I Think You're Interesting

Comedian Russell Brand would probably bristle at being described as a comedian. It’s not that he’s not funny, or doesn’t occasionally perform stand-up. It’s more that in the years since he’s achieved fame, he’s become just as notable for his wonderfully unhinged performances in a number of films, as well as for writing books that sensitively and thoughtfully probe questions about himself, our society, and existence itself. The latest of these is Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, and it continues Brand’s string of works that seem rooted less in his desire to make everybody laugh and more to connect with everyone on the planet. The book — which posits that you can use a 12-step program to fix problems and addictions in your life far beyond traditional chemical dependency — made Todd push back against it quite a bit, but by the end, Brand’s argument started to seem more solid. Twelve-step programs are terrifically effective means for forcing us to confront our own weaknesses and dependencies, so why not use them to diagnose issues in bad relationships or toxic workplaces? Brand and Todd talked about his book, yes, but also about his bees, about America’s gun violence problem, about religion, about systems of government, about fatherhood, and about the West Ham football club. It’s a wide-ranging discussion, and Brand’s thoughts on all of these topics are, as always, fascinating.

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Todd loves few TV shows more than BoJack Horseman, Netflix's weird animated comedy about a sad horse. Its recently completed fourth season, which delved into the histories of many of the characters and talked about the roots of trauma and depression, just might be the best the series has ever done.

 To understand why the season was so potent, creator and showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg, production designer and producer Lisa Hanawalt, and supervising director Mike Hollingsworth joined Todd to talk about not just season four but also the show's evolution and where it might be headed next.

 They talked about balancing different kinds of jokes, making sure the audience understands the subtext, and building dramatic stakes when so much of what's happening is about the characters' emotions.

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One of Todd’s favorite actors for elucidating, perfectly, what makes one performance work where another doesn’t is Griffin Newman, who plays Arthur, the moth-man sidekick on Amazon’s The Tick. Newman also co-hosts the podcast Blank Check With Griffin and David, where his discussion of acting frequently helps explain things like why one of the hardest characters to play is someone who’s unfailingly good and decent (because the psychology can be harder to tap into) and why Newman so reveres Philip Seymour Hoffman’s work.

That meant when Todd wanted to make a list of the five best superhero performances of all time, Newman was a natural choice to join him. The two trade lists back and forth, and Newman’s is just as idiosyncratic as you’d hope (just wait until you hear which performance he picks from the Marvel universe!), but with some great, deep defenses of his choices. You can also listen to Todd speak up for Christopher Reeve as Superman, which will surely be a controversial choice.

Newman also talks with Todd about what it means to wear a superhero suit on The Tick every week, as well as just why he so admires Michael Keaton. The discussion is mostly about superheroes, but it’s also about finding the emotional realism of a character, even when you’re stuck in spandex.

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Fans of ABC’s Modern Family, which just entered its ninth season, know Eric Stonestreet as Cameron Tucker, the role for which he’s won two Emmys. The neurotic but good-natured Cam was half of one of TV’s first major married gay couples, and over the course of the show’s run, Cam and his husband, Mitch, have settled into the sort of farcical bliss we might wish on all sitcom couples.

But the road to Modern Family wasn’t always guaranteed for Stonestreet. He estimates in this interview that he was in more than 100 commercials, many of which required him to build whole characters off just one line or a gesture. He bounced among guest spots on numerous TV shows of the ’90s and 2000s — from Dharma & Greg to ER and The West Wing — and didn’t always seem like he’d find his niche. Indeed, he only heard about Modern Family because a friend of his was auditioning and asked Stonestreet to help him prepare.

Now, however, he can look back on that struggle with both clear eyes and the sort of analysis that offers good advice to everyone pursuing a dream. Stonestreet talked with me about how Modern Family has (and hasn’t) changed over nine seasons, what it’s like hosting his new reality show The Toy Box, and how he tried to find roles that let him keep his self-worth as a heavyset actor.

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Tom Perrotta’s books have become one of our most consistently enjoyable dissections of a very specific sort of America — upper-class, wryly comic, and white. Even when his books dig into a world where something very much like the Rapture has happened (as in The Leftovers), they take place long enough after the catastrophic event for things to be reverting to the status quo. That makes him terrific at picking apart the foibles of our modern world, and it’s also made him a frequent target for Hollywood adaptation. His Little Children became an Oscar-nominated film in 2005, while The Leftovers turned into a tremendous HBO series. It’s Election, however, that won him the most fame. A book the author had largely given up hope of seeing published, Election found its way into Hollywood’s hands and became a classic 1999 film that helped propel Reese Witherspoon to stardom and cemented Perrotta as a novelist to watch. Now, nearly 20 years on from Election’s 1998 publication, Perrotta’s latest book, Mrs. Fletcher, tackles lots of meaty topics, from issues of white privilege to gender and sexual identity, from going to college to the ways the internet has changed all of our lives. They’re places many novelists fear to tread, but Perrotta tackles them with his same command of tone and sly sensibility. He joined Todd this week to talk about finding his way into the heads of characters very different from himself, seeing your book turning up on the big screen, and reading some of his most famous books all these years later.

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For a large number of people, just seeing the name "Ken Burns" is mark enough of quality. Whether Burns is producing or directing, his long, multi-part documentaries have been PBS mainstays since the 1980s.

His breakthrough film, The Civil War, released in 1990, announced him as one of the best-known, most beloved documentarians in America, and he's since chronicled just about every corner of American history through a variety of lenses, including the much loved projects Baseball, The National Parks, and The War, among others.

Now he and co-director Lynn Novick have launched one of his most massive miniseries yet: The Vietnam War, a new PBS documentary told over 18 hours and 10 parts. Burns and Novick joined me to talk about the incredible scope of their new project, how they pulled it all together, how they managed to get the rights to all that great music from the period, and the eerie similarities between America then and America now.

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Even if you're the least pop culture–aware person in the world, you know who Nancy Cartwright is. You just might not know why you know.

In the late '80s, Cartwright, a voice actor, went on an audition for the role of an 8-year-old girl in a series of brief animated shorts that would air in the middle of Fox's sketch comedy The Tracey Ullman Show. She didn't particularly want that part, but she sparked to something in the girl's older brother, a rascal named Bart Simpson. The Simpson family would be spun off into its own show, Cartwright would turn Bart into a world-famous icon, and she's still playing the kid 30 years later.

But Cartwright is more than her most famous part, even on The Simpsons (where she voices a host of the show's other well-known characters). She was the second Chuckie on Rugrats. She was on a bevy of '80s cartoons, including Pound Puppies. And she's had several memorable on-camera roles, even if you wouldn't instantly recognize her in any of them. Now she's both nominated for an Emmy (for the first time!) for her work as Bart and about to premiere her screenwriting debut, the film In Search of Fellini, based on her one-woman show. Cartwright joins Todd to talk being Bart, the technical process of creating a character using only your voice, and why she loves the filmmaker Federico Fellini.

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If you have been watching TV — like, at all — since the 1990s, you've probably seen (and loved) Kellie Martin in something. After beginning her career as a child in the '80s, she landed the role of Becca on the critically acclaimed family drama Life Goes On, a role that would eventually earn her an Emmy nomination. But her career is far more than that one role. She was part of one of the most terrifying moments in ER history. She worked with Lucille Ball. She was a voice in The Goofy Movie, for goodness sakes. Even as she's moved into adult parts, she's continued to work frequently, in everything from Mad Men to Hallmark movies. And now, she's one part of TBS's new, very broad comedy, The Guest Book. But look, Todd just wanted to talk to Kellie because his 10-year-old, Life Goes On-loving self wouldn't forgive himself if he didn't. They discuss everything from how she managed to keep from falling into the pitfalls that consume so many child actors, to how she balances her work and her many other pursuits, to her long friendship with Life Goes On co-star Patti LuPone. Kellie's a great storyteller — and she has many great stories to tell.

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Few of 2017's new TV shows have hit with the impact of Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, which went from "they're making a TV show out of _that_" territory to 13 Emmy nominations (including Drama Series) in what seemed like record time. Taken from the book by Margaret Atwood, the series depicts a dystopian society, built from the ruins of the United States, where women have no legal rights and where fertile women (also known as "handmaids") are held as slaves by powerful men and ritually raped once a month with the purpose of conceiving a child. The show's reality seemed, for many viewers, to eerily dovetail with actual reality in the wake of the election of a president who boasted about committing sexual assault and still was voted into office. But The Handmaid's Tale would have been excellent regardless of who was in office. The series is beautifully directed, hauntingly performed, and terrifically written. The show's writers room is headed up by longtime TV hand Bruce Miller, and he joins Todd to talk about the series' journey from page to screen, figuring out a way to tell such an elementally feminist story when he's a man, and working with Elisabeth Moss and Margaret Atwood. Note: This week's episode was recorded in Miller's office, and there are some stray traffic noises.

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After more than 20 years building her stage and screen resume, Ann Dowd has become a star thanks to her roles as Patti Levin on The Leftovers and the menacing yet maternal Aunt Lydia on The Handmaid’s Tale. Her characters are a product of the fractured worlds around them, but she manages to imbue them with depth and dimensionality that suggests their tragic origins. They’re villains, but ones who feel just as human as the protagonists they play against.

With season two of The Handmaid’s Tale confirmed and a host of other projects in the works, Dowd now finds herself one of the most in-demand character actresses on television. She speaks with Todd about her theater roots, what it was like to be filming the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale while Donald Trump rose to prominence, and how having children later in her career has given her valuable perspective and balance.

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