Nick Offerman has been busy lately, taking part in what sounds like the best summer theater camp of all time. He and his wife, Megan Mullally — both among the most ever-present faces on television these days — have spent the summer starring together in a Chicago production of Iceboy!, a new musical comedy that marks Offerman’s first time onstage in over a decade.
“There’s a wonderful sense of coming home,” he tells me on today’s Prestige Junkie podcast, recorded a few hours before he went back onstage for another one of his eight shows a week. “And it is fun in that it feels like being away at camp.” Born in Joliet, Ill., Offerman actually got his start in Chicago theater — but as he admits, things may have, well, evolved for him since then.
“My memories of doing theater here in my 20s, of course, involved youth,” the 56-year-old tells me. “I was like, ‘This is gonna be great. I’ll have one pitcher of beer and two pizzas every night!’ It turns out my body has changed a bit since the ’90s.”
Offerman swears he and Mullally do occasionally take time off. But, he adds, “I think what we’re guilty of is having a hard time saying no to really good writing when these projects come our way.” That’s how, for example, he found himself flying from Budapest to Charleston, S.C., last year, traveling from the set of the period piece Death by Lightning to visit Mullally while she was filming The Righteous Gemstones. “It’s very dreamy to get to work on things like that, but then to maintain a healthy marriage and household requires a lot of hard work and maintenance,” Offerman says. “Otherwise you just get lazy, and I guess start hugging the costume ladies.”
All that sacrifice and travel time, however, was clearly worth it. Offerman is a double Emmy nominee this year, both for his performance as a boisterous President Chester A. Arthur on the Netflix limited series Death by Lightning and for Margo’s Got Money Troubles, the Apple TV comedy that, blessedly, shot back home in Los Angeles. (“I spent all this money on these fancy pillowcases, I’d like to use them,” Offerman tells me.)
Both roles make the most of the perfect comic timing that catapulted Offerman to fame on Parks and Recreation in the late 2000s. But each part also shows the dramatic range that earned the actor his first Emmy (as a guest actor in the devastating romance episode of The Last of Us season one, “Long, Long Time”). Offerman jokes that growing President Arthur’s impressive sideburns helped land him in the Death by Lightning part, but he also tells me how he connected to a man who had lost track of his moral compass in the cutthroat world of 1880s politics.
“In the light of how much corruption there is in politics — there was then, and there is now — you can say, ‘Hey, you know better than this,’” Offerman says. “Like, why don’t you be decent?”
For Margo’s Got Money Troubles, meanwhile, Offerman has openly wondered why other actors didn’t beat him to the part of Jinx, a former professional wrestler and onetime absentee father to Elle Fanning’s Margo who steps back into the picture when Margo has a baby. “For whatever reason they didn’t want him to be that appealing,” Offerman jokes in our conversation. “But I just keep my mouth shut, and I’m like, ‘Great. However I ended up here, I’m gonna mind my manners and do my job as well as I can.’”
For much more on both shows — from why he loved the scene in Death by Lightning where Betty Gilpin slaps him in the face to the meticulous fake tattoos made by the Margo makeup team — take a listen to today’s special bonus edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast. You can watch the conversation on YouTube as well!
