Will Arnett Wants You to Take Him Seriously (Even If He Can’t)

Three years ago, an opportunity arrived in Will Arnett‘s inbox. It was a film script and an offer to headline, with a giant paycheck attached. He had every intention of taking it.

It was a big dumb comedy, the kind Arnett had done several times before. And had he said yes, he’d be playing, as he puts it, “another larger-than-life, goofy-ass character who’s kind of a doofus.” But again, he would’ve done it. “I would’ve said, ‘Oh, fuck it. Who cares? This is my lot.’ ”

But before he got to that point, before he signed on any dotted line or cashed any big check, his agent, CAA’s Rick Kurtzman, had called. He’d read the script, too. “He says to me, ‘Look, I never want to take money out of your pocket, so if this is something you want to do, for whatever reason, it’s fine,’ ” Arnett recalls. “And then he says, ‘But if I’m being honest, if I see that poster with you on it, I go, ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of movie Will Arnett makes.’ It was a shifting moment — it really just winded me, and I didn’t act again, not really, for a while.”

He didn’t act again, not really, until Is This Thing On?, the Bradley Cooper-helmed Searchlight film that Arnett co-wrote and stars in. It’s the kind of movie that no one would expect him to make. It’s about a marriage, or the disintegration of one, and when it rolls into theaters Dec. 19, audiences will see a decidedly different, dramatic side to the actor best known for arch roles in cult TV comedies like Arrested Development, 30 Rock and BoJack Horseman. The film, loosely based on the life of John Bishop, a British comedian who accidentally stumbles into stand-up as a form of marital catharsis, made its debut at the New York Film Festival, where it earned rapturous reviews, many of them hailing Arnett’s tender performance opposite Academy Award winner Laura Dern.

Over an early December brunch in Manhattan’s West Village, where the SmartLess co-host and dad of three increasingly spends his time, he insists he never set out to prove himself or be taken seriously — though he doesn’t downplay the validation this moment has delivered. In fact, it’s impossible to ignore the delight on Arnett’s face when a producer at a nearby table stops by to say he’d caught a recent screening of the film and was gobsmacked by its “raw, real, perfect portrayal of marriage.” (For what it’s worth, delight is harder to detect when a second restaurant-goer tells Arnett that her 10-year-old thinks Lego Batman is his best work.)

“This movie, this experience, it reminded me of why I started doing this in the first place,” he says as he forks into an omelet. It’s the kind of work Arnett had hoped to do when he arrived in New York 35 years ago, enrolling in the prestigious Lee Strasberg theater program and dabbling off-Broadway. He was all of 20 at the time, and he’d dropped out of Montreal’s Concordia College to become “a serious actor.” His Harvard-educated dad, a serious guy who was once the CEO of Molson Brewery, never tried to dissuade him. But he’d never been the type to heap praise on his son, either. That changed with this project, too.

The two had talked while Arnett was in prep, which, he told his father, involved him performing stand-up, in character, three times a night, almost every night, for six weeks at such famed clubs as the Comedy Cellar — and then, with Cooper, reworking his material the following day. At the time, plenty were confused: What was Arnett doing onstage, and why was he talking about the unraveling of his relationship? “Was it real?” the gossip sites wondered. “Was he having some sort of breakdown?” others worried. Not his dad, though. “He just said, ‘Geez, Willie, I’m really proud of you,’ ” Arnett recounts in his famously raspy baritone. “And I know he has been before and I know he loves me, but my dad’s very old school and Canadian, and that was the first time he’d said it overtly — and I was 54. It was a big moment.”

He looks up from his plate, his eyes watery, and smiles: “I’m not going to cry again.”

***

This is not my first time profiling Arnett. I sat down with him nearly 10 years earlier, when this moment was supposed to happen for him the first time. Back then, he’d co-written and starred in a dramatic TV comedy called Flaked for Netflix. Unlike Is This Thing On?, which was inspired by Bishop’s life, Flaked was ripped from his own. At 45, Arnett was playing a quietly crumbling Venice, California, “cool guy,” who spews AA platitudes despite the fact that he’s secretly drinking again.

He co-wrote, produced and pored over every frame of the show with his pal, British screenwriter Mark Chappell, whom he met working on the IFC comedy The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. “It was just the two of us on Flaked, and it was a deeply personal show for Will,” Chappell says. “He shared so much of himself, and I think part of that is AA — you do get the tools and the language to be able to be that open.”

The series was Arnett at his most vulnerable, and the first day of shooting was supposed to coincide with the 15th anniversary of his own sobriety. But during our time together, he revealed something that few in his life knew: While making the show, he, too, had started drinking again. It didn’t last long — and much like 15 years earlier, there was no dramatic event that jolted him back to sobriety. “I just know where this path goes, and it’s a dead end,” he said at the time.

The confession might have gone down easier had the show been received positively. Instead, it was largely savaged by critics, crushing for the man at its center. “When you do something that’s that close to you and then it’s rejected, it’s hard not to feel like you’re being rejected,” he says. With a decade’s distance, I wondered if he had walked away from the experience never wanting to put himself out there in that way again, to which he replied yes before I’d fully formed the question.

“I flew way too close to the sun, and after, I’d have moments like, ‘What was I thinking?’ ” he says, and then references a book, Everybody Knows, that came out a few years later and, at least in title, perfectly encapsulated how he felt. “But here’s the flip side: Everybody knows, and nobody cares. Turns out, everyone’s got their own shit.”

Arnett went back to doing the kind of work people expected him to do: more animated projects, a few favors for his famous friends, a buddy cop comedy where he starred opposite a dog. “There’s a lot of stuff I did just to do,” he says. “But I remember seeing a comment once about something I was working on, which was like, ‘Oh, he’s just doing it for the money.’ And I wanted to answer, ‘Did you go to work today? Right. What’d you do it for? Love of the game? Like, are you fucking joking me, man.’ “

A few years later, Arnett was in Europe, working another one of those gigs, when he scored an invite to a weekend getaway in Amsterdam. I feel compelled to stop here and tell you that Arnett seems to score a lot of invites. I ask one of his close friends, Robert Downey Jr., why that is, and he laughs. “Because he’s absolutely intoxicating and he knows that he can be the greatest dinner guest you’ve ever had, if you just clear the deck and let him do his thing — and it’s not performative, it’s just raising the levity factor immediately,” says Downey Jr. “So what is that? It’s intellect, it’s wit, it’s timing, but it’s also a desire to delight and amuse people. And by the way, I’ve spent a fair amount of time with Will when we’re not working, and he’s just a good hang.”

So, Arnett was in Amsterdam, and he meets Bishop. Despite the comedian selling out massive U.K. venues including the O2, he wasn’t familiar with him or his work. But the two get talking and Bishop tells him how he got his start — how his marriage had been falling apart, when he stumbles into an open mic night and puts his name on the list instead of paying the four-pound cover charge. He ends up returning to that stage, again and again, and starts to feel better as he works through his issues. Then one night, by chance, his estranged wife comes in, and she recognizes the shift in him, too. Soon, they’re able to have the difficult conversations they weren’t having, and before long, they’re back together.

Arnett was tickled by the story and the hopeful message he saw within it — that it’s never too late to connect with yourself or with somebody else. “Obviously, it’s not inspired by my story, but there are themes in there that I connect to,” he says without ever explicitly referencing the demise of his relationship with his ex-wife, Amy Poehler, with whom he shares two teen boys, or, more recently, with businesswoman Alessandra Brawn, with whom he has a 5-year-old son. (Arnett is now dating model Carolyn Murphy.) “I’m just a sum of all of my own experiences, and you bring some of that into what you do. I mean, you try to be sensitive, but it would be weird if I didn’t connect dots on certain things.”

He flew home after the meeting and enlisted Chappell — who not only knew Bishop’s story but, by sheer coincidence, had once attempted to secure his life rights — to write it with him. Still, he didn’t know if the two of them alone had the clout to get the script greenlit, much less if he’d be allowed to star. Then COVID hit, and Arnett threw himself into a different challenge: launching a podcast with his buddies (and comedic sparring partners), Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman.

“It’s been the greatest gift,” Arnett says of SmartLess, and he’s not talking about the $100 million deal they’ve struck with SiriusXM or the myriad A-listers, including sitting and former presidents, that they’ve had on as guests. “No, it’s because I’ll have people come up and say, ‘During COVID, you guys helped me laugh,’ or ‘You got me through a tough time.’ And what I’ve come to realize is it had that same effect on me.”

***

In spring 2022, Cooper came on as Arnett’s guest for the show’s 100th episode. The two had known each other for a few decades already, having met initially through Poehler. “Will was always the funniest guy in the room,” says Cooper. “The fact he’d even talk to me back then made me feel cool — and then we ended up living next to each other as young actors in Venice and we became really good friends.”

Over time, they’d still connect periodically, but life got in the way. Cooper’s career had taken off, and suddenly he was living on film sets — and when he wasn’t, he’d settled in New York. Arnett was raising his kids in L.A. The SmartLess appearance would be something of a reunion, or at least a chance to reconnect with an old friend, albeit with a few million fans listening in. But rather than use the platform to promote a project or chop it up about the good old days, Cooper revealed the transformative role Arnett had played in him getting sober in 2004.

“Will took the risk of having that hard conversation with me that put me on the path of deciding to change my life. It is truly Will Arnett, he is the reason,” said Cooper, who was also remarkably open about his struggles with alcohol, cocaine and severely low self-esteem during the appearance. “And it helped that it was the guy I thought I was emulating. It’s not like somebody else said it. Like, the king told me.”

Arnett was caught off-guard by his friend’s honesty and moved by his vulnerability. “I think it allowed us both to open up and talk about our shared history,” he says, “and how profound and deep those connections were.” It renewed their bond, and the two started spending considerably more time in each other’s lives again. In fact, later that year, they flew east together for the holidays, which is when Cooper asked what Arnett was working on, and then suggested he send along the script. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker, still making Maestro at the time, found that he not only connected to Bishop’s story, but also wanted to do a pass and direct it himself. He was unequivocal about Arnett as his star.

“The whole movie rides on the internal evolution of this guy, and that’s a lot to put on your shoulders,” says Cooper, but he had watched Arnett go through his own evolution and knew what he was capable of delivering. “And I thought, if I can be a part of that, that would be really, really exciting.”

In many ways, the stand-up was the easy part. Cooper had reached out to comedian Shane Gillis about writing some of the material, but he wasn’t interested. “I was like, ‘Eh, I don’t know, if I write a joke, I’m going to want to keep it,’ ” says Gillis, who suggested he and Arnett come to Austin, Texas, where he’s based, and he’d give Arnett some of his stage time instead. To Gillis’ surprise, they agreed. “The whole time I was like, ‘Oh, these guys think this is easy,’ ” he says, “and then Will gets up onstage and makes it look pretty easy. I mean, he was really good at it.”

The radical vulnerability, tenderness and intimacy that the relationship at the center of the film demanded was the bigger challenge. “Will was very up-front with me about this being a new process for him, in terms of exploring character,” says Dern. “And yet I felt like he became the leader in his bravery of going to the most uncomfortable places, and I was really blown away by it.”

It wasn’t until after the 33-day shoot was complete that Arnett was able to fully process what he had done. While making the film, he’d come home most days a puddle of insecurity. “It’s like I’d conditioned myself to become such a know-it-all for so long, and there I was, like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to do this,’” he says. But over time, Arnett found himself letting go, trusting Cooper, and it ultimately led to some sort of “profound spiritual awakening,” he tells me, and then he laughs: “You and I are going to catch up every 10 years and I’m just going to be super revealing about my stupid fucking spiritual experience.”

He stops himself here, visibly embarrassed by the direction this is going. I’d press, but I don’t need to. “The critic I think I’m the most worried about here is me,” he says. “It’s like I can hear my own voice going, ‘Shut up, man. Oh, you were vulnerable, were you? Tell us about that. Yeah, do an article about how vulnerable you were as an actor. Like, shut the fuck up, man. Honestly.’ “

***

Despite the strong reviews and powerful word of mouth among critics and pundits who saw the film early, Is This Thing On? has largely been absent from the first wave of awards recognition, including the Golden Globes. Nominations for the latter were revealed a couple hours before Arnett and I meet, and he’s still sorting his emotions when we sit down.

“I’m in this very weird place, where I feel like I’m running a race that I didn’t even ask to be running in, so how can I be disappointed? But then you hear like, ‘Hey, man, sorry you guys didn’t get any Golden Globe nominations,’ and you start to think, like, ‘Oh wait, am I disappointed? Do I need that validation? I just wanted to get a movie made.’”

He keeps going, and I don’t bother stopping him. “You get wrapped up in it, and it’s all about are you on the right roundtable? Did you spend time talking to the right people? And I’m like, maybe I didn’t — or maybe I did, and they didn’t care,” he says. “But I feel really proud of what we made, and it was transformative to me as a person. And if I’m Searchlight, I’m like [sarcastically], ‘Great, we needed to make a movie to help transform you.’ But it did, and I feel really good about it.”

For the record, he did score a nomination for SmartLess, which will compete in the Globes’ new podcast category, where it’s up against his ex-wife’s podcast, Good Hang. While we’re talking, Poehler texts Arnett and Hayes. “Congrats. Let’s party,” he reads the message aloud, adding her addendum with a howl: “I don’t have Bateman’s number, but that’s for the best.” (The Globes and THR share a parent company.)

Regardless of what happens from here, he intends to continue with the promotional tour — even if it’s just to get people to theaters to see the film when it premieres. Arnett may be exhausted, but he doesn’t seem to detest the dog-and-pony show the way that others do. In fact, he’s always enjoyed being a guest on podcasts and talk shows, and he’s widely considered one of the best at it. He even ended up doing a roundtable, one hosted by the Los Angeles Times, which, as it happens, gave him a fresh perspective on what it is he’s striving for.

“There I am, sitting next to Wagner Moura and Benicio del Toro, and it’s also Jacob Elordi, Stellan Skarsgard and Jesse Plemons, and [the moderator] asks, ‘The idea of imposter syndrome, does that ever occur to you, Benicio?’ ” he says. “And Benicio del Toro says — without missing a beat, and he meant it — he goes, ‘What is that?’ And I looked at Plemons and we just start laughing, it was so fucking dope. I was like, ‘That’s it. That’s the holy grail. How can I get to that?’”

In the meantime, Arnett keeps being asked what he’s doing next — which, outside of an arc as Michelle Pfeiffer’s therapist on a Taylor Sheridan show, he doesn’t know — or what he’d like to do next. He wishes he had a better answer. “I just keep going, ‘I only want to do something I feel really connected to, that’s my goal, and I can’t believe that it took me this long to think that way,’ ” he says before he laughs to himself: “Cut to me doing the dumbest thing of all time.”

This story appeared in the Dec. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.