May 9, 2023 • 64 mins
Brian’s fellow Southerner, high school debate team champion, and friend of John Krasinski John Hoogenakker is on the podcast today. He shares how he managed to be a big-time actor without ever living in New York or LA, traveling the world for beer commercials, and balancing his resume of extremely dark stories (like Dopesick and Waco: The Aftermath) with lighter fare (Dilly Dilly!).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
When I've done work in Los Angeles and New York,
and I've never lived in either of those cities, but
I spent a good amount of time in them getting
to work. When people found out that I was based
in Chicago, they were always kind of gobsmacked. I was like, well,
why did they fly your dumbass in here when there's
there's so many talented actors here. So there was always
(00:23):
like a certain amount of, you know, low key glee
that I had kind of beat the odds just by
getting a seat at the table from Chicago. But I
also felt like a representative of what the city has
to offer. Chicago is lousy with incredibly talented actors. Hi,
(00:45):
my name is John Hogan Acker, and I'm just a
guy doing acting stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Hi, everybody, I'm so excited to welcome you all to
this week's episode of Off the Beat. I am your host,
as always, Brian Baumgartner, and I'm also very excited to
announce that the incredible John Hoganacher is joining us today.
Just like me, John has an extensive theater background, working
(01:18):
on productions like Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and one of
my dark dark favorites, Killer Joe. He of course, didn't
stop at theater. Since those good old days, he has
taken the film and television world by storm, jumping into
some very intense and very impressive roles on shows like
(01:40):
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Dope, Sick, and Waco The Aftermath.
Now he is here to go deep into his life
and his career from his commercial days. Dilly Dilly, anyone
to working on Jack Ryan with some guy named John Krasinski.
I don't know if you got I have heard of him.
(02:01):
I definitely haven't. All jokes aside, this is a great conversation.
So without further idea, John Hoganaker, everybody.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Bubble and squeak. I love it.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Bubble and squeak. I know, bubble and squeak.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
I cook, get every mole left over from the night before.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
What's up, John, hey man?
Speaker 1 (02:41):
How you doing.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I'm great. How are you?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I'm good, I'm good.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I'm not wearing the headphones. We tried to figure the
whole thing out, and of course it all fell apart.
The wheels came off to trolley at the last minute.
So here we are.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Listen.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
I know exactly what that's like every every day, every
day of my life.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
It's so nice to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I really am such a big fan of yours and
what you have been doing here man be hanging out. Yeah,
we have a lot of things in common. Some are
mostly manufactured by me, but we do have a lot
in common. You grew up, I understand in the South,
(03:25):
right in Charlotte.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
I sure did. In fact, I'm actually in the South now.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Oh, you're right. So you're in the South right now?
You live in the South.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yes, I'm from Charlotte, North Carolina, and a lot of
family in the mountains. So I was coming up here
a lot as a kid, and we moved back to
the Asheville area during the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Really, yeah, you do you love it? Oh?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, oh yeah, I love it so much. A lot
of stuff that I needed to kind of take care of. You,
needed to be closer to family, and a lot of
I don't know if this is the way you're your
experience of this, this job being an actor is but
a lot of a lot of stuff for me comes
down to taping. Anyway. When I was in Chicago, a
lot of the jobs that I was winning or that
(04:11):
were filming around the country were from tapes. And you know,
when we got deep into the belly of the pandemic,
my wife and I were kind of like, I went,
let me back up. I went to do Dope sic
which filmed in Richmond, and my wife and the kids
came out for the month of March and we spent
the whole and you know, in the South, it's like
the flowers are on the trees in March, it's like
(04:33):
spring everything, you know, the birds are singing. And then uh,
we finished and she went back home and the same
two feet of snow was on the ground that was
there when she left in Chicago, and it was, you know,
going to be winter for another couple of months. And
she smummed about it. And I was like, well, what
if we just went ahead? And what if we just
went ahead and did it? Made the move? So it has.
(04:54):
It's been wonderful, wonderful change of pace. It's a it's
a gentler rhythm. I feel like when I travel, like
I live in a yoga studio and I take that
yoga studio with me. People in New York are like, dude,
you're so chill.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
It is a beautiful area.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
There's a little town called Greenville, South Carolina, which is
not overly far from you, which I had relatives that
lived in green I was in Atlanta and I had
relatives that lived in Greenville. When I was a kid,
Greenville was nothing. I'm just gonna see, I'm just gonna
say it straight out. And now it is a booming,
mid size, mid city metropolis with great food and places
(05:38):
to go and river walks and it's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
It's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Greenville has that Asheville does not have is a costco.
I mean, it's the little thing right we want you.
I want six worlds of toilet paper. I'm going to Greenville.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Well, And to finish this off, yet another weird connection.
I am lying tomorrow this is this is not a joke,
and this was not playing. I am flying tomorrow morning
to Chicago. I had several weeks ago been in Wyoming
and I was like, we're done with the winter. I
packed up all my winter coats, I packed up. I'm like,
(06:18):
I'm done with the winter. I'm flying. It's we're in
late April here, We're definitively in late April, and I'm
flying to Chicago tomorrow. The high is going to be
forty on Saturday and Sunday. I can't even believe that
this is happening. I mean, I'm gonna have a great time,
don't get me wrong, but yes I am.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
I can't believe it.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
You're getting on that plane under your own steam, brind
So you did it to yourself and no, yeah, it's
you know the thing on One of the things that
I'm proud of myself for is that I every time
the weather's beautiful here in Asheville. I don't take like
a screenshot of the weather app and send it to
my friends in Chicago, but I fight. That's a daily
(07:02):
that's a daily battle that I'm always fighting, right, Yes,
you know the dogwood trees are blooming right now, beautiful
or so it's going to be like rhododendrons and mountain
laurels and yeah, it's just a lovely part of the world.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Do you golf?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Oh yeah, you know what. I've been a golfer my
entire life, but you would not know it.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Watching There are great courses. I play a lot of golf.
I it's funny when I get homesick for the South.
Is the masters being from Georgia, And it's because of
what you're talking about it's the azaleas. They got it
time perfectly, man, the beginning of April, the azaleas come
(07:42):
out the dogwoods and I'm like.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Oh, man, yeah, that is that is really beautiful.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Enough about weather. Well, so another thing you and I
have in common. You did the forensics thing. I state
and district champion of I was I I was stay
champion there two three four years or something there in Georgia.
Is that where you started performing or did you have
(08:10):
an interest in it and that's what brought you to that?
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Well?
Speaker 1 (08:14):
You know I did. So. My dad did commercials in Charlotte.
He was a life insurance and he did you know,
voiceover and television commercials, and he was a real like
funny guy. He was a life of the party. And
you know, so I looked up to him and I
wanted to emulate him. So I got in trouble all
(08:34):
the time in school. I was a class clown. And
when I was in like fifth and sixth grade, I
started doing plays at the children's theater in Charlotte, and
then I got braces. And I had braces for a
few years and my dad was like, well, there's no
market for a child with braces, So then around early
high school. I think I got into debate around like
(08:57):
probably sophomore year, because at that point we still had
Junior high, you know, which was through nine and then
you had ten through twelve for high school. And my
debate coach, I don't know, did you compete in like
humorous interp and dramatic intermsmatic? That's right, yes, well cool, yeah,
And for the listeners who don't know what Brian and
I are talking about, it was like you would basically
(09:18):
pick a play or it could be a TV show
or it could be a movie. You would do a
ten minute cutting and you had to have an introduction
somewhere in there. You had to basically keep your feet planted,
but you could play all the characters. And I went
after Monty Python because I was like, surely everybody wants
to hear my rendition.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
And debate.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
It's like Monty Python never wins, but knock yourself out, uh,
And Monty Python did not win for me. Then I
started doing different plays and had a lot of fun
with it, and yeah, I got to be it was
a state champion two times and I was a district
champion two times, so that was a lot of fun.
But that kind of strengthened the audition muscle, probably more
(10:05):
than anything else, because then, you know, when I was
towards the end of high school, kind of on a lark,
I auditioned for the theater school at DePaul University, and
you know, I didn't even go for Juilliard because it
seemed unattainable, was more expensive the audition process, and Chicago seemed,
I don't know, it seemed tamer at the time than
New York City. I got in, which was very cool.
(10:29):
The school was a super intense program. Did you do
like a theater conservatory or anything like that for college?
Speaker 3 (10:34):
I did. I went to SMU in DAWs, Oh.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, absolutely, solid school.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
So the program for us, I don't know. Did you
guys have a cut program too? At SMU?
Speaker 2 (10:44):
You know, there were no cuts, but people cut themselves.
I mean, I think we started out with fifteen actors
and you know, by the end, you know, seven.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Or eight, Wow, would make it four years? Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
It was the same same percentage that we lost. They
brought in seventy some our first year in ninety five.
Then they cut half of us after the first year.
They cut the remaining after the second year, and then
if you made it past the second cut, you were
in the casting pool for your junior and senior year. Yeah,
(11:21):
and so so that the NFL thing, the debate, the
forensics thing always helped me when it came time to
get in front of you know, a team of producers
and a director or something kind of walk in and
try and own the room, because I've had been doing
that in front of fellow teenagers for you know, three
(11:42):
or four years, getting a stink guy from competitors.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
You know, that's interesting. I have never truly, I have
never made that connection before. But of course you're right,
because that experience with you know, three judges and some
other a few other people watching, which does you're exactly right,
It does mimic that the audition experienced later on there's
(12:09):
three or four judges. Yeah, that's very interesting, John, I'd
never really thought about that before. But the advantage for
having just done it, whether you've done it well or not,
just getting comfortable walking into a small setting. It's much
easier to perform I think, in front of a thousand
(12:29):
or two thousand people sometimes than those really small rooms.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Right, Oh, yeah, absolutely, you've probably done the black blocks
theater thing too in your life. Yes, I had a
lot of opportunities to do that in Chicago, a lot
of great spaces. There's nothing like that live experience. And
as we move into the AI age, I think the
craziness is it'll be the theater actors at the end
(12:54):
of the day who are the only ones. But yeah,
the ability to kind of go into a room of
people and you're all live being, sharing space and you
kind of start to cast a spell that whips everybody up.
It's a really really amazing thing to get to be
(13:16):
a part of.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
So you when you go to De Paul, have you
decided in your mind that this is what you want
to do, that you want to be an actor?
Speaker 4 (13:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
I just was positive that I was going to be.
I was going to go to Second City and do
the whole thing. I you know, in high school, especially
because of the hi thing, I humorous interp the debate thing.
I thought I was going to do stand up. And
I had a first year acting teacher that I absolutely
revered kind of pulled me aside one day and he
was like, you know, John, you remind me of Robin Williams,
(13:52):
And I was to me that was like nobody could
have said a kinder thing to me and then drop
the other, which was to him that was not a compliment,
and it crushed me. And the school was very very
hard for me in that regard. It was like, you know,
they always talk about when you joined the Marine Corps,
boot camp is about stripping away the individual and turning
(14:16):
you into this one thing that doesn't really think. You
just complete the mission. You're part of a team. And
in a very odd way, that was what going to
college to be an actor was for me.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
I remember going for the audition and being surrounded by
all these kids in leotards doing like vocal warm ups
and being like, what the fuck is going? Like, I
had no idea. I had no idea. That was why
I was sure. I was like, well, I'm not getting
in here. So I feel like a lot of my
career has been about trying to tap back into some
(14:48):
of that fairy dust, you know, that I had in
my soul before I came to a theater conservatory.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
I don't know if that even answered your question remotely. No.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Well, one, I don't know either.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
But two, that's very very interesting because I think that
you know, I mean, I am tremendously grateful for the
experience that I had and the training that I have.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
But I think that you bring up an interesting.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Point, which, by the way, at least at SMU, the
teachers talked about, which is you're learning all of these
tools and movement and voice and action and objective and
all of those things, and then eventually you are supposed
to just let it go and go back and have
(15:35):
it be a part of your training, but not what
you're focusing on. And I think especially young actors get
wrapped up in that process as sort of falling in
love with the process, which then you know doesn't enable
you to perform. Yet you mentioned something you talked about
boot camp, and I do want to touch on this
(15:57):
because this is well unique and by the way, this
is not a place we connect. You spent a bit
of time at that Naval Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps.
Now one, what is this and how old were you?
Was this a potential path for you early on?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Man, that was a deep dive, bro, I'm so glad
you asked that question. That's really really cool. Yes, it
was a potential path for me at one point. So
my dad, as I mentioned was selling life insurance. When
I was in seventh grade. The group of people that
my dad was selling life insurance with dissolved, and to
(16:37):
me as a kid, I thought, oh, no, my dad's
out of work. I have to secure my own future.
And that was, you know, in a way, that was
kind of true for a little while. But at Carmel
Junior High where I grew up in Charlotte, in your
ninth grade year, you could begin in JROTC. In high school,
they have JROTC and it can be you know, typically
(16:59):
it's Air Force, Army or Navy. So I believe maybe
there are some Marine Corps schools. But in the eighth
grade year, the master sergeant who was in charge of
our ninth grade year would bring in a small group
of eighth graders that he would kind of train alongside
the ninth graders and then they would become the for
(17:20):
lack of a better term, the cadet commanders of that
ninth grade year when they became ninth graders. So that
was me. I went up to Master Sergeant pageant. This
guy wore a smoky and had gotten into the Marine
Corps at age seventeen from a very poor background. At
Tennessee and parental consent and got to go to Korea
(17:41):
as essentially a child. Came back and became a drill
instructor at Parris Island, and then became the head of
the drill instructor training school at Paras Island. So this
guy was like Lee Ermie from Full Metal Jacket.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
I mean, he was a.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Real thing, and he was being a super intense character.
I learned so much about how to comport yourself in society,
how to be a responsible grown up, how to wear
a suit, and about decorum. So I started to discern
(18:18):
a path to college for myself. But I was also
beginning to see the clicks in high school, and I
was seeing the ROTC click and seeing myself as being
a part of that clique. And I was beginning to
think of it in terms of you know, this is
in retrospect, Brian, but it was really a role that
(18:38):
I was playing, and I was not ultimately cut out
for that. I did not want that to be my life.
I was I think I was wise enough at that age,
not that I was super wise, but I was wise
enough to know that that wasn't I wasn't ready to
commit to that for the rest of my life, and
I wanted to experience more so halfway through ninth grade,
(19:01):
I backed out and got a pair of birkenstocks and
here I am.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
You joined the you joined the click across the cafeteria
like that was on the other corner of the cafeteria.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
I mean to tell you, man, within like a year
and a half, my hair was down to here and
it was like Kaki Sack every morning. But again, it
was like, I'm very glad that I had that experience.
It was it's good to kind of feel like you're
being a part of something civic minded, especially if it's
(19:37):
not to the detriment or to the exclusion of any
one group. That's the main thing.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, you know what, I think that it's you know,
I don't have that specific experience, but I think that
what you're talking about is so valuable that you have
a variety of experiences, go through a variety of different
groups if you will, or I mean it sounds like
(20:05):
you being civic minded and choosing something of a civic
minded that's well a plus to you. But just having
that experience to pull from as an actor later on
is invaluable. And it never makes sense to me, when
you find that click or you decide, oh, I'm you know,
a theater kid or whatever too early on, and you,
(20:30):
you know, turn your nose up to other experiences or whatever.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice for the thing
that you ultimately want to do.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
One hundred percent, Brian, And I think that's what you're
to me. What you're saying is really about you need
to kind of experience as many different walks of life
as you can right on your way to being a
well rounded person. And that's what really childhood, ideally and
adolescence and young adulthood are all about.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
You mentioned before you thought Second City was your path,
that's what you were going to do. Look looking doing
a little dive into your resume, it sounds like that's
not exactly what happened as you left to Paul uh
Anthony and Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Iceman, Cometh, Tracy Lets,
Killer Joe by the Way, which nobody is going to know,
(21:38):
or they did make a movie of it.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
That play blew my mind. So you become.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Fairly quickly a working actor in one of the theater
hotbeds in the country, Chicago, talk to me a little
bit about your experience and did you then think that
that was your life.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
I've always dreamed of having a path kind of like
what I envisioned the like the English actors path to be.
They get to have this great theater background and then
they sort of at some point in their careers they
graduate into getting to also concurrently do film and television
(22:21):
and that's so that's on the bucket list too. I
want to be a detective in western North Carolina.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
All right, you've come close, by the way, we'll talk
about that. You've come pretty close, but all right, go ahead.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
No.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
So yeah, that was like the Anthony and Cleopatra was
an audition that I did when I was still in college,
and I got to play the role of Skaus, which is,
you know, like a guard, like not a big role
at all, but I got to be on stage with
Larry Yando, Kevin Goodall, Lisa Dodson, Bradley Armacoste, Scott Parkinson,
(22:57):
and Barbara Gaines was directing These are like luminaries of
Icago Classical Theater and theater in Chicago, and it was like,
holy shit.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
Anything can go wrong on this stage in real time
while we're doing Shakespeare, and one of these geniuses is
just gonna fix it, like we can just pull and
we can ride this, and we're all together and we're
gonna support each other and we'll get.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
To the end. And the crowd, even especially if they
see the fuck ups, they're gonna love it. Well, good banana.
And it was like I had spent four years learning
all of this stuff in an institutional environment, but it
wasn't until I got on stage with these pros that
it was like my education truly began in earnest. So
(23:45):
that was going on, and then after I mean, I
did that first production, and then in the February of
two thousand, first year out of college, the production that
Mike Shannon had taken to New York with Tracy Lett's
play Killer Joe came back as a four like as
a profit production, and the rules were at that point
(24:07):
that they had to hire two kids in their twenties
under union contract. So I had to join the union
at twenty three years old in Chicago, in a city
at the time which was lousy with dudes my age
who were non equity well into their thirties, So it
was like, who the hell do you think you are, man,
You've graduated college fifteen minutes ago, and now I got
(24:27):
to pick healthcare bucket. I don't think so, But you know,
I was like, when I got that job, it was
like the grittiest theater going on in Chicago, despite the
fact that it was a production coming back from out
of town. And after that, I mean, it was so intense,
Brian that, like, my wife would pick me up after
(24:48):
shows sometimes and she wouldn't know who was getting in
the car with her. But I was making a living
as a theater actor in Chicago, and I was getting
money into my healthcare, so I knew that the next
year I'd be able to go to the doctor and
do these kinds of things. And I felt like, even
though it seemed like a gamble because there were so
(25:09):
many incredibly talented actors my age, it was worth it
because I knew that this was what I wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
And then I.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Survived as a union actor by winning jobs that took
me to other places out of Chicago until I was
old enough to kind of be in the casting pool
in Chicago as a union actor.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Are you at this point are you thinking about film
and television? Where do you see your life heading at
that point.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
I guess I had some dim idea that I would
I would be one of the few people who booked
a series regular role in the show that came to Chicago, which,
as you know, that was very rare. Typically when a
big production is coming to a place like Minneapolis or
to Chicago, it's because they're shooting on location in those
(25:56):
cities and they're as a pretty strong well of talent
local there to pick up the smaller roles, So a
lot of the bigger, better roles are already cast before
those shows come to Chicago Earth And I began to
figure that out probably early on, but you know, I
(26:17):
was still like I I got to audition for I
got to my first like on camera job was it
was with Clint Eastwood directing, and it was Flags of
our Fathers at George Gizzard was in the scene that
I got to do. It was a really heady experience
and they gave me half of a trailer and that
was my first job. That was my first job. So
(26:38):
I thought that was what being an actor was going
to be. But I was getting on camera work often
enough to where I thought, yeah, this is this is
building to something. I was also really interested in doing
voice work, so from a very early age I was
chasing voiceover. So I got to do a lot of
(27:00):
voiceover over the years too, which which helped me kind
of make ends meet and kind of string it together.
But I always thought, there's gonna be a role that's
going to take me to Los Angeles, or there's gonna
be a role that's going to take me to New York.
I'm not gonna leave work that i'm actively doing in
this vibrant community to search it out.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Interesting. Did you find that able to be true?
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I will say that when I've done work in Los
Angeles and New York, and I've never lived in either
of those cities, but I spent a good amount of
time in them getting to work. When people found out
that I was based in Chicago, they were always kind
of gobsmacked. It was like, well, why did they fly
your dumbass in here when there's there's so many talent
(27:48):
wactors here. And so there was always like a certain
amount of, you know, low key glee that I had
kind of beat the odds just by getting a seat
at the table from Chicago. But I also felt like
a representative of what this city has to offer. Chicago
is lousy with incredibly talented actors like Middle America, just
(28:13):
solid natural acting. And I feel so grateful for the
time that I got to spend there, continuing to study
and continuing to grind, like it was a grind, particularly
when you're dealing with mother Nature, which you know is
you know, pleasant in Chicago for like maybe three months
(28:34):
of the year combined.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Right right, I mean, it's crazy, guys. John Is first
two credits that at least are listed where I can
find things are Flags of Our Fathers with Clenn eas
Wood and Er, which at the time is like the
biggest show in television. How does Er come about?
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Well, they would feel exterior shots sometimes in Chicago, got it,
I mean that was a big one, obviously shooting in
Los Angeles, but every now and then they would have
the stars of the show kind of outside on the
street in Chicago to sort of place it in Chicago.
And so I played a I played a doctor doctor.
(29:22):
It was like literally doctor Collins and the props guy
had Doctor Tom Collins, which was kind of a little
little joke, but yeah, that was opposite Linda Carlini at
the time, which was really really cool. She's gone on
to do so much amazing stuff, particularly like Dead to Me,
which I don't know if you've watched that show.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Which is.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
So great in that show. Yes, but you're going back
to the theater. You're continuing to work in the theater
through the the aughts that they call them.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
And it was always there were only a handful of
theater companies in Chicago at that time that were supportive
of theater actors winning on camera work. Okay, without getting
this is going to be really boring, but the contracts
in Chicago theater allow for you to go and do
(30:17):
on camera work, but it's always up to the theater's discretion.
So you know, as a Midwestern working actor, you don't
want to burn bridges. But I was always kind of
able to sneak around and do a couple days here,
a couple of days there.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
You're working in the theater, you're getting days or a
week or whatever. In film and television and also doing
voiceover work. At this point, how many commercials are you
getting around this time?
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Well? I did, I did. I actually won campaigns. So
I was the voice of Comcast actually for about years
for their television commercials I was doing the vo for them.
I was the voice of on Star for many years.
I did several years of McDonald's across many different ad agencies,
(31:10):
and throughout that time I was also picking up different
spots for other people who were advertising too. I did
a few video games here and there, and I was
getting to do on camera commercials here more and more
the later it got. I did a FedEx spot with
an on camera commercial director named Jim Jenkins, and we
(31:31):
ended up doing a couple FedEx spots. We did some
other like Hyundai spots, and then we did a one
off commercial for bud Light that ended up kind of
becoming this whole Dilly Dilly campaign.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, I mean this is obviously where I'm going of commercials.
Maybe in history it rings very It rings high on
the top of people's whether you loved it or hated it.
Everybody knew the king in Dilly Dilly. Now when you're
doing this, are you are you on set?
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Right?
Speaker 2 (32:08):
So it's like if you're shooting a television show. Sometimes
you'll be like, wow, you know this is this is
pretty good? Are you thinking that this is going to
change the world?
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Dilly Dilly?
Speaker 1 (32:17):
You know, we did the first one, and we were
just I think bud Light were doing like four or five.
They had a zombie one, they had like a Revolutionary
War era one, they had this weird Game of Thrones
it was ours, and then people just started using the
phrase dilly dilly. And then they brought us back for
(32:38):
one around Thanksgiving, and then like late November they called
and they were like, all right, we want to do
a Super Bowl spot and we're going to do it
in It's either going to be South Africa or New Zealand,
so get ready. And I was like, excuse me what?
And then we went to New Zealand and we filmed
the Super Bowl spots in friggin New Zealand, and then
we filmed in Argentina, We filmed in Czech Republic, filmed
(33:00):
many times in Spain. It was like a real dream
to get to work on. It was a lot of fun.
And you know, I think about it in terms of
like we were doing beer commercials, but really we were
just making ludicrous, funny for the benefit of a beer company,
and yeah, it was. It was just it was just
(33:21):
a lot of fun being like the stupidest guy in
the room who kind of thought he was the smartest
guy in the room, like, that's fun, that's fun space
to play in.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Well, it's it's so interesting that you talked very early
on about your humorous interpret days and choosing to do
money Python, because really I feel like that's what that
commercial was. It was like classic Monty Python humor done
(33:54):
in a really big and broad way but in a
way that everyone could understand and ludicrous but fun, just funny.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
That's how I view it, viewed it anyway.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Good.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Do you feel like the success of that campaign propelled
your career forward?
Speaker 1 (34:16):
You know, I was sitting on a boat in Columbia
on the Magdalena River with John Krazinsky, bitching and moaning
about my fear that that campaign would ruin my career,
and Krazinsky was like, dude, just bet on yourself, Just
bet on yourself. And he was also like everyone's doing
(34:38):
commercials these days, man, And I remember, like he did.
I think his story about insurance. You probably remember when
he for like fifteen years after that, all the vo
casting departments were like, give us a John Krazinski read.
You know it was it was funny because I think
(35:00):
it was such a it was this dumb kind of
quasi period character and this big, long flowing robe. But
it was a character. And I guess the viewing public
who were seeing those either they put it together or
they didn't, But if they did, it didn't really one
didn't detract from the other necessarily in an odd way,
(35:21):
which I'm very, very grateful for because you know, as
you've been talking about, a lot of the roles that
I've played on film and television have been pretty serious,
and so I'm grateful. I feel fortunate to have gotten
to be a part of those stories. But I also
feel grateful and fortunate to get to make funny. You know,
if your career starts to go in one direction, people
(35:44):
start to think, well, that's what Brian does, that's all
Brian wants to do. It's not necessarily the case as
not necessarily all Brian can bring to the table. That's
just kind of what you guys keep asking Brian to do.
That's what I think. That's what it's been for me.
So I feel like I've gotten a few got a
few lucky ones in there where I've gotten to do
funny stuff too.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
That's awesome. Who's John Krazinski? Uh?
Speaker 1 (36:08):
He was this young actor who he portrayed, showed it
a fledgling Amazon production.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Yes, John worked with my old pal, other John John
and I put that together. What was it like working
with John on the first two seasons of Jack Ryan?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Oh he was great man.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Come on, no, no, no, no, no, come on, just
we're looking for truth here.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
What was it like? What was it like working with John.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
In this one scene where we were like going into
this like suspected terrorists den in Paris and John and
I were like at the back of a line of like, uh,
you know, like hardcore commando type dudes going up the
stairs and stuff. And he kept dropping the clip out
of his gun on the hard tile floor just to
make me laugh. I mean, we were like a couple
(37:05):
of fucking children, and it was like, this is a
big budget TV show, And every time I laughed, and
then he would just.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Do it again because yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
I will say, this is a cool thing. He So
between season one and season two, A Quiet Place came out, Yes,
and it changed the dynamic on set going into season two,
and John had suddenly a lot more ability to kind
of talk about how he saw the scenes coming together,
and it was really cool. To see him kind of
(37:39):
rise to the moment. This's the thing that is like,
you know, I think there are actors out there who
just love to play different roles, and then there are
actors who are geared to kind of take over the world.
And John is one of the second category. I mean,
he's like the people that you see at the top
of their game. It's not a mistake. They put in
a lot of time, a lot of effort, worked really
(38:02):
fricking hard, and that was that was kind of my
take on John. But he John is awesome. He's been
really cool. I wish I could give you more shitty stories,
but he always like he was one of them. So
we're surrounded by Navy seals, which is kind of like,
you don't want to do your own stunts. That's cool, uh,
(38:23):
you know, but John all like always wanted to do
his own stunts because he didn't want to catch any
shade from these Navy seals.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Oh he did come on them a.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Lot, man, it's like, and some of them were were
kind of dangerous, like he he he had We've all
been like kind of busted up on that set, but
he just keeps coming back. He's a tank man. He's
getting it done. Wow, I can see I've let you down.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
I mean a little bit. I mean a little bit.
He and I relates to Jack Ryan. This is like,
this is like such a humble brag story. But I
was invited to Europe basically to play golf with Prince
Albert of Monaco. And I am in this very very fancy,
(39:16):
nice hotel and there was a yacht thing. I mean,
it was the whole thing. And my phone goes off.
It's in the evening. My phone goes off and it's
a text message from John. I don't remember exactly what
it was, but my memory is that the text message says,
what the fuck are you in Monaco? And I was like,
(39:40):
first of all, how do you know, like what where
I'm like looking around, and he was there. I don't
know if you were there. He was there, I think
to like do some festival or I don't know, but
it was about Jack Ryan. It was like the opening
of Jack Ryan or whatever. And he was there. And
so there you go. We can't see each other in
(40:01):
the United States, but you know, suddenly we're like sleeping
next to each other in this hotel in Monaco. You
guys went Montreal, Columbia, Morocco, France.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
How was that? How was it? I mean it sounds
like you you did that for the Dilly Dilly too.
How was that?
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Traveling around so much on that show? Was it fun
or was it? Was it a grind?
Speaker 4 (40:24):
It was?
Speaker 1 (40:25):
It was fun. It was an incredible experience, particularly like
our time in Morocco. One of the coolest things I
did was I I got to go out to the
western Sahara and spend the night in the desert on
the dunes, and that was absolutely an amazing experience. Yeah.
And the time in Colombia was we were on like
the National Police training headquarters near a small city called
(40:48):
Hiradok in kind of central Colombia, about two and a
half hours away from Bogatah. Yeah, man, it was. It was.
It was super intense and very challenging, but ultimately a
really really cool ride.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
You've said that the role reminded you of your own
inner voice or your family back home. What do you
mean by that.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
I'm just kind of talking about like dudes you'd come
across in North Carolina who were just kind of like, man,
I was. I'm gonna tell you what earlier this week,
our dog was in the yard and a turkey walked
across the yard and the dog ran up that turkey
ended up in the tree. I mean, just that kind
of stuff, you know. God, Okay, it just is kind
(41:41):
of like that's what's below all the theater school training,
you know, Right. So when I went in to read
for that, I just kind of let it roll, and
I saw this guy as someone who is actually, if
you play badass, it kind of makes him seem like,
maybe he's not such a badass, right. I just I
just kind of thought that he placing him in a
(42:05):
sort of real approachable place made him more of a
real human being. And I guess I guess that that's
all I was going for.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I have to mention a show, and I don't know
that I ever do this when I'm talking to people,
talk specifically about my feelings, unless it's just straight praise
of a show. You had a role of Carl Wilkes
in Castle Rock. I thought that show was so freaking interesting.
(42:50):
I thought it was flawed. I'm gonna be honest with you,
I thought a lot of it didn't work. It's so
complicated that it's hard to even explain what it is
except it's basically Stephen King's mind and his characters throughout
the history of his writings existing semi simultaneously in the
(43:11):
same town. John plays Annie Wilkes's father, Annie Wilkes, of course,
going on to be the villain the lead of Misery
played by Kathy Bates, who appeared in the office Boom.
There's my association. F. John Krasinsky. F John Krasinsky, You
(43:32):
played the father of Annie Wilkes that Kathy Bates won
an oscar for. Talk to me about the experience that
you had on that show. Was Stephen King around?
Speaker 1 (43:47):
I'm sure he was in touch with the producers and
the writers and everyone.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
He was not generals, he was not Okay, good, okay.
It makes me feel better that I wasn't involved.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
We were in Massachusetts. That filmed in Massachusetts, which was
beautiful when we were there. We were about an hour
west of Boston. And Lizzie Kaplan who played Annie, and
Ruby Cruz who played young Annie in the in the flashbacks,
both just phenomenal talents. Lizzie Man, she was just so committed,
(44:19):
so professional. It was a super intense experience. Particularly I
guess it is it a spoiler if I talk about
kind of the final scene.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I mean, I did, I didn't know. No, it's been
four years. No, it's not a spoiler, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
They the dad is pushed down some stairs.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Flight of stairs. You did. That's not yourself, like John, right,
it's not myself.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Yes, And I was impaled on a banister and they
run a they run a hose of blood kind of
up your shirt and next to your face, and that's
kind of going off while you play this scene with
your daughter. And it was, man, it was that was
(45:08):
super intense, but actually a lot of fun and really
really disturbing, really disturbing. It's a lot of fun to
get to do harror every now and then to scare
people and to dig into the things that people are
I was going to say triggered by, but that's kind
(45:28):
of a loaded term.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
I just thought that the series was super fascinating and
it's it's good to hear that it was a good
experience and also not surprising that it was. That it
was difficult, an amazing cast, and yeah, if you haven't
checked it out, it's worth checking out. Got to talk
to you about Dope Sick, The show of twenty twenty
(45:54):
one twenty twenty two for sure, Randy Ramsayer, Ramsayer, Ramsire,
Ramsire whatever, Randy, uh that was? This is my reference
to the playing a cop in western North Carolina, close
but not quite. Talk to me about your experience working
(46:16):
on Dope Sick and interestingly, an incredibly dark I loved it,
incredibly dark show. Did you have a positive experience working
on Dope Sick and did you expect that to be
well the show of the last year or so.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
I absolutely had a positive experience on it. I learned
so much. You know that that's one of the conversations
that has been on a slow boil in this country
for over twenty years, to reading OxyContin and all these
things going on, and we've all known that we've been
kind of fed a line on this, these prescription painkillers.
(46:59):
But it wasn't until shows and documentarians really started to
do a kind of a deep dive into the connection
between this one company and the way that these drugs
are sort of insinuated into the healing process when you
get hospitalized, and kind of making all these connections and
(47:22):
finding out that certain aspects of the testing going through
the FDA were all kind of fiddled with. It woke
me up to a lot of ways that we can
certainly do better. Danny Strong, who was the writer and
the producer, was a constant. It was like walking around
with an encyclopedia. This guy had so much knowledge in
(47:42):
his brain the whole time.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
But also.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
It was kind of like that situation where the darker
the subject matter, the more levity there is offscreen because
the people telling those stories have to find a balance
or you just absolutely go insane. Yeah, you know, it's
it's a very different path for an actor on a
set like that. And the cool thing is casts and
(48:12):
the producers sort of understand what it is that you
have to find within yourself on a given day, and
they will give you space to find it, and they
will they will kind of try and find a way
to be supportive of you. But it was we shot
that and rich In and around Richmond, Virginia. It was
a lovely time to get to work in. It was.
(48:33):
It was a great experience. And the first couple episodes
were directed, of course by Barry Levinson, which was a
real honor to get to work with him. He was
one of he's one of these directors who knows exactly
what's going in the final cut. He knows what he's
going to use, so there's a he's very efficient and
very direct in getting what he needed from the actors.
(48:53):
Was wonderful to get to work with all those.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
Guys, being from North Carolina now living back in North Carolina,
that is a state and an area there that has
suffered a lot from the opioid epidemic. Did you have
a personal connection to this because of that?
Speaker 3 (49:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
There are suboxym clinics, which is one of the drugs
that they try and do replacement therapy with all over
the place here, and I think that that was one
of the things that I learned is that cold turkey
and prayer doesn't work all that well. Unfortunately with people
who are addicted to drugs like this. You're lucky if
(49:35):
you get off it and stay off it at all.
A lot of times, the more humane way to stop
using it is to slowly step down with a replacement
And certainly it has touched these addictions. Have touched people
in my family, They've touched so many people in America,
and it's something that it's like a dirty, little household
(49:57):
secret for so many people. And that was one of
the things that I was eager to tackle was how
are we going to portray people who become addicted to
this drug? You know, if it's a high school football
football player who suffers a knee injury and is given
(50:19):
OxyContin and then four months later their life is ruined
and they have to find something cheaper, so they switch
to heroin. Generally, we in this country, I think, have
thought of people who become drug addicts as morally weak
for people who have suffered, and the reality is often
so much more nuanced than that. And so I think
(50:42):
one of the things that the show really got right
was how you can become addicted to some of these
drugs when the situation is constructed and architected in such
a way to make people become addicted through no fault
of your own. And I feel like that that was
the thing that the show got right, because that was
(51:03):
one of the comments that we got over and over
and over again was oh, man, my aunt suffered this,
my grandmother, my son, my daughter, I have I'm still
working on this, you know. And then I have had
people friends and family who have, you know, kind of
casually over the years asked about, yeah, if you have
any pills or because I'm suffering this and I'm having
(51:23):
a hard time getting blah blah blah. That's what that is.
Speaker 3 (51:27):
I mean, that's.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Right, and I know, you know. The other argument is
when shows go after oxyconton like this, you're taking a
very valuable tool out of the doctor's hands. And I
don't think that was what the show was saying. I
think what the show was saying was like, when you're
dealing with end of life pain or when you are
(51:50):
under a doctor's direct supervision, this is an absolutely a
valuable tool, but it's not a valuable tool for myriad
other inies that one can sustain and live with and
perhaps manage with different classes of drugs that are not
addictive in the same way that an opioid is.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah, that was certainly my takeaway that really the issue
was the lack of transparency with how addictive it was,
and then potentially the over prescribing, which triggered that faster
and faster.
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Walking into a hospital, you know, with an injury or
some severe pain and being shown you know, the smiley
face graph from smiley to frownie, where are you on
this spectrum? And learning that that was kind of something
that was constructed to make pain treatment a conversation that's
at the front and center of conversations with doctors when
you're healing and healing, and obviously dealing with pain is
(52:48):
horrible and something that needs to be done empathetically. But
when you have a company that stands to gain billions
of dollars kind of wagging the federal government around or
its agencies, that's something that we need to look very
very closely at to make sure that, you know, ideally
the government exists to make sure that we are kept
(53:10):
safe from the crueler intentions of corporate entities.
Speaker 3 (53:15):
Did you meet Randyr Yeah, he.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
Got to Zoom and then he came to an event
I think in Washington. Got to meet him there, and
he's a super laid back, cool guy, you know. And
these guys were like bulldogs, like they were immovable. There
was they weren't going anywhere once they started with this,
and that's kind of the cool thing. It's like, you
may think of us as small town and therefore you
(53:42):
may not take us seriously, but we take this job
very seriously. We work on the taxpayer's dime and we're
not going to stop until justice has been served. Yeah,
the really compelling story him in Rick Mountcastle just out.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
Not that you need any more, but John, but Waco
the aftermath. I'm very, very interested in this. When I
went to SMU, this is when Waco happened. From the
public television in my dorm room in college, we watched it,
(54:22):
and of course it's I don't know, sixty eighty miles
down the road this was all taking place, So I
feel this weird connection to it. I don't want you
to give any spoilers, but what was that like going
back to yet another true story, a tragedy and exploring
(54:44):
the aftermath of that.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
So Clive Doyle, who I portray in the show, was
a branch Davidian I remember that time too. I was
fifteen turning sixteen that April. Yeah, I remember, probably like
you do. There were you know, it was like three
or four network news sources that were all kind of
(55:08):
giving the same information on the standoff, and the idea
was basically, these people were insane and they were making
the situation worse and worse, and the government was just
trying to get the kids out of there and keep
everybody safe. And I think that's all generally accurate. However,
there's so much more that went into pushing the government
(55:33):
into the standoff, and that kept this group of ultra
orthodox in the middle of the desert in Texas from
complying and coming out of the buildings without giving anything away.
Clive immigrated to the United States in the early sixties
with his mom from Australia and had been at the
(55:56):
compound for thirty years already when the fire happened. So
I thought at the time that this was kind of
a new group of people, and he had moved, and
they were into guns, and they were marrying girls off
very young, and this community had been there for many
decades even prior to Clive arriving in the sixties. From
a technical aspect, they wanted an actor who could find
(56:22):
a way to also weave in a Texas dialect to
this sort of soft Australian accent. So that was kind
of a fun challenge to try and tackle. But yeah,
Clive was I think a tantamount to a monk, and
he also inhabited a world where miracles were all over
(56:43):
the place. And this guy sitting next to him who
begins as Vernon Howell and then kind of chooses the
name David Koresh is to this group of people, he's
the embodiment of God. He literally is the lamb they believe,
and at a certain point, Koresh tells this group of people,
I'm the only one who can have sex with anyone.
(57:05):
So if you're married and I choose your wife, you
have to be okay with that. And stunning how many
of them stayed so to kind of study this against
the backdrop of everything the federal government was doing at
the time. It's an incredibly messy story from so many angles.
I think that the takeaway for the federal government was
(57:29):
if you back people with extreme beliefs into a corner,
it's likely that they will do extreme things. Technically, what
that means is that the government ends up acting more
empathetically when there are guns involved. Then that's a good thing.
As an actor, I want more empathy everywhere. I want
(57:50):
us to strive to understand the worldview of those that
we don't agree with. We have to make the effort
to understand which is distinct and separate from agreeing with them.
Speaker 3 (58:02):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (58:03):
I don't know that we're all going to ever agree
on everything. I don't think that's realistic, but we have
to spend time trying to understand. And that's why I
think this show is important is it's a continued meditation
on what went wrong, which means producers and a network
are sitting around trying to understand how we got to
(58:24):
that place then and the doubtles. The producers and directors
and creators of the show are drawing a bright red
line from that event to Charlottesville and to January sixth.
Speaker 2 (58:36):
I think one, you're awesome and to the point that
you bring up there is so important on both sides
of this debate or war that's raging in the United States,
and not having any empathy for the other side, whatever
(59:00):
side that is, and behaving toward them in a harsh
and unsympathetic and unempathetic way is only going to make
them strengthen their resolve. As you said, that's incredible because yeah,
we're still we're still trying to figure it out.
Speaker 3 (59:18):
God.
Speaker 2 (59:18):
And side note, I don't even know. I mean, I
watched this other show. Did they talk about that in
the waycoat that had been going on that long in
the sixth in the sixties, that had been going on.
Speaker 3 (59:31):
I miss that. I had no idea.
Speaker 1 (59:34):
Yeah, Lois So Lois Rodin, Jay Smith Cameron wonderful Actors.
He plays Lois Rodin in this season. She is the
prophet of the era and she sort of inherited being
the prophet from her husband, who inherited it from another guy.
So it's a shootoff of a shootoff of the Seventh
(59:56):
day Adventist denoment.
Speaker 3 (59:57):
Yeah, and you know.
Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
It was the kind of thing where and again, I
want to talk about it without demeaning a group of
people's beliefs. So it would be, you know, the idea
that the it's all going to end on this day,
and then that day comes and goes, and then I've
gotten another prophecy, and now I was wrong, It's actually
going to end on this day, and so forth and
(01:00:22):
so on, and the Branch Davidians it was known by
the federal government at this point that their theology was
that the world was going to end in fire, and
they had listening devices in the compound and apparently had
audio of the Branch Davidians planning to set fire in
various locations if the federal government ever breached the walls.
(01:00:45):
They knew that, you know, the tear gas they were
going to use was highly flammable, and they also knew
that the branch Davidians had been talking about setting the fire.
So it does become very very messy. So two things
that I think about on this show are like, David
Koresh committed suicide by cop and he took eighty souls
(01:01:06):
with him, and the federal government for its part, was
over eager to be used in that regard for a
number of reasons. Also, there were three I believe three
government entities on the ground at Waco. You had the ATF,
which started the raid and called cameras there to film
it because they were facing an existential crisis in Congress
they needed to televise win. So this this standoff ultimately
(01:01:30):
becomes a debacle in a tragedy. But when four ATF
agents are killed and the FBI shows up, now you
have two forces who are not actually working in concert,
and then you have the hostage rescue team who has
its own goals. So there was no general sort of
telling everybody what the next step needs to be. Yeah,
and tragedy ensues.
Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
Fascinating.
Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
It was something that we we spent a lot of
time learning about and studying about, and I don't want
oral government is one blame or that the branch Davidians
are one hundred percent to blame, but it is worthy
of study.
Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Well that's you know.
Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Where great art lives, as far as I'm concerned, is
in the question, not in the answers. So exploring all
sides is valuable and ultimately hopefully changes things for the future. John,
thank you so much for your time you Knox goes away.
I hear you've just wrapped principal photography on that. Another
(01:02:27):
Michael Keaton adventure. Good luck with that. I'm a big
fan of his and a huge fan of yours as well.
Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
I will be watching whatever you do next.
Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
Thank you for this time together. This has been a
lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (01:02:42):
Man.
Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
Yeah, thank you so much, John, I appreciate it. Good luck.
Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
Thank you sir, take care.
Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
That was so much fun. Thank you so much for
hopping on after talking to you. Let me just say
I am so excited to watch Waco the Aftermath. It
was a story I followed very closely years ago, but
to hear the residences from today's world, well, well I
just can't wait. Listeners, make sure to look out for
(01:03:22):
John in Waco.
Speaker 3 (01:03:23):
He is going to be awesome.
Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
I know it, and of course make sure to leave
a comment on our Instagram. Tune into next week for
Off the Beat, Same time, same place, same me.
Speaker 3 (01:03:36):
We'll see you then.
Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
Off the Beat is hosted and executive produced by me
Brian Baumgartner, alongside our executive producer, Ling Lee. Our senior
producer is Diego Tapia. Our producers are Liz Hayes, Hannah Harris,
and Emily Carr. Talent producer is Ryan Papa Zachary, and
our intern is Sammy Katz. Our theme song Bubble and Squeak,
(01:04:07):
performed by the one and only Creed Bratton,
When I've done work in Los Angeles and New York,
and I've never lived in either of those cities, but
I spent a good amount of time in them getting
to work. When people found out that I was based
in Chicago, they were always kind of gobsmacked. I was like, well,
why did they fly your dumbass in here when there's
there's so many talented actors here. So there was always
(00:23):
like a certain amount of, you know, low key glee
that I had kind of beat the odds just by
getting a seat at the table from Chicago. But I
also felt like a representative of what the city has
to offer. Chicago is lousy with incredibly talented actors. Hi,
(00:45):
my name is John Hogan Acker, and I'm just a
guy doing acting stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Hi, everybody, I'm so excited to welcome you all to
this week's episode of Off the Beat. I am your host,
as always, Brian Baumgartner, and I'm also very excited to
announce that the incredible John Hoganacher is joining us today.
Just like me, John has an extensive theater background, working
(01:18):
on productions like Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and one of
my dark dark favorites, Killer Joe. He of course, didn't
stop at theater. Since those good old days, he has
taken the film and television world by storm, jumping into
some very intense and very impressive roles on shows like
(01:40):
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Dope, Sick, and Waco The Aftermath.
Now he is here to go deep into his life
and his career from his commercial days. Dilly Dilly, anyone
to working on Jack Ryan with some guy named John Krasinski.
I don't know if you got I have heard of him.
(02:01):
I definitely haven't. All jokes aside, this is a great conversation.
So without further idea, John Hoganaker, everybody.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Bubble and squeak. I love it.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Bubble and squeak. I know, bubble and squeak.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
I cook, get every mole left over from the night before.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
What's up, John, hey man?
Speaker 1 (02:41):
How you doing.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I'm great. How are you?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I'm good, I'm good.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I'm not wearing the headphones. We tried to figure the
whole thing out, and of course it all fell apart.
The wheels came off to trolley at the last minute.
So here we are.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Listen.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
I know exactly what that's like every every day, every
day of my life.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
It's so nice to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I really am such a big fan of yours and
what you have been doing here man be hanging out. Yeah,
we have a lot of things in common. Some are
mostly manufactured by me, but we do have a lot
in common. You grew up, I understand in the South,
(03:25):
right in Charlotte.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
I sure did. In fact, I'm actually in the South now.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Oh, you're right. So you're in the South right now?
You live in the South.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yes, I'm from Charlotte, North Carolina, and a lot of
family in the mountains. So I was coming up here
a lot as a kid, and we moved back to
the Asheville area during the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Really, yeah, you do you love it? Oh?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, oh yeah, I love it so much. A lot
of stuff that I needed to kind of take care of. You,
needed to be closer to family, and a lot of
I don't know if this is the way you're your
experience of this, this job being an actor is but
a lot of a lot of stuff for me comes
down to taping. Anyway. When I was in Chicago, a
lot of the jobs that I was winning or that
(04:11):
were filming around the country were from tapes. And you know,
when we got deep into the belly of the pandemic,
my wife and I were kind of like, I went,
let me back up. I went to do Dope sic
which filmed in Richmond, and my wife and the kids
came out for the month of March and we spent
the whole and you know, in the South, it's like
the flowers are on the trees in March, it's like
(04:33):
spring everything, you know, the birds are singing. And then uh,
we finished and she went back home and the same
two feet of snow was on the ground that was
there when she left in Chicago, and it was, you know,
going to be winter for another couple of months. And
she smummed about it. And I was like, well, what
if we just went ahead? And what if we just
went ahead and did it? Made the move? So it has.
(04:54):
It's been wonderful, wonderful change of pace. It's a it's
a gentler rhythm. I feel like when I travel, like
I live in a yoga studio and I take that
yoga studio with me. People in New York are like, dude,
you're so chill.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
It is a beautiful area.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
There's a little town called Greenville, South Carolina, which is
not overly far from you, which I had relatives that
lived in green I was in Atlanta and I had
relatives that lived in Greenville. When I was a kid,
Greenville was nothing. I'm just gonna see, I'm just gonna
say it straight out. And now it is a booming,
mid size, mid city metropolis with great food and places
(05:38):
to go and river walks and it's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
It's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Greenville has that Asheville does not have is a costco.
I mean, it's the little thing right we want you.
I want six worlds of toilet paper. I'm going to Greenville.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Well, And to finish this off, yet another weird connection.
I am lying tomorrow this is this is not a joke,
and this was not playing. I am flying tomorrow morning
to Chicago. I had several weeks ago been in Wyoming
and I was like, we're done with the winter. I
packed up all my winter coats, I packed up. I'm like,
(06:18):
I'm done with the winter. I'm flying. It's we're in
late April here, We're definitively in late April, and I'm
flying to Chicago tomorrow. The high is going to be
forty on Saturday and Sunday. I can't even believe that
this is happening. I mean, I'm gonna have a great time,
don't get me wrong, but yes I am.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
I can't believe it.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
You're getting on that plane under your own steam, brind
So you did it to yourself and no, yeah, it's
you know the thing on One of the things that
I'm proud of myself for is that I every time
the weather's beautiful here in Asheville. I don't take like
a screenshot of the weather app and send it to
my friends in Chicago, but I fight. That's a daily
(07:02):
that's a daily battle that I'm always fighting, right, Yes,
you know the dogwood trees are blooming right now, beautiful
or so it's going to be like rhododendrons and mountain
laurels and yeah, it's just a lovely part of the world.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Do you golf?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Oh yeah, you know what. I've been a golfer my
entire life, but you would not know it.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Watching There are great courses. I play a lot of golf.
I it's funny when I get homesick for the South.
Is the masters being from Georgia, And it's because of
what you're talking about it's the azaleas. They got it
time perfectly, man, the beginning of April, the azaleas come
(07:42):
out the dogwoods and I'm like.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Oh, man, yeah, that is that is really beautiful.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Enough about weather. Well, so another thing you and I
have in common. You did the forensics thing. I state
and district champion of I was I I was stay
champion there two three four years or something there in Georgia.
Is that where you started performing or did you have
(08:10):
an interest in it and that's what brought you to that?
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Well?
Speaker 1 (08:14):
You know I did. So. My dad did commercials in Charlotte.
He was a life insurance and he did you know,
voiceover and television commercials, and he was a real like
funny guy. He was a life of the party. And
you know, so I looked up to him and I
wanted to emulate him. So I got in trouble all
(08:34):
the time in school. I was a class clown. And
when I was in like fifth and sixth grade, I
started doing plays at the children's theater in Charlotte, and
then I got braces. And I had braces for a
few years and my dad was like, well, there's no
market for a child with braces, So then around early
high school. I think I got into debate around like
(08:57):
probably sophomore year, because at that point we still had
Junior high, you know, which was through nine and then
you had ten through twelve for high school. And my
debate coach, I don't know, did you compete in like
humorous interp and dramatic intermsmatic? That's right, yes, well cool, yeah,
And for the listeners who don't know what Brian and
I are talking about, it was like you would basically
(09:18):
pick a play or it could be a TV show
or it could be a movie. You would do a
ten minute cutting and you had to have an introduction
somewhere in there. You had to basically keep your feet planted,
but you could play all the characters. And I went
after Monty Python because I was like, surely everybody wants
to hear my rendition.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
And debate.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
It's like Monty Python never wins, but knock yourself out, uh,
And Monty Python did not win for me. Then I
started doing different plays and had a lot of fun
with it, and yeah, I got to be it was
a state champion two times and I was a district
champion two times, so that was a lot of fun.
But that kind of strengthened the audition muscle, probably more
(10:05):
than anything else, because then, you know, when I was
towards the end of high school, kind of on a lark,
I auditioned for the theater school at DePaul University, and
you know, I didn't even go for Juilliard because it
seemed unattainable, was more expensive the audition process, and Chicago seemed,
I don't know, it seemed tamer at the time than
New York City. I got in, which was very cool.
(10:29):
The school was a super intense program. Did you do
like a theater conservatory or anything like that for college?
Speaker 3 (10:34):
I did. I went to SMU in DAWs, Oh.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, absolutely, solid school.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
So the program for us, I don't know. Did you
guys have a cut program too? At SMU?
Speaker 2 (10:44):
You know, there were no cuts, but people cut themselves.
I mean, I think we started out with fifteen actors
and you know, by the end, you know, seven.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Or eight, Wow, would make it four years? Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
It was the same same percentage that we lost. They
brought in seventy some our first year in ninety five.
Then they cut half of us after the first year.
They cut the remaining after the second year, and then
if you made it past the second cut, you were
in the casting pool for your junior and senior year. Yeah,
(11:21):
and so so that the NFL thing, the debate, the
forensics thing always helped me when it came time to
get in front of you know, a team of producers
and a director or something kind of walk in and
try and own the room, because I've had been doing
that in front of fellow teenagers for you know, three
(11:42):
or four years, getting a stink guy from competitors.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
You know, that's interesting. I have never truly, I have
never made that connection before. But of course you're right,
because that experience with you know, three judges and some
other a few other people watching, which does you're exactly right,
It does mimic that the audition experienced later on there's
(12:09):
three or four judges. Yeah, that's very interesting, John, I'd
never really thought about that before. But the advantage for
having just done it, whether you've done it well or not,
just getting comfortable walking into a small setting. It's much
easier to perform I think, in front of a thousand
(12:29):
or two thousand people sometimes than those really small rooms.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Right, Oh, yeah, absolutely, you've probably done the black blocks
theater thing too in your life. Yes, I had a
lot of opportunities to do that in Chicago, a lot
of great spaces. There's nothing like that live experience. And
as we move into the AI age, I think the
craziness is it'll be the theater actors at the end
(12:54):
of the day who are the only ones. But yeah,
the ability to kind of go into a room of
people and you're all live being, sharing space and you
kind of start to cast a spell that whips everybody up.
It's a really really amazing thing to get to be
(13:16):
a part of.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
So you when you go to De Paul, have you
decided in your mind that this is what you want
to do, that you want to be an actor?
Speaker 4 (13:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
I just was positive that I was going to be.
I was going to go to Second City and do
the whole thing. I you know, in high school, especially
because of the hi thing, I humorous interp the debate thing.
I thought I was going to do stand up. And
I had a first year acting teacher that I absolutely
revered kind of pulled me aside one day and he
was like, you know, John, you remind me of Robin Williams,
(13:52):
And I was to me that was like nobody could
have said a kinder thing to me and then drop
the other, which was to him that was not a compliment,
and it crushed me. And the school was very very
hard for me in that regard. It was like, you know,
they always talk about when you joined the Marine Corps,
boot camp is about stripping away the individual and turning
(14:16):
you into this one thing that doesn't really think. You
just complete the mission. You're part of a team. And
in a very odd way, that was what going to
college to be an actor was for me.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
I remember going for the audition and being surrounded by
all these kids in leotards doing like vocal warm ups
and being like, what the fuck is going? Like, I
had no idea. I had no idea. That was why
I was sure. I was like, well, I'm not getting
in here. So I feel like a lot of my
career has been about trying to tap back into some
(14:48):
of that fairy dust, you know, that I had in
my soul before I came to a theater conservatory.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
I don't know if that even answered your question remotely. No.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Well, one, I don't know either.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
But two, that's very very interesting because I think that
you know, I mean, I am tremendously grateful for the
experience that I had and the training that I have.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
But I think that you bring up an interesting.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Point, which, by the way, at least at SMU, the
teachers talked about, which is you're learning all of these
tools and movement and voice and action and objective and
all of those things, and then eventually you are supposed
to just let it go and go back and have
(15:35):
it be a part of your training, but not what
you're focusing on. And I think especially young actors get
wrapped up in that process as sort of falling in
love with the process, which then you know doesn't enable
you to perform. Yet you mentioned something you talked about
boot camp, and I do want to touch on this
(15:57):
because this is well unique and by the way, this
is not a place we connect. You spent a bit
of time at that Naval Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps.
Now one, what is this and how old were you?
Was this a potential path for you early on?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Man, that was a deep dive, bro, I'm so glad
you asked that question. That's really really cool. Yes, it
was a potential path for me at one point. So
my dad, as I mentioned was selling life insurance. When
I was in seventh grade. The group of people that
my dad was selling life insurance with dissolved, and to
(16:37):
me as a kid, I thought, oh, no, my dad's
out of work. I have to secure my own future.
And that was, you know, in a way, that was
kind of true for a little while. But at Carmel
Junior High where I grew up in Charlotte, in your
ninth grade year, you could begin in JROTC. In high school,
they have JROTC and it can be you know, typically
(16:59):
it's Air Force, Army or Navy. So I believe maybe
there are some Marine Corps schools. But in the eighth
grade year, the master sergeant who was in charge of
our ninth grade year would bring in a small group
of eighth graders that he would kind of train alongside
the ninth graders and then they would become the for
(17:20):
lack of a better term, the cadet commanders of that
ninth grade year when they became ninth graders. So that
was me. I went up to Master Sergeant pageant. This
guy wore a smoky and had gotten into the Marine
Corps at age seventeen from a very poor background. At
Tennessee and parental consent and got to go to Korea
(17:41):
as essentially a child. Came back and became a drill
instructor at Parris Island, and then became the head of
the drill instructor training school at Paras Island. So this
guy was like Lee Ermie from Full Metal Jacket.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
I mean, he was a.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Real thing, and he was being a super intense character.
I learned so much about how to comport yourself in society,
how to be a responsible grown up, how to wear
a suit, and about decorum. So I started to discern
(18:18):
a path to college for myself. But I was also
beginning to see the clicks in high school, and I
was seeing the ROTC click and seeing myself as being
a part of that clique. And I was beginning to
think of it in terms of you know, this is
in retrospect, Brian, but it was really a role that
(18:38):
I was playing, and I was not ultimately cut out
for that. I did not want that to be my life.
I was I think I was wise enough at that age,
not that I was super wise, but I was wise
enough to know that that wasn't I wasn't ready to
commit to that for the rest of my life, and
I wanted to experience more so halfway through ninth grade,
(19:01):
I backed out and got a pair of birkenstocks and
here I am.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
You joined the you joined the click across the cafeteria
like that was on the other corner of the cafeteria.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
I mean to tell you, man, within like a year
and a half, my hair was down to here and
it was like Kaki Sack every morning. But again, it
was like, I'm very glad that I had that experience.
It was it's good to kind of feel like you're
being a part of something civic minded, especially if it's
(19:37):
not to the detriment or to the exclusion of any
one group. That's the main thing.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, you know what, I think that it's you know,
I don't have that specific experience, but I think that
what you're talking about is so valuable that you have
a variety of experiences, go through a variety of different
groups if you will, or I mean it sounds like
(20:05):
you being civic minded and choosing something of a civic
minded that's well a plus to you. But just having
that experience to pull from as an actor later on
is invaluable. And it never makes sense to me, when
you find that click or you decide, oh, I'm you know,
a theater kid or whatever too early on, and you,
(20:30):
you know, turn your nose up to other experiences or whatever.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice for the thing
that you ultimately want to do.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
One hundred percent, Brian, And I think that's what you're
to me. What you're saying is really about you need
to kind of experience as many different walks of life
as you can right on your way to being a
well rounded person. And that's what really childhood, ideally and
adolescence and young adulthood are all about.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
You mentioned before you thought Second City was your path,
that's what you were going to do. Look looking doing
a little dive into your resume, it sounds like that's
not exactly what happened as you left to Paul uh
Anthony and Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Iceman, Cometh, Tracy Lets,
Killer Joe by the Way, which nobody is going to know,
(21:38):
or they did make a movie of it.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
That play blew my mind. So you become.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Fairly quickly a working actor in one of the theater
hotbeds in the country, Chicago, talk to me a little
bit about your experience and did you then think that
that was your life.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
I've always dreamed of having a path kind of like
what I envisioned the like the English actors path to be.
They get to have this great theater background and then
they sort of at some point in their careers they
graduate into getting to also concurrently do film and television
(22:21):
and that's so that's on the bucket list too. I
want to be a detective in western North Carolina.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
All right, you've come close, by the way, we'll talk
about that. You've come pretty close, but all right, go ahead.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
No.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
So yeah, that was like the Anthony and Cleopatra was
an audition that I did when I was still in college,
and I got to play the role of Skaus, which is,
you know, like a guard, like not a big role
at all, but I got to be on stage with
Larry Yando, Kevin Goodall, Lisa Dodson, Bradley Armacoste, Scott Parkinson,
(22:57):
and Barbara Gaines was directing These are like luminaries of
Icago Classical Theater and theater in Chicago, and it was like,
holy shit.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
Anything can go wrong on this stage in real time
while we're doing Shakespeare, and one of these geniuses is
just gonna fix it, like we can just pull and
we can ride this, and we're all together and we're
gonna support each other and we'll get.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
To the end. And the crowd, even especially if they
see the fuck ups, they're gonna love it. Well, good banana.
And it was like I had spent four years learning
all of this stuff in an institutional environment, but it
wasn't until I got on stage with these pros that
it was like my education truly began in earnest. So
(23:45):
that was going on, and then after I mean, I
did that first production, and then in the February of
two thousand, first year out of college, the production that
Mike Shannon had taken to New York with Tracy Lett's
play Killer Joe came back as a four like as
a profit production, and the rules were at that point
(24:07):
that they had to hire two kids in their twenties
under union contract. So I had to join the union
at twenty three years old in Chicago, in a city
at the time which was lousy with dudes my age
who were non equity well into their thirties, So it
was like, who the hell do you think you are, man,
You've graduated college fifteen minutes ago, and now I got
(24:27):
to pick healthcare bucket. I don't think so, But you know,
I was like, when I got that job, it was
like the grittiest theater going on in Chicago, despite the
fact that it was a production coming back from out
of town. And after that, I mean, it was so intense,
Brian that, like, my wife would pick me up after
(24:48):
shows sometimes and she wouldn't know who was getting in
the car with her. But I was making a living
as a theater actor in Chicago, and I was getting
money into my healthcare, so I knew that the next
year I'd be able to go to the doctor and
do these kinds of things. And I felt like, even
though it seemed like a gamble because there were so
(25:09):
many incredibly talented actors my age, it was worth it
because I knew that this was what I wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
And then I.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Survived as a union actor by winning jobs that took
me to other places out of Chicago until I was
old enough to kind of be in the casting pool
in Chicago as a union actor.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Are you at this point are you thinking about film
and television? Where do you see your life heading at
that point.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
I guess I had some dim idea that I would
I would be one of the few people who booked
a series regular role in the show that came to Chicago, which,
as you know, that was very rare. Typically when a
big production is coming to a place like Minneapolis or
to Chicago, it's because they're shooting on location in those
(25:56):
cities and they're as a pretty strong well of talent
local there to pick up the smaller roles, So a
lot of the bigger, better roles are already cast before
those shows come to Chicago Earth And I began to
figure that out probably early on, but you know, I
(26:17):
was still like I I got to audition for I
got to my first like on camera job was it
was with Clint Eastwood directing, and it was Flags of
our Fathers at George Gizzard was in the scene that
I got to do. It was a really heady experience
and they gave me half of a trailer and that
was my first job. That was my first job. So
(26:38):
I thought that was what being an actor was going
to be. But I was getting on camera work often
enough to where I thought, yeah, this is this is
building to something. I was also really interested in doing
voice work, so from a very early age I was
chasing voiceover. So I got to do a lot of
(27:00):
voiceover over the years too, which which helped me kind
of make ends meet and kind of string it together.
But I always thought, there's gonna be a role that's
going to take me to Los Angeles, or there's gonna
be a role that's going to take me to New York.
I'm not gonna leave work that i'm actively doing in
this vibrant community to search it out.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Interesting. Did you find that able to be true?
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I will say that when I've done work in Los
Angeles and New York, and I've never lived in either
of those cities, but I spent a good amount of
time in them getting to work. When people found out
that I was based in Chicago, they were always kind
of gobsmacked. It was like, well, why did they fly
your dumbass in here when there's there's so many talent
(27:48):
wactors here. And so there was always like a certain
amount of, you know, low key glee that I had
kind of beat the odds just by getting a seat
at the table from Chicago. But I also felt like
a representative of what this city has to offer. Chicago
is lousy with incredibly talented actors like Middle America, just
(28:13):
solid natural acting. And I feel so grateful for the
time that I got to spend there, continuing to study
and continuing to grind, like it was a grind, particularly
when you're dealing with mother Nature, which you know is
you know, pleasant in Chicago for like maybe three months
(28:34):
of the year combined.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Right right, I mean, it's crazy, guys. John Is first
two credits that at least are listed where I can
find things are Flags of Our Fathers with Clenn eas
Wood and Er, which at the time is like the
biggest show in television. How does Er come about?
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Well, they would feel exterior shots sometimes in Chicago, got it,
I mean that was a big one, obviously shooting in
Los Angeles, but every now and then they would have
the stars of the show kind of outside on the
street in Chicago to sort of place it in Chicago.
And so I played a I played a doctor doctor.
(29:22):
It was like literally doctor Collins and the props guy
had Doctor Tom Collins, which was kind of a little
little joke, but yeah, that was opposite Linda Carlini at
the time, which was really really cool. She's gone on
to do so much amazing stuff, particularly like Dead to Me,
which I don't know if you've watched that show.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Which is.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
So great in that show. Yes, but you're going back
to the theater. You're continuing to work in the theater
through the the aughts that they call them.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
And it was always there were only a handful of
theater companies in Chicago at that time that were supportive
of theater actors winning on camera work. Okay, without getting
this is going to be really boring, but the contracts
in Chicago theater allow for you to go and do
(30:17):
on camera work, but it's always up to the theater's discretion.
So you know, as a Midwestern working actor, you don't
want to burn bridges. But I was always kind of
able to sneak around and do a couple days here,
a couple of days there.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
You're working in the theater, you're getting days or a
week or whatever. In film and television and also doing
voiceover work. At this point, how many commercials are you
getting around this time?
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Well? I did, I did. I actually won campaigns. So
I was the voice of Comcast actually for about years
for their television commercials I was doing the vo for them.
I was the voice of on Star for many years.
I did several years of McDonald's across many different ad agencies,
(31:10):
and throughout that time I was also picking up different
spots for other people who were advertising too. I did
a few video games here and there, and I was
getting to do on camera commercials here more and more
the later it got. I did a FedEx spot with
an on camera commercial director named Jim Jenkins, and we
(31:31):
ended up doing a couple FedEx spots. We did some
other like Hyundai spots, and then we did a one
off commercial for bud Light that ended up kind of
becoming this whole Dilly Dilly campaign.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, I mean this is obviously where I'm going of commercials.
Maybe in history it rings very It rings high on
the top of people's whether you loved it or hated it.
Everybody knew the king in Dilly Dilly. Now when you're
doing this, are you are you on set?
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Right?
Speaker 2 (32:08):
So it's like if you're shooting a television show. Sometimes
you'll be like, wow, you know this is this is
pretty good? Are you thinking that this is going to
change the world?
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Dilly Dilly?
Speaker 1 (32:17):
You know, we did the first one, and we were
just I think bud Light were doing like four or five.
They had a zombie one, they had like a Revolutionary
War era one, they had this weird Game of Thrones
it was ours, and then people just started using the
phrase dilly dilly. And then they brought us back for
(32:38):
one around Thanksgiving, and then like late November they called
and they were like, all right, we want to do
a Super Bowl spot and we're going to do it
in It's either going to be South Africa or New Zealand,
so get ready. And I was like, excuse me what?
And then we went to New Zealand and we filmed
the Super Bowl spots in friggin New Zealand, and then
we filmed in Argentina, We filmed in Czech Republic, filmed
(33:00):
many times in Spain. It was like a real dream
to get to work on. It was a lot of fun.
And you know, I think about it in terms of
like we were doing beer commercials, but really we were
just making ludicrous, funny for the benefit of a beer company,
and yeah, it was. It was just it was just
(33:21):
a lot of fun being like the stupidest guy in
the room who kind of thought he was the smartest
guy in the room, like, that's fun, that's fun space
to play in.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Well, it's it's so interesting that you talked very early
on about your humorous interpret days and choosing to do
money Python, because really I feel like that's what that
commercial was. It was like classic Monty Python humor done
(33:54):
in a really big and broad way but in a
way that everyone could understand and ludicrous but fun, just funny.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
That's how I view it, viewed it anyway.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Good.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Do you feel like the success of that campaign propelled
your career forward?
Speaker 1 (34:16):
You know, I was sitting on a boat in Columbia
on the Magdalena River with John Krazinsky, bitching and moaning
about my fear that that campaign would ruin my career,
and Krazinsky was like, dude, just bet on yourself, Just
bet on yourself. And he was also like everyone's doing
(34:38):
commercials these days, man, And I remember, like he did.
I think his story about insurance. You probably remember when
he for like fifteen years after that, all the vo
casting departments were like, give us a John Krazinski read.
You know it was it was funny because I think
(35:00):
it was such a it was this dumb kind of
quasi period character and this big, long flowing robe. But
it was a character. And I guess the viewing public
who were seeing those either they put it together or
they didn't, But if they did, it didn't really one
didn't detract from the other necessarily in an odd way,
(35:21):
which I'm very, very grateful for because you know, as
you've been talking about, a lot of the roles that
I've played on film and television have been pretty serious,
and so I'm grateful. I feel fortunate to have gotten
to be a part of those stories. But I also
feel grateful and fortunate to get to make funny. You know,
if your career starts to go in one direction, people
(35:44):
start to think, well, that's what Brian does, that's all
Brian wants to do. It's not necessarily the case as
not necessarily all Brian can bring to the table. That's
just kind of what you guys keep asking Brian to do.
That's what I think. That's what it's been for me.
So I feel like I've gotten a few got a
few lucky ones in there where I've gotten to do
funny stuff too.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
That's awesome. Who's John Krazinski? Uh?
Speaker 1 (36:08):
He was this young actor who he portrayed, showed it
a fledgling Amazon production.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Yes, John worked with my old pal, other John John
and I put that together. What was it like working
with John on the first two seasons of Jack Ryan?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Oh he was great man.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Come on, no, no, no, no, no, come on, just
we're looking for truth here.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
What was it like? What was it like working with John.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
In this one scene where we were like going into
this like suspected terrorists den in Paris and John and
I were like at the back of a line of like, uh,
you know, like hardcore commando type dudes going up the
stairs and stuff. And he kept dropping the clip out
of his gun on the hard tile floor just to
make me laugh. I mean, we were like a couple
(37:05):
of fucking children, and it was like, this is a
big budget TV show, And every time I laughed, and
then he would just.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Do it again because yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
I will say, this is a cool thing. He So
between season one and season two, A Quiet Place came out, Yes,
and it changed the dynamic on set going into season two,
and John had suddenly a lot more ability to kind
of talk about how he saw the scenes coming together,
and it was really cool. To see him kind of
(37:39):
rise to the moment. This's the thing that is like,
you know, I think there are actors out there who
just love to play different roles, and then there are
actors who are geared to kind of take over the world.
And John is one of the second category. I mean,
he's like the people that you see at the top
of their game. It's not a mistake. They put in
a lot of time, a lot of effort, worked really
(38:02):
fricking hard, and that was that was kind of my
take on John. But he John is awesome. He's been
really cool. I wish I could give you more shitty stories,
but he always like he was one of them. So
we're surrounded by Navy seals, which is kind of like,
you don't want to do your own stunts. That's cool, uh,
(38:23):
you know, but John all like always wanted to do
his own stunts because he didn't want to catch any
shade from these Navy seals.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Oh he did come on them a.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Lot, man, it's like, and some of them were were
kind of dangerous, like he he he had We've all
been like kind of busted up on that set, but
he just keeps coming back. He's a tank man. He's
getting it done. Wow, I can see I've let you down.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
I mean a little bit. I mean a little bit.
He and I relates to Jack Ryan. This is like,
this is like such a humble brag story. But I
was invited to Europe basically to play golf with Prince
Albert of Monaco. And I am in this very very fancy,
(39:16):
nice hotel and there was a yacht thing. I mean,
it was the whole thing. And my phone goes off.
It's in the evening. My phone goes off and it's
a text message from John. I don't remember exactly what
it was, but my memory is that the text message says,
what the fuck are you in Monaco? And I was like,
(39:40):
first of all, how do you know, like what where
I'm like looking around, and he was there. I don't
know if you were there. He was there, I think
to like do some festival or I don't know, but
it was about Jack Ryan. It was like the opening
of Jack Ryan or whatever. And he was there. And
so there you go. We can't see each other in
(40:01):
the United States, but you know, suddenly we're like sleeping
next to each other in this hotel in Monaco. You
guys went Montreal, Columbia, Morocco, France.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
How was that? How was it? I mean it sounds
like you you did that for the Dilly Dilly too.
How was that?
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Traveling around so much on that show? Was it fun
or was it? Was it a grind?
Speaker 4 (40:24):
It was?
Speaker 1 (40:25):
It was fun. It was an incredible experience, particularly like
our time in Morocco. One of the coolest things I
did was I I got to go out to the
western Sahara and spend the night in the desert on
the dunes, and that was absolutely an amazing experience. Yeah.
And the time in Colombia was we were on like
the National Police training headquarters near a small city called
(40:48):
Hiradok in kind of central Colombia, about two and a
half hours away from Bogatah. Yeah, man, it was. It was.
It was super intense and very challenging, but ultimately a
really really cool ride.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
You've said that the role reminded you of your own
inner voice or your family back home. What do you
mean by that.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
I'm just kind of talking about like dudes you'd come
across in North Carolina who were just kind of like, man,
I was. I'm gonna tell you what earlier this week,
our dog was in the yard and a turkey walked
across the yard and the dog ran up that turkey
ended up in the tree. I mean, just that kind
of stuff, you know. God, Okay, it just is kind
(41:41):
of like that's what's below all the theater school training,
you know, Right. So when I went in to read
for that, I just kind of let it roll, and
I saw this guy as someone who is actually, if
you play badass, it kind of makes him seem like,
maybe he's not such a badass, right. I just I
just kind of thought that he placing him in a
(42:05):
sort of real approachable place made him more of a
real human being. And I guess I guess that that's
all I was going for.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I have to mention a show, and I don't know
that I ever do this when I'm talking to people,
talk specifically about my feelings, unless it's just straight praise
of a show. You had a role of Carl Wilkes
in Castle Rock. I thought that show was so freaking interesting.
(42:50):
I thought it was flawed. I'm gonna be honest with you,
I thought a lot of it didn't work. It's so
complicated that it's hard to even explain what it is
except it's basically Stephen King's mind and his characters throughout
the history of his writings existing semi simultaneously in the
(43:11):
same town. John plays Annie Wilkes's father, Annie Wilkes, of course,
going on to be the villain the lead of Misery
played by Kathy Bates, who appeared in the office Boom.
There's my association. F. John Krasinsky. F John Krasinsky, You
(43:32):
played the father of Annie Wilkes that Kathy Bates won
an oscar for. Talk to me about the experience that
you had on that show. Was Stephen King around?
Speaker 1 (43:47):
I'm sure he was in touch with the producers and
the writers and everyone.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
He was not generals, he was not Okay, good, okay.
It makes me feel better that I wasn't involved.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
We were in Massachusetts. That filmed in Massachusetts, which was
beautiful when we were there. We were about an hour
west of Boston. And Lizzie Kaplan who played Annie, and
Ruby Cruz who played young Annie in the in the flashbacks,
both just phenomenal talents. Lizzie Man, she was just so committed,
(44:19):
so professional. It was a super intense experience. Particularly I
guess it is it a spoiler if I talk about
kind of the final scene.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I mean, I did, I didn't know. No, it's been
four years. No, it's not a spoiler, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
They the dad is pushed down some stairs.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Flight of stairs. You did. That's not yourself, like John, right,
it's not myself.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Yes, And I was impaled on a banister and they
run a they run a hose of blood kind of
up your shirt and next to your face, and that's
kind of going off while you play this scene with
your daughter. And it was, man, it was that was
(45:08):
super intense, but actually a lot of fun and really
really disturbing, really disturbing. It's a lot of fun to
get to do harror every now and then to scare
people and to dig into the things that people are
I was going to say triggered by, but that's kind
(45:28):
of a loaded term.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
I just thought that the series was super fascinating and
it's it's good to hear that it was a good
experience and also not surprising that it was. That it
was difficult, an amazing cast, and yeah, if you haven't
checked it out, it's worth checking out. Got to talk
to you about Dope Sick, The show of twenty twenty
(45:54):
one twenty twenty two for sure, Randy Ramsayer, Ramsayer, Ramsire,
Ramsire whatever, Randy, uh that was? This is my reference
to the playing a cop in western North Carolina, close
but not quite. Talk to me about your experience working
(46:16):
on Dope Sick and interestingly, an incredibly dark I loved it,
incredibly dark show. Did you have a positive experience working
on Dope Sick and did you expect that to be
well the show of the last year or so.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
I absolutely had a positive experience on it. I learned
so much. You know that that's one of the conversations
that has been on a slow boil in this country
for over twenty years, to reading OxyContin and all these
things going on, and we've all known that we've been
kind of fed a line on this, these prescription painkillers.
(46:59):
But it wasn't until shows and documentarians really started to
do a kind of a deep dive into the connection
between this one company and the way that these drugs
are sort of insinuated into the healing process when you
get hospitalized, and kind of making all these connections and
(47:22):
finding out that certain aspects of the testing going through
the FDA were all kind of fiddled with. It woke
me up to a lot of ways that we can
certainly do better. Danny Strong, who was the writer and
the producer, was a constant. It was like walking around
with an encyclopedia. This guy had so much knowledge in
(47:42):
his brain the whole time.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
But also.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
It was kind of like that situation where the darker
the subject matter, the more levity there is offscreen because
the people telling those stories have to find a balance
or you just absolutely go insane. Yeah, you know, it's
it's a very different path for an actor on a
set like that. And the cool thing is casts and
(48:12):
the producers sort of understand what it is that you
have to find within yourself on a given day, and
they will give you space to find it, and they
will they will kind of try and find a way
to be supportive of you. But it was we shot
that and rich In and around Richmond, Virginia. It was
a lovely time to get to work in. It was.
(48:33):
It was a great experience. And the first couple episodes
were directed, of course by Barry Levinson, which was a
real honor to get to work with him. He was
one of he's one of these directors who knows exactly
what's going in the final cut. He knows what he's
going to use, so there's a he's very efficient and
very direct in getting what he needed from the actors.
(48:53):
Was wonderful to get to work with all those.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
Guys, being from North Carolina now living back in North Carolina,
that is a state and an area there that has
suffered a lot from the opioid epidemic. Did you have
a personal connection to this because of that?
Speaker 3 (49:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
There are suboxym clinics, which is one of the drugs
that they try and do replacement therapy with all over
the place here, and I think that that was one
of the things that I learned is that cold turkey
and prayer doesn't work all that well. Unfortunately with people
who are addicted to drugs like this. You're lucky if
(49:35):
you get off it and stay off it at all.
A lot of times, the more humane way to stop
using it is to slowly step down with a replacement
And certainly it has touched these addictions. Have touched people
in my family, They've touched so many people in America,
and it's something that it's like a dirty, little household
(49:57):
secret for so many people. And that was one of
the things that I was eager to tackle was how
are we going to portray people who become addicted to
this drug? You know, if it's a high school football
football player who suffers a knee injury and is given
(50:19):
OxyContin and then four months later their life is ruined
and they have to find something cheaper, so they switch
to heroin. Generally, we in this country, I think, have
thought of people who become drug addicts as morally weak
for people who have suffered, and the reality is often
so much more nuanced than that. And so I think
(50:42):
one of the things that the show really got right
was how you can become addicted to some of these
drugs when the situation is constructed and architected in such
a way to make people become addicted through no fault
of your own. And I feel like that that was
the thing that the show got right, because that was
(51:03):
one of the comments that we got over and over
and over again was oh, man, my aunt suffered this,
my grandmother, my son, my daughter, I have I'm still
working on this, you know. And then I have had
people friends and family who have, you know, kind of
casually over the years asked about, yeah, if you have
any pills or because I'm suffering this and I'm having
(51:23):
a hard time getting blah blah blah. That's what that is.
Speaker 3 (51:27):
I mean, that's.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Right, and I know, you know. The other argument is
when shows go after oxyconton like this, you're taking a
very valuable tool out of the doctor's hands. And I
don't think that was what the show was saying. I
think what the show was saying was like, when you're
dealing with end of life pain or when you are
(51:50):
under a doctor's direct supervision, this is an absolutely a
valuable tool, but it's not a valuable tool for myriad
other inies that one can sustain and live with and
perhaps manage with different classes of drugs that are not
addictive in the same way that an opioid is.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah, that was certainly my takeaway that really the issue
was the lack of transparency with how addictive it was,
and then potentially the over prescribing, which triggered that faster
and faster.
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Walking into a hospital, you know, with an injury or
some severe pain and being shown you know, the smiley
face graph from smiley to frownie, where are you on
this spectrum? And learning that that was kind of something
that was constructed to make pain treatment a conversation that's
at the front and center of conversations with doctors when
you're healing and healing, and obviously dealing with pain is
(52:48):
horrible and something that needs to be done empathetically. But
when you have a company that stands to gain billions
of dollars kind of wagging the federal government around or
its agencies, that's something that we need to look very
very closely at to make sure that, you know, ideally
the government exists to make sure that we are kept
(53:10):
safe from the crueler intentions of corporate entities.
Speaker 3 (53:15):
Did you meet Randyr Yeah, he.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
Got to Zoom and then he came to an event
I think in Washington. Got to meet him there, and
he's a super laid back, cool guy, you know. And
these guys were like bulldogs, like they were immovable. There
was they weren't going anywhere once they started with this,
and that's kind of the cool thing. It's like, you
may think of us as small town and therefore you
(53:42):
may not take us seriously, but we take this job
very seriously. We work on the taxpayer's dime and we're
not going to stop until justice has been served. Yeah,
the really compelling story him in Rick Mountcastle just out.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
Not that you need any more, but John, but Waco
the aftermath. I'm very, very interested in this. When I
went to SMU, this is when Waco happened. From the
public television in my dorm room in college, we watched it,
(54:22):
and of course it's I don't know, sixty eighty miles
down the road this was all taking place, So I
feel this weird connection to it. I don't want you
to give any spoilers, but what was that like going
back to yet another true story, a tragedy and exploring
(54:44):
the aftermath of that.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
So Clive Doyle, who I portray in the show, was
a branch Davidian I remember that time too. I was
fifteen turning sixteen that April. Yeah, I remember, probably like
you do. There were you know, it was like three
or four network news sources that were all kind of
(55:08):
giving the same information on the standoff, and the idea
was basically, these people were insane and they were making
the situation worse and worse, and the government was just
trying to get the kids out of there and keep
everybody safe. And I think that's all generally accurate. However,
there's so much more that went into pushing the government
(55:33):
into the standoff, and that kept this group of ultra
orthodox in the middle of the desert in Texas from
complying and coming out of the buildings without giving anything away.
Clive immigrated to the United States in the early sixties
with his mom from Australia and had been at the
(55:56):
compound for thirty years already when the fire happened. So
I thought at the time that this was kind of
a new group of people, and he had moved, and
they were into guns, and they were marrying girls off
very young, and this community had been there for many
decades even prior to Clive arriving in the sixties. From
a technical aspect, they wanted an actor who could find
(56:22):
a way to also weave in a Texas dialect to
this sort of soft Australian accent. So that was kind
of a fun challenge to try and tackle. But yeah,
Clive was I think a tantamount to a monk, and
he also inhabited a world where miracles were all over
(56:43):
the place. And this guy sitting next to him who
begins as Vernon Howell and then kind of chooses the
name David Koresh is to this group of people, he's
the embodiment of God. He literally is the lamb they believe,
and at a certain point, Koresh tells this group of people,
I'm the only one who can have sex with anyone.
(57:05):
So if you're married and I choose your wife, you
have to be okay with that. And stunning how many
of them stayed so to kind of study this against
the backdrop of everything the federal government was doing at
the time. It's an incredibly messy story from so many angles.
I think that the takeaway for the federal government was
(57:29):
if you back people with extreme beliefs into a corner,
it's likely that they will do extreme things. Technically, what
that means is that the government ends up acting more
empathetically when there are guns involved. Then that's a good thing.
As an actor, I want more empathy everywhere. I want
(57:50):
us to strive to understand the worldview of those that
we don't agree with. We have to make the effort
to understand which is distinct and separate from agreeing with them.
Speaker 3 (58:02):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (58:03):
I don't know that we're all going to ever agree
on everything. I don't think that's realistic, but we have
to spend time trying to understand. And that's why I
think this show is important is it's a continued meditation
on what went wrong, which means producers and a network
are sitting around trying to understand how we got to
(58:24):
that place then and the doubtles. The producers and directors
and creators of the show are drawing a bright red
line from that event to Charlottesville and to January sixth.
Speaker 2 (58:36):
I think one, you're awesome and to the point that
you bring up there is so important on both sides
of this debate or war that's raging in the United States,
and not having any empathy for the other side, whatever
(59:00):
side that is, and behaving toward them in a harsh
and unsympathetic and unempathetic way is only going to make
them strengthen their resolve. As you said, that's incredible because yeah,
we're still we're still trying to figure it out.
Speaker 3 (59:18):
God.
Speaker 2 (59:18):
And side note, I don't even know. I mean, I
watched this other show. Did they talk about that in
the waycoat that had been going on that long in
the sixth in the sixties, that had been going on.
Speaker 3 (59:31):
I miss that. I had no idea.
Speaker 1 (59:34):
Yeah, Lois So Lois Rodin, Jay Smith Cameron wonderful Actors.
He plays Lois Rodin in this season. She is the
prophet of the era and she sort of inherited being
the prophet from her husband, who inherited it from another guy.
So it's a shootoff of a shootoff of the Seventh
(59:56):
day Adventist denoment.
Speaker 3 (59:57):
Yeah, and you know.
Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
It was the kind of thing where and again, I
want to talk about it without demeaning a group of
people's beliefs. So it would be, you know, the idea
that the it's all going to end on this day,
and then that day comes and goes, and then I've
gotten another prophecy, and now I was wrong, It's actually
going to end on this day, and so forth and
(01:00:22):
so on, and the Branch Davidians it was known by
the federal government at this point that their theology was
that the world was going to end in fire, and
they had listening devices in the compound and apparently had
audio of the Branch Davidians planning to set fire in
various locations if the federal government ever breached the walls.
(01:00:45):
They knew that, you know, the tear gas they were
going to use was highly flammable, and they also knew
that the branch Davidians had been talking about setting the fire.
So it does become very very messy. So two things
that I think about on this show are like, David
Koresh committed suicide by cop and he took eighty souls
(01:01:06):
with him, and the federal government for its part, was
over eager to be used in that regard for a
number of reasons. Also, there were three I believe three
government entities on the ground at Waco. You had the ATF,
which started the raid and called cameras there to film
it because they were facing an existential crisis in Congress
they needed to televise win. So this this standoff ultimately
(01:01:30):
becomes a debacle in a tragedy. But when four ATF
agents are killed and the FBI shows up, now you
have two forces who are not actually working in concert,
and then you have the hostage rescue team who has
its own goals. So there was no general sort of
telling everybody what the next step needs to be. Yeah,
and tragedy ensues.
Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
Fascinating.
Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
It was something that we we spent a lot of
time learning about and studying about, and I don't want
oral government is one blame or that the branch Davidians
are one hundred percent to blame, but it is worthy
of study.
Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Well that's you know.
Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Where great art lives, as far as I'm concerned, is
in the question, not in the answers. So exploring all
sides is valuable and ultimately hopefully changes things for the future. John,
thank you so much for your time you Knox goes away.
I hear you've just wrapped principal photography on that. Another
(01:02:27):
Michael Keaton adventure. Good luck with that. I'm a big
fan of his and a huge fan of yours as well.
Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
I will be watching whatever you do next.
Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
Thank you for this time together. This has been a
lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (01:02:42):
Man.
Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
Yeah, thank you so much, John, I appreciate it. Good luck.
Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
Thank you sir, take care.
Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
That was so much fun. Thank you so much for
hopping on after talking to you. Let me just say
I am so excited to watch Waco the Aftermath. It
was a story I followed very closely years ago, but
to hear the residences from today's world, well, well I
just can't wait. Listeners, make sure to look out for
(01:03:22):
John in Waco.
Speaker 3 (01:03:23):
He is going to be awesome.
Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
I know it, and of course make sure to leave
a comment on our Instagram. Tune into next week for
Off the Beat, Same time, same place, same me.
Speaker 3 (01:03:36):
We'll see you then.
Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
Off the Beat is hosted and executive produced by me
Brian Baumgartner, alongside our executive producer, Ling Lee. Our senior
producer is Diego Tapia. Our producers are Liz Hayes, Hannah Harris,
and Emily Carr. Talent producer is Ryan Papa Zachary, and
our intern is Sammy Katz. Our theme song Bubble and Squeak,
(01:04:07):
performed by the one and only Creed Bratton,
Host
Brian Baumgartner
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