Will Arnett is a very funny man. That fact should be apparent to anyone who has watched “Arrested Development” or “The LEGO Batman Movie” or tuned into his “Smartless” podcast, but spend 30 minutes talking to him and any of your doubts about that will be definitively erased.
That only added to the challenge presented by his leading man turn in “Is This Thing On?,” in which he plays Alex Novak, a soon-to-be-divorced man who tries his hand at the New York stand-up comedy scene as part of a midlife crisis. The Bradley Cooper-directed film, which he co-wrote with Arnett and Mark Chappell, didn’t just require Arnett to explore his serious side — for the first time in his life, he had to appear like he was trying and failing to be funny.
For all of his comedic bona fides, Arnett had never dabbled in stand-up. But when he encountered the work of British comedian John Bishop, who found the art form by agreeing to perform at an open mic in order to avoid a cover charge at a pub and ended up launching a new career that saved his marriage, Arnett saw an opportunity to tell a story about the nuances of aging and navigating long term relationships as a performer.
“It started to change him, and started to kind of, almost in a way, reconnect him to himself. And then ultimately led to him reconnecting with his wife,” Arnett said during a recent conversation with IndieWire. “John’s wife, she said, ‘That guy is on stage. That was the guy I married, and that’s the guy I fell in love with.’ And that started this process of them reconnecting. They literally had an affair with each other and didn’t tell anybody. So that part of the story really got me. Like, how could we tell that story about two people who are so lost and so separate and then figure out a way to sort of reconnect?”
He and Chappell wrote an initial draft of “Is This Thing On?” that he described as “more of a rom-com” than the finished product. He took it to his old friend Cooper, who immediately wanted to direct but ended up rewriting it to flesh out the darker sides of the story. As the film approached production, Arnett realized that he had to quickly learn to be a stand-up comedian — and a bad one, at that.
He quickly immersed himself in the world of New York stand-up, performing multiple times a week under the name of his character, Alex Novak. It provided great research for the role, but Arnett’s recognizability created some awkward situations.
“I’d come out, sometimes they’d go, especially one of the MCs would say, ‘Please welcome to the stage for the first time, Alex Novak.’ And I come through the crowd at the Comedy Cellar and people couldn’t really see me. And then I’d get on stage and I’d sort of be leaning down. I grab the mic and I say, ‘How’s everybody doing tonight?’ or whatever it was. And I’d look up and some people, not everybody, but some people who did recognize me would go, ‘Oh, what’s happening?’” he said. “And then I would start talking about going through a divorce and stuff, and I think people were like, ‘What’s happening?’ But actually ended up being kind of gratifying was, for the most part, audiences would then just give into the fact, like ‘I guess he’s doing a bit, or who the hell knows.’”
After a career devoted to making audiences laugh, the art of doing bad comedy forced Arnett to ignore all of the instincts that he spent a lifetime honing.
“There is that instinct when I get on the stage of wanting to please the crowd, if you will. Your instinct is like, ‘I don’t want to go out there and have people think I suck,’ but that was what I had to do,” he said. “I had to be willing to go out there and know that I’m going to do stand-up in the voice of this guy, Alex Novak, and that people are going to think, A) People that recognize me are going to think I’m crazy, and B) Other people, if they don’t, might just think I’m bad.”
Carrying a dramatic film was new territory for Arnett, but it also marked the fulfillment of the kind of dreams that led him to acting in the first place. While he’s grateful for the comedy career he’s enjoyed, Arnett explained that his initial ambitions always lied in more dramatic roles.
“Yeah, I think ambition is the right word. When I was moved to New York when I was 20, it was what I always wanted to do, or it certainly was this kind of thing that I thought I was going to do. I didn’t have a background in comedy as a kid, I didn’t do sketch comedy or Second City or any of that stuff.
And so, I thought that I would end up in a more sort of dramatic realm,” he said, noting that he was starting to believe that his comedy career had ended his chances of landing more serious parts. “I think because I kind of went down that path, they just didn’t really come my way or people didn’t see me that way. It’s not they didn’t think I had the capacity. They just never considered me, and they didn’t have to. Why would they?”
Once he got the chance to express his more serious side, Arnett left everything on the field. Alex is not an autobiographical character, but he knew that many people would see their own midlife struggles reflected back to them. Embracing the vulnerability of divorce without the crutch of comedy to fall back on was daunting, but Arnett explained that every time he dove into uncharted emotional waters, the film was better for it.
“What can I do to understand, to sort of be sensitive in the material, and to get to a place where I can allow myself to be vulnerable enough in front of these people so that I can access that? And that was the real job for me,” Arnett said. “And there were a lot of moments where I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’ And there were moments where I thought, ‘Is this terrible? Am I going through it?’ Like, can I? And anytime that I did, anytime I kind of shed my ego and just kind of opened up and did access parts of my own life experience in that way, were always the best parts.”
“Is This Thing On?” now has Arnett in the heart of the Best Actor race, and the showcase it provides for his dramatic chops could end up taking his career in any number of directions. Where does he go from here?
He’s hesitant to make any sweeping declarations (other than expressing his hypothetical interest in playing a “Captain Kirk type” in a future “Star Trek” iteration), but Arnett makes one thing clear. From here on out, he’s going to be chasing the kind of authentic storytelling that he found with this film.
“And now what I realize is people say, ‘Oh, what are you going to do next? Or do you know?’ I’m like, ‘I have no idea,’ he said. “But I do know for one thing, I’m pretty hell-bent. I want to do stuff that I really connect with. And I know that that sounds almost like, yeah, wouldn’t you always, but it’s just not always the case that comes your way. But I just want to do stuff that I connect with, if I can.”
A Searchlight Pictures release, “Is This Thing On?” opens in theaters on Friday, December 19.