No one is better at playing idiotic egomaniacs than Will Arnett, and I mean that as the highest of compliments. From his malevolent ice skating champion in Blades of Glory, to the nefarious TV executive Devon Banks in 30 Rock, to most famously, Gob (pronounced, biblically, "Job") Bluth, the inept eldest son on Arrested Development, Arnett has cornered the market on fools who brag about themselves to compensate for how little they have to brag about.
"Like the guy in the $4,000 suit is holding the elevator for the guy who doesn't make that in three months. Come on!" Gob shouts at his employees. So it is extremely pleasing that when we connect by video chat, and Arnett appears on my screen from his home in Los Angeles, that he is sitting in front of a clutch of awards. Like the actor with a shelf of awards is going to talk to the journalist with nothing. Come on!
“Oh man. I just figured out that I probably shouldn’t be sitting here,” Arnett says when I ask about the metalware behind him. “It’s embarrassing because it’s like: ‘Hey man, we can all curate what we have in our background – and you choose to have that!’ I’ve gotten a lot of shit from friends on Zoom calls about it. But honestly, I didn’t put them there, I just moved house …”
As well as moving house, Arnett, 52, had a baby over lockdown, Alexander, known as Denny, with his girlfriend Alessandra Brawn. He also has two older sons with his ex-wife, Amy Poehler. How has having his third baby in his 50s compared with having his first in his 30s? "Well, when you already have kids, you know how long the road is. Like, this morning, just getting my two older boys out of the house and to school took a couple hours and by the time I'm home it's 8.30 and I'm three hours into the day already and I'm like: 'Oh my god. I'm in this for a while,'" he says, rubbing his eyes. Arnett looks far better than anyone with a 20-month-old baby has any right to, but his handsome appearance always did undercut his loser persona (or maybe that should be the other way around). So he's not planning the fourth and fifth babies? He fixes his face into an exaggerated grin with wide-open, terrified eyes. "No. I am absolutely not doing that."
The awards are for his work on the superlative animated Netflix series BoJack Horseman, which ran from 2014 to 2020, because as well as being the go-to guy for malevolent doofuses, Arnett is the man to call if you're making an animated film or TV show and you need a deep and scratchy voice that audiences adore. Name a blockbuster animated film of the past 20 years and Arnett was probably involved: Ratatouille, Despicable Me, the Lego films – in which he played a hilariously arrogant Batman. "I think the first thing I did was … I want to say Ice Age 2? Maybe? But don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those actors who are like: 'Actually I've done so many, I can't remember which one it is.' It's purely bad memory," he adds quickly. Liza Minnelli swooned to his baritone on Arrested Development and I ask when he realised he had such a great voice and whether he does anything to take care of it. He laughs at the very thought.
"Never and no. It wasn't until I moved to New York that people mentioned my voice to me. Maybe in Canada people don't really compliment each other. Actually, a member of my extended family said to me: 'People pay you for that voice?!'"
Unlike his characters, Arnett, who grew up in Toronto, is cursed with a very Canadian sense of self-awareness and self-mockery. "I hope I'm not being too earnest," he frets at one point. "I just get so worried when I talk about my life." And yet Arnett has been famous now for decades. He didn't breakthrough until he was almost 33, when Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development, cast him as Gob after years of false starts. "From the moment I met Mitch, my life changed. I learned so much about the world from him, and I'm a better person because of my friendship with him. You're not going to get me crying," he says, tears suddenly welling in his eyes.
Arnett was one of the breakout stars of Arrested Development, going from a complete unknown to being cast in movie comedies such as Blades of Glory, Hot Rod and Semi-Pro, playing characters not a million miles from Gob. “I like characters who are really cocky and really dumb. That always seems to be a really great cocktail for me,” he says.
And yet, over the past decade, he seemed to have enough of that cocktail. BoJack Horseman and Flaked, the Netflix series he created, wrote and starred in 2016, about a man struggling to maintain his sobriety, were melancholic rather than farce. "It's a new phase," he told interviewers at the time. Arnett was always a good actor, having studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute, rather than taking the usual route to comedy through sketch shows. The dramatic background helped his comedy: his idiots are endearing because he balances the silliness with epiphanic moments of bleak self-awareness, most obviously with Gob. As a result, we Arrested fans laughed at Gob, but we also wanted to things to work out for him. Arnett was especially excellent on BoJack Horseman, as the destructive has-been actor who knows how awful he is. Yet he had always been so winning at playing losers, it was hard not to feel that, in jettisoning his signature character, something had been lost.
So it's a joy to see him in his latest Netflix series, Murderville, a US take on BBC Three's Murder in Successville, in which he plays a cop named Terry Seattle – "and no, I've never been there," Seattle growls. In each episode, Seattle has to solve a murder with a different celebrity trainee – Sharon Stone, Conan O'Brien, Annie Murphy, Ken Jeong and Kumail Nanjiani all take turns in the role, and the celebrity has no script. Yes, it's the improv celebrity cop show you didn't know you needed in your life. I was a little sceptical when I heard about the concept, and I have seen Arnett in too many short-lived shows. But I ended up bingeing it and, at times, especially with Nanjiani's episode, I cried with laughter. It's shamelessly silly, and watching Arnett try to control the storyline, while also bouncing off the bemused celebrity guest and still maintain his persona as the moronic cop feels like a glimpse of sunshine after a long winter: you can't help but grin. But why isn't Arnett's Arrested co-star – and off-screen best friend – Jason Bateman in the show?
“He was supposed to be! But because of the scheduling of his other Netflix show [Ozark], he couldn’t. What happened was a bummer because – well, wait,” he says, correcting himself. “Here’s the good news: I actually ended up making the show with a bunch of people I didn’t know, which was amazing. Because I’m lazy, I love doing stuff with my friends, but everyone was working. But actually, we ended up getting so many amazing people.”
It works to the show’s advantage to have Arnett trying to manage people he clearly isn’t best buddies with, as it makes proceedings feel less chummy. Stone is an obvious example. “She’s so confident and smart, I felt like her assistant,” he says, and this comes across very satisfyingly on screen. But the real joy of Murderville is that, after the existential angst of BoJack, it’s nice to see Arnett enjoying himself again.
“You know, the last couple years have been so weird for me, and this was just about having fun,” he says.
The weird years began in 2012 when Arnett and Poehler announced, after nine years of marriage, that they were separating; they divorced in 2016. They had often worked together and Mindy Kaling, in her bestselling memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, cites their relationship as the ideal, a sentiment echoed by fans. So their split sparked an enormous amount of online commentary. What's it like going through a divorce when the outside world is so invested in you as a couple?
“People talk about you like they know you and they talk about your relationship as if they know what’s going on. So imagine how weird that is. It’s brutal with any relationship, and we have kids, and without getting into specifics, you then see stuff online, like, this one journalist wrote: ‘I’m Team Amy.’ I’m like: ‘You’re a grown person. What are you talking about? This is a breakup. This is a family. This isn’t some game.’”
'There were moments when we were together and I was crying with laughter, and it was worth it for that'
I tell him that my favourite part of Poehler’s 2014 memoir, Yes Please, is her chapter in which she imagines hypothetical books to help people through a divorce. One is called I Want a Divorce! See You Tomorrow! – to help divorced parents with young children “have a knock-down, drag-out fight and still attend a kid’s birthday party together on the same day”. He makes a small smile. “Yeah, you get on with it. It’s been almost 10 years and my kids are so lucky that Amy is their mother and I’m so lucky that we’re such a huge part of each other’s lives, even more so than we were five years ago,” he says.
At the time of the separation, Arnett was making season four of Arrested Development, when Netflix revived the show in 2013 after Fox abruptly ended it in 2006. He was thrilled to be back with the cast, but the shoot was, he says “almost excruciating … Just brutal, brutal, brutal. I was driving to the set one day and I pulled over to the side of the road and cried for an hour.” At least he was working with Hurwitz at the time, who, he says, helped him to turn his pain into something “hilarious and cathartic” on the show.
That pain directly fed into BoJack Horseman and Flaked. His self-loathing, narcissistic character on the latter was, he says, “an amalgamation of characteristics that I didn’t like about other people and other stuff about me that I didn’t like. Yeah, what a weird thing to do. But it was kind of the only thing I knew how to do. It was a painful couple of years, but I had to go through it, I guess.”
At the time of making Flaked, Arnett, who had been sober for well over a decade, said he was struggling with alcohol again. He winces when I bring that up. “I don’t know. I think we all go through things in our lives, and when we’re in it, we talk very honestly about it. I don’t regret [saying it], but that was six or seven years ago. You know what I mean?”
Arnett then went back to Arrested to make the fifth series. It is by now largely agreed among the fans that the fourth and fifth seasons aren’t a patch on the original three. Did it feel different making them?
“You know, I think there were a lot of things in those seasons that did not work. We weren’t all together, for a start,” he says, referring to the scheduling difficulties that made it impossible to get the actors all together at the same time. “But there were moments when we were together and I was crying with laughter, and it was worth it for that. Maybe it was like a very expensive reunion for all of us.”
Another problem was that Jeffrey Tambor, who plays twins George and Oscar Bluth, had recently been fired from another TV show, Transparent, after allegations, which he denied, of sexual misconduct. It then emerged that while filming Arrested he had yelled at Jessica Walter, who played his onscreen wife, Lucille, and who died last year. An awkward interview with the cast in the New York Times in 2018 about all this did little to help, especially against the background of the #MeToo movement. Tambor has been little seen since. Is Arnett in touch with him?
“Yeah, no comment. It’s just a bummer all round,” he says carefully.
Other shows of Arnett’s have also come in for criticism, including BoJack (for having a white actor voice an Asian character) and 30 Rock (for featuring multiple occurrences of blackface; the show’s creator and star, Tina Fey, has apologised and removed those episodes from streaming platforms). Is it harder to make comedy these days now that people are more socially aware?
“I don’t know. Sure? I guess? There are more ways for people to voice their displeasure these days. But then, when we made Murderville, we had a lot of laughs,” he shrugs.
We go back to talking about the “weird years”, and where he is now, no longer a lost, divorced man, but a happy new father with joyful new comedy. “It is crazy to me how much my whole life has shifted in five years in such a dramatic way. Isn’t that wild?” he says happily. We Arrested fans never confused Arnett with Gob, but, as with Gob, we did always want things to work out for him. – Guardian
Murderville is on Netflix
