At the weekends, Nick Offerman likes nothing more than to sit at home with his wife, Will and Grace’s Megan Mullally, doing puzzles while listening to an audiobook – “Which, by the way, is a huge life hack,” he says enthusiastically. “Those two activities use different parts of your brain and allow you to really lock into each of them.”
One day, Mullally had a brainwave: the pair should dress up and recreate the picture on the puzzle they had just finished, complete with cameos from their dogs. “So we would finish doing a Sunday of this activity and then Megan would say: ‘OK, great, now come up with me to my closet so I can dress us up,’” Offerman continues. “And of course, like a whiny kid, I was like: ‘Can we please get this over with?’ In hindsight, those pictures may end up being the greatest work we’ve ever done.”
A selection of these photos – which see them variously decked out as the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, fairytale maidens, cherubim and assorted big cats – can be viewed in their joint 2018 book, The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, in which they winningly share the details of their domestic life. Over the years, Offerman and Mullally have delighted in subverting the notion of the showbiz couple via means of copious oversharing. It started when Mullally – who, after 20 years of marriage, Offerman still refers to as “my bride” – turned up in an episode of Parks and Recreation, the beloved comedy in which Offerman played the moustachioed public servant, staunch libertarian and all-round fan favourite Ron Swanson (the show’s co-creator Michael Schur called Swanson “our cast MVP”).
Mullally was cast as Swanson’s ex-wife, Tammy, with whom Ron has a lust/hate relationship. An early scene saw them breaking the furniture while kissing in a diner before hightailing it to a nearby motel, shedding clothes as they went. As Offerman tells it, “the fanbase began to absolutely shit themselves … It was all very over the top given we are just a couple of expectorating human beings who happen to have gotten some lucky acting jobs. We are maintaining a relationship, like anybody.”
Offerman – whose recent roles have included the real-life porn producer Milton Ingley in Pam and Tommy; the American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s adoptive dad in fictionalised drama series Colin in Black and White; and a lonely prepper in HBO’s zombie series The Last Of Us – is talking to me from the guest room of his and Mullally’s home in Los Angeles. Wearing black-rimmed specs and sporting Lemmy-style mutton chops, he has the rugged, outdoorsy look of a man who, given an axe, would make light work of a pile of logs. Which is fitting, since, when he’s not acting or writing books (he has published five, with a sixth in the works), or at home doing jigsaws, Offerman can be found – also like Ron Swanson – at his wood shop, a business in LA that he launched in 2001 when he was still a struggling actor, and where he now has four employees producing everything from dining tables and shelving units to handcrafted canoes.
He tries to visit a few times a month “to do problem-solving and offer my two cents on the designs that are going out the door. I do miss it terribly; it’s like getting home to a family you hardly see. Everywhere you look, there’s somebody you want to hug or there’s a project calling out your name. But, after a couple of days, Dad’s got to head back out on the road.”
On the road is where he’s headed next: having just wrapped filming on the fourth series of superhero drama The Umbrella Academy, in which he and Mullally play married college professors, he is putting the finishing touches to his one-man show, which comes to the UK this month. Offerman came late to standup. After the success of Parks and Recreation, universities would ask him to perform and he kept turning them down: “I told them I was a theatre actor, that I perform works of literature on stage.”
But the invitations kept coming, including one from Ohio State University. When Offerman asked how many students would attend, he was told 2,000. “And so I thought: ‘OK, there are some things I would love to tell 2,000 young people.’ My agent was also telling me: ‘Look, they pay great and they don’t care if you’re a comedian or not.’ That was around 12 years ago. I mean, I was afforded an easy step up because of Parks and Rec. I am a spoilt baby who was able to leap past the ‘paying of dues’ stage. Now when I walk on stage and say ‘Good evening’, everyone laughs like they’re somehow already on board.”
Audiences at his touring show can expect a mixture of songs and wry commentary: “I do my best to take whatever is annoying me in the news, or in general with people’s lack of comportment. One of my first songs, for instance, was suggesting that we all carry a handkerchief.” Offerman’s description makes it sound sweet and innocent; in fact, like a lot of his songs, it gets very dirty very quickly.
While he is in the UK, Offerman also hopes to head north to Cumbria to visit his beloved Belted Galloways, or “belties” as he calls them. These are black cattle identifiable by the fat white stripes around their middles that he, rather improbably, co-owns with the English farmer and A Shepherd’s Life author James Rebanks.
Offerman and Rebanks met on Twitter, where they bonded over their love of all things agrarian. A friendship was struck and Rebanks invited Offerman to visit him next time he was here. By chance, Offerman had just been cast in sci-fi series Devs, part of which was filmed in Manchester. And so he became a weekend guest at Rebanks’ farm (his escapes there, and to assorted rural locations in the US, are detailed in his 2021 book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play). On arriving, Offerman rolled up his sleeves and asked Rebanks to put him to work. “James told me: ‘You’re like the fool that Tom Sawyer tricks into painting his fence.’ [But] when he said: ‘You want to go help me repair a stack stone wall? I was like: ‘Yes, this is my Disneyland.’”
The actor’s enthusiasm for the outdoor life goes back to his childhood in Minooka, Illinois, as a member of “a salt-of-the-earth midwestern family”. His mother was a nurse, and his father a high school teacher, and his grandparents on his mother’s side were farmers. They, along with the books of Kentucky author and environmentalist Wendell Berry, helped instil in Offerman a deep reverence for nature and a sustainable way of living.
“We as a society don’t pay attention,” Offerman tells me. “We have been completely blinded by consumerism and modern capitalism to not care about where our goods come from. Once I read Berry, and also Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma [about the impact of our food choices], the toothpaste was out of the tube. I have never been able to let go of it.” The Offermans still live in Minooka; he reckons around 40 members of his family live within an eight-mile radius. “Megan and I are the only ones who don’t live right in the nucleus. They’re all teachers and librarians. My dad is the mayor of our little town. Meanwhile, I am the dancing jackass.”
His parents were initially nonplussed by his desire to act: “It was bizarre to them. I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a cultural vacuum. Nobody in our town had ever gone into the arts. So when I said: ‘I think I want to be an actor’, everybody kind of shook their head and said, ‘I don’t think you can get there from here.’” With no funds to go to New York or Los Angeles, he instead went to Chicago, an hour away from home, where he joined a drama programme at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and found a flourishing theatre scene.
Thanks to his father, who had raised his son to be an able carpenter, Offerman was able to stay afloat financially by building scenery in between whatever acting roles came his way. At 25 “something clicked” and the stage roles started to get bigger: he won a theatre award for Robert Schenkkan’s seven-hour play called The Kentucky Cycle. In 1997, he moved to Los Angeles on the assumption he would be able to continue his ascent, but instead spent a couple of years “flailing, realising my theatre résumé was worthless to the people I was meeting in film studios and television networks”. But Offerman was stubborn and, he says, “willing to live in poverty until things kicked in”. Eventually, he got an agent and the work – including small parts in ER, The West Wing and Gilmore Girls – started to trickle in.
Then came Parks and Recreation, which ran from 2009 to 2015 and changed everything. I imagined Offerman would be heartily sick of discussing it, but he shakes his head. “It was like winning the lottery, except there was creativity involved,” he smiles. The series was not the instant runaway hit many assume it was. “We were on the cusp of being cancelled every year and we were very grateful to be able to survive for 125 episodes,” Offerman says. “Then when streaming came on the scene, it became one of these comfort shows, and the popularity grew exponentially.”
He remains fiercely proud of Parks and Recreation, although being in a hugely successful sitcom has its drawbacks. For his comedy tour American Ham (recorded for a 2014 Netflix comedy special), he wrote the song “I Am Not Ron Swanson” in which he bemoaned being mistaken for his most famous character (sample lyric: “He can eat a big-ass steak for every single meal / Because his colon is fictitious while mine is all too real”).
In some ways, you can understand the confusion: both men play saxophone, enjoy woodwork and have a manly gruffness about them. Offerman sighs. “I’ve argued with fans over whether or not I am actually Ron Swanson and, pretty quickly, I was like: ‘OK, I’ve been a part of this narrative that is a medicinal part of their escapism, and I don’t want to diminish that.’”
But some comments stick in the craw. He recalls a young woman tweeting: “I saw Nick Offerman without his moustache. I vomited and died.” “And that’s sort of the root of it,” he says. “People don’t want to allow [you] to play Atticus Finch, or Polonius. They’re like: ‘No, no, you’re Ron Swanson.’ So even when I got some attention, earlier this year, for an episode of The Last of Us, there was a portion of people obstinately saying: ‘No, that’s still Ron. It’s prepper Ron. It’s gay Ron. You’ll never not be Ron.’”
Ah, yes, The Last of Us. When Offerman says he got “some attention”, he is being modest. The series, about a middle-aged man and a 14-year-old girl travelling across America during a zombie apocalypse, was already a hit before he pitched up in the third episode. But this was different, a standalone story about Bill (Offerman), a Massachusetts survivalist with a well-stocked armoury who catches Frank (Murray Bartlett) in a trap in his property. Bill grudgingly allows him to stay for dinner, and what is meant to be a passing visit turns into a wonderfully poignant 20-year romance. The New York Times called the episode “frankly remarkable … It’s as though the opening montage from the movie Up were extended to about 45 minutes and then dropped in the middle of World War Z.”
When Offerman read the script, he “knew it was going to be trouble”, by which he means he knew he had to do it. “There was nothing to do but to ask Megan to read it. Because my options were either to say: ‘Honey, I just read a very good script that’s going to screw up the calendar for a month’, or say, ‘Will you please read this and let me know what you think?’ She read it and said: ‘Sorry buddy, you’re going to Calgary to shoot this show.’”
Making it was, he says, “like making a Sundance movie. It was treated by the entire production [crew] like the exquisite hit that it became.” Though Offerman isn’t one to worry about ratings, or what critics make of his shows, he was nonetheless “quite taken aback at the Game of Thrones-level tsunami of approbation. Megan said she was going to start calling me ‘Episode Three Offerman’.”
Presumably, he must now have casting directors beating his door down. Not exactly, says Offerman. “I’m not choosing from a raft of scripts and saying: ‘Should I play this Marvel hero? Should I be the next Bond?’ Or should I do this character role?’”
When considering their next roles, he and Mullally try to go where the good writing is and “go with our gut. We also have a No-Assholes policy, wherever we can manage it.” In rare moments of professional discontent, Offerman makes a point to “stop and think and look at the bigger picture. I mean, I thought my life had peaked when I became Mr Megan Mullally, I had a wood shop and I was getting guest-star jobs on ER and The West Wing. So I just keep listening to my gut. The worst-case scenario? I’ll have some time off and get to build another canoe.”
Nick Offerman tours the UK and Ireland from 26 June to 4 July, starting at Vicar Street, Dublin.
