Nick Offerman

was so excited.

I went home to my mom and dad and said, you can get paid to do plays in Chicago.

That's what I want to do.

What was their response?

God bless them.

I have always said, you know, I've had some crazy ideas in my life, but I always work really hard and do my best.

No matter what cockamamie scheme I'm up to.

And so they said, look, we'll support you.

If you can try to have something to fall back on it, like you should, you know, try and have a way to make money, which ended up being using my my carpentry skills.

But they supported me and I couldn't believe it.

I went and had to.

do my first audition of my life to get into the conservatory there at the University of Illinois.

And they were short on strong young men to carry the talented people on and off stage.

And so I was able to fill one of those slots in 1988.

In my research, I discovered that while you were in school, you took two semesters of ballet and enrolled in a kabuki theater class taught by Shozo Sato and ended up traveling to Japan with Sato's kabuki troupe.

Did that work influence how you were approaching your acting?

Well, sure.

I mean, you know, all these Illinois kids basically are suddenly learning this traditional Japanese art form.

And his genius, he's an award-winning theater artist, and his genius was for taking the plays of Shakespeare or Greek dramas and interpreting them in the kabuki style.

So the makeup, the wigs, the presentational movement and voice work is