Nick Offerman

I mean, because of the Kabuki show, we took a year off school.

We toured Japan, and it was Kabuki Achilles.

It was an adaptation of the Iliad.

And this was 1991, and I always hate this sentence, but the first Gulf War had just broken out while we were in production.

Yeah.

in Champaign-Urbana.

We took the show to Japan.

Some producers loved the anti-war message of Achilles and Hector ultimately saying to each other, you are as I, we're the same.

Why are we trying to kill each other?

We ended up touring Hungary, and then we played a theater outside of Philly for six months called the People's Light and Theater Company in Malvern, which is up the main line from Philadelphia.

And so that was a year off school, so I spent five years in theater school, all told.

And then it was a couple years into Chicago, after school, where naturalism finally began to occur to me, where...

i don't know the insecurity or the ignorance i just chipped away at it until finally i realized oh i simply finally get it just act like yourself and i just so thick-headed it literally took me like six or seven years to get it so once that happened

My best friend, this genius director and actor named Joe Faust, he had been waiting for it for years.

He desperately wanted me to catch on.

And I finally got it.

And so once that happened, I looked back at all these auditions and said, oh, I see.

I'm never going to get cast as a cool leather jacket sort of finger popping daddy.

That's that's not my bag.

I'm going to get cast as a laborer or a plumber or a bus driver or what have you or a scary version of those guys.