inewsamerica: Comedy M.V.P. Jason Mantzoukas Is Changing Lanes

By Lloyd Bishop/NBC/Getty Images.

Few people play swarthy, unsavory characters better than Jason Mantzoukas, who’s made a habit of popping up for supporting turns in beloved comedies like The League, Parks and Recreation, Enlightened, Transparent, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, and Big Mouth. It was only a matter of time before he was given the chance to take center stage.

Enter The Long Dumb Road, an odd-couple buddy comedy in which Mantzoukas and co-star Tony Revolori take an entertaining and emotional road trip. Revolori plays Nat, a 19-year-old driving from Austin, Texas, to art school in Los Angeles when his car breaks down near the garage where Richard (Mantzoukas) works as a mechanic—just as Richard quits his job. Richard and Nat make a deal: he’ll fix Nat’s car if Nat gives him a ride, one that ends up being the road trip of a lifetime.

As The Long Dumb Road prepares to expand wide on November 16, Mantzoukas spoke about stepping up his game for his first starring role, talking his way into John Wick 3, and how friendship has kept his bad-movie podcast, How Did This Get Made?, going for 201 episodes.

Vanity Fair: So, just how long and dumb was the road that led to The Long Dumb Road?

Jason Mantzoukas: Well, Hannah Fidell and Carson Mell had written a script based on a story a friend of theirs told them about being a young kid on a road trip for the first time and picking up a drifter—like, a real, proper drifter. I think the real story was much darker, and the one they started working on was much funnier. But this mismatched pair of guys driving across the Southwest really got them excited to write it. And then I read that script—Tony had already been attached—and I just desperately wanted to be in the movie.

Did you feel any pressure tackling a leading role, given that you’d never done that?

I didn’t feel any pressure, but it was different on a process level. Normally, I kind of get dropped into things—I come in, I upset the balance, and then they get rid of me. I’m not usually responsible for much long-term storytelling, so this one was actually quite different, in that I’m in almost all the scenes, and my character has to have an arc and grow. And we’re shooting out of order, and for the first time I had to be responsible for, like, “Oh, O.K., so the stuff we did this morning was, like, three days after we met, but the stuff we’re doing this afternoon is only three hours after we met.” I really enjoyed that. I liked having more to think about and do than just, like, “What’s the funniest version of this that I can do?”

On that note, did you have the opportunity to improvise at all? Or did you stick pretty hard and fast to the script?

I think Hannah said that it’s probably 70 percent scripted, 30 percent improvised. A lot of the scenes are just Tony and I sitting in a minivan, so we’d do the scripted lines a couple of times, and then without needing to change lighting or camera setup or anything, we were able to be like, “O.K., we can take two more drives up and down this highway.” The Fast & Furious stuff that’s in there, that’s totally improvised. My entire background is in improv. I come out of the Upright Citizens Brigade scene starting in the late 90s. In a lot of those scenes, you’re watching genuine moments of me just improvising stuff and Tony having to deal with it.

Have you ever gone on a road trip like this yourself?

There were years where I lived in New York but would come out to L.A. for pilot season for two and a half or three months, and I would drive every year. I’m trying to think of any good, weird stories. Honestly, most of them are just, like, me in the middle of the night listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks narrated by Jim Dale and just, like, openly weeping. And that’s not at all a joke [Laughs] I think people picture me driving cross-country as if I’m one of my characters, stopping at strip clubs and getting into bar fights. But it’s so much more likely that I would be like driving late into the night listening to Harry Potter and crying.

When you were playing Derek on The Good Place, a character who’s effectively created out of thin air by Janet [D’Arcy Carden] to serve as her rebound boyfriend, I can’t imagine that you were ever told to take it down a notch.

Uh, no. If anything, it was, “Keep going!” It’s such a fun character. And I’ve known [D’Arcy] from U.C.B. for maybe 10 or 15 years, so we have such an easy rapport. It was so easy to jump into those scenes where we’re in love and then we cut straight to hating each other.

The character has this wide-eyed naïveté that was so unexpected to see you playing.

Yeah! And I will say, that was the pitch. Mike Schur called me and he was like, “Uh, the character is . . . not a fully formed being.” The way he explained it, he said, “You’re basically like a newborn fawn, really rickety and kind of off. And you know how when Janet appears there’s a pleasant sound that goes off, like a ding? When you appear, there’s going to be a clunky thunk. And the way we’re doing your dialogue is that we’re writing you lines, then we’re translating them with Google Translator two times. Like, we’ll take the English dialogue and translate it into, I don’t know, Czechoslovakian. And then we’ll translate the Czechoslovakian into Portuguese. And then we’ll take the Portuguese and translate it back into English. And that will be your line.”

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJpi-BxMJiU

With Big Mouth, it’s surprising how well the show balances filthy and sweet to come up with a disconcertingly accurate encapsulation of how it feels to go through puberty.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s really great to watch people discover that the super-dirty, funny show is actually incredibly sweet, heartfelt, and responsible.

Mind you, my daughter is 13, and there’s no way I’m showing it to her.

But you know what? I’m gonna tell you: she’s probably watching it with her friends.

She may be.

I mean, that’s what I’m hearing. What I’m hearing from my friends is one of two things: either it’s “I’m watching it with my kids, because it allows us to laugh at the same stuff and then have conversations about it that I know neither of us would have brought up,” or they know because of some joke they’ve made that their kid has seen it already, and then they’ve talked about it subsequently because of that. Both of which I like. I like that the show is provoking conversations that maybe either the parents or the kid would never have brought up without the show.

I’m not saying that I wouldn’t want her to watch it. I’m just saying that I’m not sure I’m ready to have the conversations that could result from watching it with her.

I get it. I get it! And if you need me to call and explain any of the Jay stuff, I’m happy to. [Laughs] I’m available to talk to kids about puberty as Jay. It’s one of the promo things we’re doing.

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRcLTmBB6Ow

I hadn’t known that you were going to be in John Wick 3 until I read your bio. How did that come about?

I’m not entirely sure how that came about. But I talk about John Wick a lot on the podcast [How Did This Get Made?], and I wonder if that put me on their radar. Now, let me be very clear: it’s a very small part. [Laughs] But they said, “The director would like to talk to you about coming onto this movie,” and I was like, “Dude, yes! A million percent yes!” I can’t tell you any of the specifics, but for me . . . For the most part I’m jumping between doing low-budget comedies or big-budget comedies. So to set foot on a big action movie . . .

Even though it was this big, huge behemoth of a production, it also felt like a group of people who love each other and have been working together for years. And that was cool, because that’s what Big Mouth is.

That seems like the driving force behind How Did This Get Made? as well: you enjoy working together, and you have guests whom you enjoy seeing again.

You are not wrong. It started out at a party where we were all talking about Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and we had an hour-plus conversation at the party, a group of us, that was just so funny and so wild. And afterwards, Paul [Scheer] and I were talking, and I was like, “I feel like that’s a podcast, that conversation we just had.” And then Paul was like, “Wait, that is a podcast! Let’s do that!” And I think I probably would’ve just walked away, but with Paul being like, “Wait a minute, let’s actually follow through,” I was like, “Interesting! I like this!”

It’s now become a semi-frequent occurrence when I’m at the airport or when I’m running—I’m coming into contact with a lot of people who walk up to me and show me their phone because they’re listening to How Did This Get Made? A guy jogged by me recently and yelled, “I’m listening to you right now!” That’s wild. I love that.