Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners. Today, we have something a little different. This is an episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman, another podcast in the TED Audio Collective. I'm a huge Debbie Millman fan. I've really enjoyed our conversations. Debbie has these wonderful, warm chats with incredibly creative people about how they design the arc of their lives.
If you like it, you can find and follow Design Matters wherever you're listening to this.
Nick Offerman is a famous comedian and actor, so you probably know a lot about him. You most certainly know that he played Amy Poehler's boss, Ron Swanson, on the sitcom Parks and Recreation. And you might know he's married to Megan Mullally of Will and Grace, and he appeared on that show as a plumber.
But did you know that Nick Offerman is also a professional boat builder and that he's written not one, not two, but five really funny books? His latest is Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside. He joins me to talk about his remarkably variegated career and to talk about his brand new book.
Nick Offerman, welcome to Design Matters. Thank you so much. I'm so pleased to be here. So is it true that your ultimate soundtrack for lovemaking is Peter Gabriel's music for The Last Temptation of Christ?
Yes.
Well, I mean, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more suitable record. It has romance, it has ambiance, and it also has screams of agony. So if you time it right, it's like putting Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz. If you sync it up right, everything matches up.
Yeah.
What makes it such an aphrodisiac, though? Is there something about the sort of crescendo? I don't know. When that record came out, for those who aren't familiar with it, it's a mostly instrumental Peter Gabriel tour de force. It's really drum-heavy and period-sounding, like otherworldly screaming and orchestrations. And so I've just always found it to be really moving and
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Chapter 2: What unique skills does Nick Offerman bring to his career?
Did I pronounce that correctly? Minooka. That's right, yes. And your mom was a nurse. Your dad taught social studies at the local high school. And I understand you grew up working on your grandparents' farm where they grew corn and beans and raised pigs. What kind of work did you do on the farm? Oh, just menial labor.
I mean, my first job, you know, if you work in agriculture, you hope to have kids because that's your that's your labor pool and they'll work for a sandwich generally. And so as a really small kid, grandpa would have me shovel out the poop out of the pig barn. That was my first job bailing hay.
which means riding out behind the baler as the hay is harvested and stacking the bales, throwing them up in the barn. And then on a soybean farm, one of the most prevalent summer jobs for young people is called walking beans, where you actually walk up and down the rows of the entire fields of soybeans, just killing the weeds.
We all learned to drive by the time we were 11 or 12 so we could haul empty wagons out to the field to be filled with corn and soybeans and stuff like that. And then, you know, just odd jobs. There was another job picking up rocks.
So once the harvest would be done and last year's stems would be plowed under and the dirt would be turned over, often rocks, sometimes as big as your head, would be turned up in the soil and so you would be sent out with a tractor and a little trailer to just cover the entire field and pick up all the rocks you see.
I read that when you were in the fourth grade studying vocabulary, when your teacher taught the class the word nonconformist, she defined it as a person who did the opposite of what everybody else was doing. Upon hearing that, you raised your hand and told Mrs. Christensen you wanted to be a nonconformist. Where did that sensibility come from?
Your question reminds me of at a young age, I want to say maybe first or second grade, I remember in art class, we had this project where we got a little piece of wood and a little paper cutout of a smiling clown head. And then another little paper cut out that said, a smile is the nicest kind of welcome.
And the job was to stain the piece of wood and then glue the clown head and the text onto the thing and then varnish the whole shebang and take it home for mom and dad. And I remember... Looking at that sentiment, a smile is the nicest kind of welcome, and it made me feel kind of whimsical. And so I tilted my clown head to what I considered a rakish, whimsical angle.
And my teacher gave me a C and said, look at this. The head is crooked. And I said, ma'am, that is a rakish angle. That's I will one day come to know that that's called panache. And so I just always had this sensibility of like adding a little bit of a jaunty kick to whatever I did. And so when I heard that that was called nonconformity, I said, yes, please count me in for one of those.
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Chapter 3: How did Nick Offerman's upbringing influence his creative journey?
You push the towel, then do kind of a salute to the sun kind of pose until you push yourself all the way across the stage. So the whole company cleans the stage before every show. So, I mean, it really has this reverential sort of shrine atmosphere. And then when we started a theater company in Chicago, me and my friends, a lot of us had come from that Kabuki training.
And so we were able to bring that a lot of the same aesthetic to our own, you know, crappy little Chicago company. You earned your degree in theater, but have said that in the four years of theater school, it became clear that you were trying too hard to be hip and cool and urbane and had unwittingly thought that your sort of country-rude persona would not be interesting to an audience.
When did you realize otherwise? Uh... 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. Once I realized that, then my life kind of began.
That was ground zero where I said, okay, the tools that I have, who I am, what I grew up as, that's the most valuable thing in my toolbox. So let me now begin to build my professional career, my body of work around that particular set of tools.
You and your friends founded the experimental company, The Defiant Theater, and you've said that if you had started auditioning at big theaters before this work, you'd probably still be there. Was it when you developed The Defiant Theater that that realization about your country-rude persona first occurred to you?
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Chapter 4: What does Nick Offerman mean by 'eye acting'?
I also love music, but I've benefited greatly from her acumen. You almost got a part on Will and Grace that ultimately went to Woody Harrelson, and you also auditioned for the role of Michael Scott in The Office. You didn't get either, but your audition created the seed for the casting director that became your character, Ron Swanson, in Parks and Rec.
And is it true that when you got the call from your producer, Mike Schur, you sobbed for 30 minutes upon hearing you got the role? I mean, 30 minutes might be, it may have been more like 28 minutes. Professionally, it was all of the parts that I didn't get for so many years. paid off so powerfully with such an emotional catharsis because all of those other roles weren't right.
It would have been wonderful to get a cool part on a show, but we've seen the examples you've cited. The reason I didn't get the roles is because they were better people. Finally, the role found me that no one ostensibly could have done better. So life clicked in for me at age 38, I think I was.
It was like the end of the Lord of the Rings or something where I was like, oh, my God, it all makes sense. Everything Gandalf ever said to me suddenly hit home. And so I had a very emotional, gratitude-filled reaction. You played Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation for all of the show's seven seasons to great acclaim.
You won the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Comedy, twice nominated for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. You've also starred in movies including The Founder and Hearts Beat Loud, in the television shows Fargo, Devs, which I just binge watched and loved. I need to ask you about your hair in that one.
And along with Amy Poehler, you hosted the NBC reality series Making It and have been nominated for two Emmy Awards. Congratulations on all of that. Yeah, you've said that you put your relationship with Megan above everything else, including acting jobs, and have a rule that you never do a job that will keep you apart for more than two weeks.
Is that the secret to the success of your 20-year marriage? Well, I suppose, I mean, the secret to our marriage, I think, is just we're lucky enough to have picked the right person because we love being together. We've been together for 21 years, and we sometimes choose to work together. We've gone on tour together. We do plays together. We wrote a book together.
And so often people we know will say to us, Why in the world would you choose to spend more time with your spouse? And we say, man, I feel so bad for you that you would ask that question. You might reconsider some of your choices. If you think about it, and even two weeks sucks. I mean, if we get to the end of a week where we're apart, she just is, I mean, she's the love of my life.
But it's not just all sappy romance. There's a very powerful health component. My weaknesses involve things like like to drink too much. We'll sit down and eat two pizzas. I'll put myself in pain to be a hedonist. And as a young person, you're like, okay, that's part of being young. But now if I'm away from Megan, I'll say, oh, there's a baseball game.
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Chapter 5: How did Nick Offerman transition from theater to television?
No matter who comes after you into that bathroom, you are doing them such an unkindness. You're being such a bad neighbor. And if you go into a bathroom and someone else has left it messy... It doesn't matter who did or when. The next person is going to think you did it. Yes. So not only do you have to be conscientious and take care of your own hygiene and cleanliness, but...
And now I'll go into a bathroom that someone else has been a jerk and left a mess. And I'm like, God damn it, sensei. Now I have to clean up some other jerk. But I mean, those are the kind of values that I'm like, okay, that feels like something I would have taken from church where it's like,
It's like picking up litter or it's like doing the right thing even when no one will see you do the wrong thing. It's never more true than with national park toilets because quite often you come upon them when you're desperate for a place to relieve yourself. And if someone has left it somehow in an unfriendly way, what a horrible thing to do to your neighbors.
You also talk about a trip that you and Megan took together. And in your book, you describe how at the time, which was just when COVID had really taken hold, both you and Megan had been dealing with your own personal, you termed it flavors of depression, and describe how your general happiness often depends upon your ability to accomplish good productive work, that does somebody some good.
And you go on to state that whether it's as an actor or a writer or a woodworker or son or husband or neighbor, you've had the very good luck over the last few decades in almost always having been able to be of good use to someone. And you go on to write, having the vocational side of this personal economy stripped away or was quite alienating and left you feeling useless and adrift.
And when the pandemic began, all forms of work instantly disappeared. But you were grateful that you were still needed by Megan to fill your role as spouse or you would have been truly in peril.
And in part three of the book, you write about how a month or two into COVID lockdown, Megan came up with the idea to get an RV or camping trailer to travel across the country to spend Thanksgiving with your family in Illinois. What did you initially think of this idea? Megan is the, is the idea factory.
She's an incredible picker of things, which I've, I learned pretty quickly into our relationship. And so, uh, Certain things that I don't care what color we paint the hallway or which sink faucet we choose. And so I learned the many arenas in which I say, honey, please, you go ahead and curate this experience. I'm never sorry.
And so something as big as like, let's buy some sort of camper situation and become, you know, road tripping campers is pretty substantial. And I always at first, I'm like, I'm not sure. I want to bristle. That sounds like a big change. And, you know, who likes change? But pretty quickly, I was like, well... I know how it goes.
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