His most famous role as the dysfunctional Dr Tobias Funke in Arrested Development brought him more recognition in the UK along with his reputation on the live circuit, all of which led him being offered his own show by Channel 4 and now his first UK DVD release. First up, welcome to the UK! How you doing? Good, good! Y’know, getting ready to start shooting the TV show. Looking forward to that. This is kind of the boring part for me, where it’s mostly written and we’re just doing pre-production, so it’s not my favourite part. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia which is the short answer. The long answer is pretty much everywhere. We’d move once a year, if not twice. Up and down the eastern seaboard, New York, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia and then settled back into Atlanta. I was born there and came back there when I was nine and lived there ‘til I was nineltten and then moved to Boston. So, it was a bit of a nomadic existence? Is there much that stands out from that time in terms of what you were seeing or experiencing? Well, it’s less of the more tangible stuff rather than what you’re feeling as a kid when you’re constantly uprooted. I got very used to, almost comfortable with, constantly being the new kid and I supposed I honed a keen sense of judgement of character. I’d be the new kid and I’d be sitting in the back of the room and I could pretty quickly, within a days time, go, “Ok, that’s the tough guy who’s going to pick on me and that’s the guy who’s gonna be my friend and that’s the guy who’s gonna get me out of trouble and she’s the girl who’ll take pity on me,” and I’d get really good at that. What was the moment when you decided you were going to get on stage and make people laugh? I was always the class clown, goofy guy, loved Monty Python. I was always quoting Holy Grail. And as I got older, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I started going to open mic nights at a place called The Punchline in Atlanta. The first night I ever went on stage and did it, I fucking killed. Which is crazy and really threw me for a loop because the next sixteen times I went up I sucked. People were wanting me to get off stage and all that. You mention the scene at the time was catering for the lowest comment denominator. Did you make a conscious effort to get away from that kind of material? The material was very esoteric but not clever. There was a germ of cleverness there that, y’know, I might have been somebody that you might have said, “You know what? That kid’s got some interesting ideas. I’d definitely want to check him out in a couple of years, but not right now.” I guess I became the comedian’s comedian. I had a group in Boston and I was friends with Janeane Garofalo, who had moved to LA and started becoming successful. She got onto The Ben Stiller Show and they needed a writer. I had met Ben Stiller prior to that through Janeane, so I got a packet of sketches together, sent them to LA and a couple of days later they were like, “Ok, we’re hiring you”. So, I flew out and it was very much like baptism of fire, you know? Boom, right into it! Coming from a stage background, did you find it easy to write for TV? Did you work with Ben a lot? Not really. We had writers meetings and he’d make time where he could. They all tried to make themselves as available as possible, but they would only have so much time. On The Ben Stiller Show. He was writing there and so was I. Obviously, there’s a longer, more kinda boring story, but yeah, we hung out as friends and started working together. Not initially for TV though. Mr Show came about soon after, which was the springboard for a lot of people like Sarah Silverman and Jack Black, for example. At the time were you aware you were doing something more leftfield than typical sketch shows? But we definitely knew we were doing good stuff and different stuff. I first saw Mr Show only five years ago myself, and I wondered how I could have missed it for so long. It’s a shame it never got a UK broadcast. In the comedy nerd world, the hardcore comedy guys, British comedy is half of what you trade and talk about and discuss and seek out. We were just frustrated by their inability to understand, “Oh, it could be huge over in Britain.” Which shows or comedians were you really into at that time? Yeah, the British comedy scene was centred around about ten people but, like you say, spidered out. Yeah, you’d see The Day Today and think, “That Steve Coogan guy is really funny,” so you’d watch his thing and go, “Oh man, that guys really funny”. Yeah, I’d always been interested in that. I’d been in school plays so I was acting before I really did stand-up. The two go hand in hand. And depending on the project, acting would pay ten times as much as creating, writing and performing and editing your own comedy show. It’s sort of a vacation and it allows you to do the stuff where you don’t get much money. Y’know? You got the role of Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development soon after. Did you have much influence into how he turned out or was he already pretty fully formed? Then I started this show on Monday nights and I had a blast doing it. But (Mitchell) Hurwitz, the creator of the show, urged me to check out the scripts and it’s really great, so I read it and it was immediately great. He wanted me to look at Gob and Buster, I don’t think they had been cast yet. I read the script, and Gob, I had no idea who that guy was, and Buster less so, but Tobias I knew immediately. I conjured up this kinda guy, this kinda fey, over sensitive, full of shit, mixture of touchy feely and yoga-ish Jewish intellectual pain in the ass guy. Once everyone signed off on that, the writers did the rest. As actors, we got a lot more credit than we deserve for adding and ad -libbing. There was some of that in the beginning, but not towards the end. The scripts were so dense and specific and perfect. Now we move on to The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret. This is your first UK show. As an anglophile, was this your dream project? Anyway, it was well received and we got a co-producer in the States. I just sort of co-developed the idea with a venue in mind, being London. I didn’t pitch the show. They came up to me about it. Having watched it again recently, it’s a lot closer to a UK sitcom in tone. I noticed it wasn’t a typical culture clash comedy. It wasn’t a case of ‘American comes to England, thinks the British use funny words’. We definitely wanted to avoid that. Hopefully, you enjoy this character and his responses to situations, rather than just the situation. Yeah, it’s ever-changing, it’s always going to be amorphous, the zeitgeist. In America more so. There’s about 350 million people over there. In a sense that all the people on the right have a physical tangible focus for their anger so you can make fun of them now. Comedy will always change, but for most part remain the same going back to Jonathan Swift’s time. Thank you, David Cross! Thanks to www.cookdandbombd.co.uk for their help too.
