he’s otherwise best known for—it makes sense to understand that Garland, who comes from the U.K., had no idea that he was famous in the context of comedy; he had never been a fan of Parks and Rec.
It took a fan recognizing an incognito Offerman while in production for Garland to even realize just how famous he really is here in the U.S.
“We were sitting in a restaurant and he had a big beard and he had his head shaved because he was wearing a wig,” Garland says. “And somebody walking past the restaurant on the street, Nick with his back to the window, shouted: Nick Offerman! Through the window. And I thought, ‘How did they recognize him? And I guess that's a measure of fame.”
Garland directed two films prior to Devs—Ex Machina, and Annihilation. And in these films, he’s gotten a top-level performance out of his actors, his writing clearing the way for what became excellent performances from the likes of Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Natalie Portman. Offerman’s role in Devs feels like a spiritual successor to Isaac’s in Ex Machina, and the director elaborated on how much he was drawn to the actor’s cool and calm nature.
“There's something really soulful about him,” Garland says. “It's in the kinds of jokes he makes that there's a kind of rueful quality behind them sometimes—it's like a keen sense of what's ridiculous which I personally like. Because so many things are fucking ridiculous.”
In some ways, it feels like Offerman has been building toward a role like the one he has in Devs. He’s had small parts in things like the second season of FX’s Fargo, where he played a war veteran in a weird, screwy single-season plot. He had a small role in 2018's Bad Times at the El Royale, a high-concept thriller with a uniquely dark tone. But as much as it might seem like he was building toward something, he wants to be clear: it wasn’t deliberate.
“I’m not a big careerist,” he says. “When I got to Hollywood and saw how gross and superficial it is, by and large, I said ‘I’m not going to chase this business. That will destroy my life. I’ll turn into a drunk, or I’ll end up in the looney bin.’ And so I determined to just be a carpenter and a woodworker, and if they needed me for a show, they could call me.”
And call him they did. But still, Offerman makes it clear that it’s not a nonstop trail of contracts and offers coming to his door. He says he gets offered a lot of TV comedies, and a lot of independent films, and the buck mostly stops there. “People are often surprised to hear, the business is not not banging my door down,” he says. “I don't ever see studio films—they have no interest in me. Most genres of entertainment are not interested in me.”
But, as I tell him, it’s important to never say never. Studios like Disney are casting unexpected actors in their Marvel and Star Wars franchises all the time. Did anyone expect to see 2020 Kumail Nanjiani back in 2018? It’s important to keep those doors open, right?
Offerman doesn't hold back. “I think there are those big franchises—Marvel or Star Wars or whatever—I think those all hold within them examples of wonderful, great creativity, and also examples of less good material,” he says. “Depending on what they brought to me, and where I was, and what I had available? If Taika Waititi’s name is involved, then I will come running.”
He continues to say that while he’s open to trying most different kinds of projects, he does hold his own personal rule for a genre that he just refuses to do: TV procedurals.
“Any show where like, every episode involves a forensic officer pulling a condom out of the gutter. It's a very popular genre—it’s just not my bag,” he says. “I don't want to go to work every day dealing with that sort of darkness.”
Doing the same murder-of-the-week story seems like it would get stale fast, he says. “That also to me seems like it would get super redundant,” he says. “Like, wait, which rapist is this?”
Amy Poehler starred with Offerman for seven seasons on Parks and Recreation, but has known him even longer than that—the pair originally met back in 1996, when both were making the rounds in the Chicago theater scene. When I talk to Poehler on the phone, she’s thrilled to talk about what she refers to as Offerman’s “Philip Seymour Hoffman-level performance” in Devs.
Poehler now hosts Making It, NBC’s craft-building reality show, with Offerman, and she makes it clear in our call that the two of them aren’t just professional colleagues. They get along on the same level because they don’t like being difficult for the sake of being difficult.
“We really like to work hard, we like to work a lot, we like to have a good time, and we’re not really interested in a lot of the bullshit,” she says. “And Nick really isn’t. It’s funny. I think sometimes people think he’s going to be a little grouchier, or meaner than he is. Because he’s a real giggler. Like, he’s got a really infectious giggle.”
By the time we get to the end of our brief call, well, I might have been swooning over how much I enjoyed my afternoon with Offerman, because Poehler had a quick remark on the effect he seems to have on people like me.
“You’re a young man, and young men really fall in love with Nick. You know?” she says with a laugh. “Look—I mean, Nick can build canoes, and would probably be the person I would want to be stuck in quarantine with, because he’s so handy. But he’s also a very gentle, sensitive soul, and he’s a caring, compassionate guy. So he’s like, all of the macho underpinnings, but the heart of a young teenage girl in love.”
Even aside from Poehler, Offerman says he still keeps just as close to his former castmates as ever. The cast maintains an ongoing text thread where people are check in, congratulate one another, and otherwise keeping in touch. He doesn't have a ton in common with Ron Swanson, but like that character, he does have his own woodshop—appropriately called the Offerman Woodshop—which is in the midst of a big project: building a dining table for Chris Pratt’s new house.
Not just because the two are friends and former costars, but it would seem like Offerman owes Pratt one after the Guardians of the Galaxy star gave him a lasting workout tip a few years back: do 100 push-ups a day—two sets of 50. “It’s really turned things around,” Offerman says, walking down a New York City sidewalk. “I’ve become an actor known for my boobs.”
On a recent episode of In Bed With Nick and Megan, the podcast Offerman hosts with his wife, actress Megan Mullally, the actor said that one thing he always does as he goes through life is go through it with a learning mentality. He always wants to be open for improvement, and open to use one life experience to build into the next one.
As much as he doesn’t like to see his role in Devs as something he’s built up to, his analogy certainly sounds like someone who took a step back and told himself yes, I belong here. “As a younger actor, I think if you told me I was going to get a job like this, I would be terrified,” he says. “I’d be really daunted, because you just think. It’s like, if I said to you 'You’re going to be playing basketball with LeBron.' You’d be like…’No! I’ll die!’ There’s no way I would survive if he even looked at me.”
But, as he continues, you just have to take a deep breath and remember what you did, and how you got there.
“If you’re playing against LeBron, you got there,” he says. “You deserve it.”
And after all these years in the industry, whether it’s playing the heart-filled, warm comedy of Parks and Recreation, the bizarre, oddball world of Fargo, or the cold, calculated sci-fi world of Devs, Offerman has proven that he deserves it. The propensity to transform from one role to another doesn’t come without practice, and by the time he’s got that blonde hair and beard on his face when he’s playing Garland’s mysterious tech genius, well, it’s clear that he’s picked up some skills while on this crazy journey through the acting sphere.
Despite his long time as a working actor, it was Parks that put Offerman on the radar—a role that began when he was 39 years old. So he knows as much as anyone that whether your name is Alex Garland, or Oscar Isaac, or Nick Offerman, the road to success could be a similar one.
“I think it’s a wonderful life lesson for young people to understand that no matter who it is you admire, or who you aspire to be, we’re all just human beings, we all put our pants on the same,” he says. “By gripping them around the waist, leaping into the air, doing a scissor kick, and then ramming both feet into the pants at the same time, before you gently land in your shoes, which then tie themselves with little swallows flying around.”
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