When Nick Offerman was a young man, what he wanted more than anything was to succeed in the Chicago theatre scene. “That was my life’s dream,” he deadpans. “It hasn’t worked out. I say let go of your dreams because you can find happiness no matter what.”
Plan B seems to have worked out OK. Offerman’s career has at least three distinct streams. His gruff, lugubrious voice is familiar to families from animated movies like The Lego Movie and Sing. As an actor, conversely, he’s come to specialise in cranks and extremists: an authoritarian in Civil War, a survivalist in The Last of Us, and now an anti-government agitator in Christian Swegal’s debut movie Sovereign. On top of that, he’s a genial Midwestern sage who goes on speaking tours and writes bestselling books about history and the great outdoors. And he is still best-known for the role that made his name: Ron Swanson, the red-meat libertarian in Parks and Recreation. How, I wonder, does all this tie together?
“It’s a good question,” he says. His full answer takes in his childhood in Illinois, his marriage to actress Megan Mullally (Will & Grace), his late sensei, the malign influence of Big Tech, the spiritual value of woodwork, and the importance of sustainable farming. “My sensei taught me all this beautiful philosophy about how much of your life can be your art,” he wraps up. “Everything you do is an opportunity for creativity.”
It’s unsurprising that Offerman got the narrating gig on The Life of Chuck, the recent Stephen King adaptation about appreciating life when the world is ending. Like the writer George Saunders, his close friend and hiking companion, Offerman has become a kind of moral celebrity — an avatar for compassion and humility. He is famously generous on set and his wholesome 22-year marriage to Mullally has its own fanbase.
Speaking to me from a hotel room in New York – with his signature, Swansonesque moustache – he savours old-fashioned words like “behooves” and “shebang”, but has an unexpectedly cartoonish and endearing “hyuk-hyuk” laugh. Offerman’s thoughtful, reassuring manner has the power to make you feel better about the world. Of course, people like that never want to brag about being people like that.
“I always open with my fallibility,” he says. “I say, look, people, I own a mirror so I can never get too high on myself. But I pay attention to a lot of the right things.”
Offerman’s moral core was forged in Minooka, the Illinois village where he was raised Catholic by a high school history teacher (currently the mayor) and a nurse. He still appreciates Minooka’s ethos of hard work and public service, but only when he left for college did he realise how white and conservative the village was – and how those values could manifest in very different ways. He firmly believes that “generally people are good” but prone to discriminate against people they have never met, and have been taught to fear.
“There are friends of my family who are staunch Trump voters and these are some of the best people in my life,” he says. “I’m grateful to them because it allows me not to fall into the binary trap of just shaking my fist at them. I have these conversations where I say, ‘Listen, you’re a great person and someone I admire, but I think you’re getting bad information.’ And they shake their heads sadly and say, ‘Sorry, Nick, I’m afraid you’re getting bad information. Brainwashed by the paedophiles.’ Oh, boy.”
As a kid, Offerman had “this insatiable, clumsy penchant for clowning”. He frantically waves his hands around. “Look at me! Check this out!” But Minooka was a “cultural vacuum”, with no local hipsters to turn him onto popular culture, and no sense of how he could get from there to the world of entertainment – until he went to the University of Illinois. “When I got to college, I met my friends for life who said, ‘This is marijuana. And this is The White Album. Call me in a week.’”
Offerman was far from an overnight success — he was 39 when Parks and Recreation made him famous in 2010 — but that was fine with him. He’d been making a steady income playing bit parts in shows like The West Wing and NYPD Blue, he was happily married and he ran his own woodshop, carving tables and canoes. (His new book for families, Little Woodchucks, is “a thinly veiled screed: don’t forget to know how the world is put together”.)
“I had the wherewithal to understand what a happy life I had,” he says. “I think that may have been an important factor in getting my big break. Something you learn with success is that once you’re not desperate to get the acting job, you have a much better chance of getting the acting job.”
Always on the verge of cancellation, Parks and Recreation was never a smash hit but it had a loyal fanbase and has since made for perfect comfort viewing on streaming. A feelgood sitcom about small town governance in which political differences can be cheerfully bridged by mutual respect, it’s very much an artefact of Obama-era optimism. Would that be a harder sell now?
“We definitely think so,” Offerman agrees. “The world has shifted in the years since Obama’s time. That show may be accused of being a Pollyanna in today’s landscape.”
As the show went on, he put more and more of his own personality and tastes into Ron. For that reason, he’s still fiercely protective when Ron is press-ganged into right-wing memes as a socially-conservative gun nut. “Many, many people with bad reading comprehension will use Ron’s image as their avatar when they’re super-right-wing. I can’t sit every one of them down and explain why they’re bad at watching television.”
Offerman has, though, played a lot of genuinely right-wing characters, including a MAGA plumber in Ava DuVernay’s Origin and an autocratic president in Alex Garland’s Civil War. “It’s not like I have a yearning to play those specific ideologies,” he says, “but I can serve the writing that uses these characters to help us evolve.”
Offerman is pathologically modest about his work. On the subject of the third episode of The Last of Us, season one – a modern masterpiece for which he won an Emmy as a misanthropic doomsday prepper who falls in love – he shrugs: “It was a confluence of beautiful, swirling artistic winds around one very lucky donkey.”
Similarly, he heaps praise on writer-director Christian Swegal for Sovereign, a harshly compelling indie movie that shows what happens when the libertarian instinct goes to extremes. It’s the true story of Jerry Kane, a motivational speaker and so-called “sovereign citizen” who believed he was not bound by US laws. The US government disagreed. In Arkansas in 2010, Kane’s increasingly angry, desperate life — and that of his teenage son Joe — ended in bloodshed.
Offerman gives this unravelling man a terrible pathos. “It struck me as important to humanise the drastic things that people can turn to when their government leaves them in the cold, or the banks and insurance companies victimise them,” he says. “My gut was telling me I have to do this.”
There are an estimated 300,000 sovereign citizens in the US, often overlapping with extremist movements like QAnon, and they are as committed to their idiosyncratic version of American values as Offerman is to his.
“I think sadly when people say, ‘This is not who we are’, that’s denial,” he says. “And that’s one of the American values. It’s a huge, beautiful, ugly, thrilling and terrifying mess. When decisions are not made based on empathy and affection for one’s fellow man but instead for profits, then we create some pretty big messes for ourselves.”
Offerman votes for the Democrats but his politics are more ethical than partisan. Although he no longer attends church, he “appreciates the tenets of Christianity” and is a great admirer of Wendell Berry, the 91-year-old agrarian philosopher and environmental activist. Decency, humanism and respect for the natural world form Offerman’s lodestar.
“It’s an ever-evolving ideology,” he says. “There are factions in the world that engender or promote hate of one sort or another. We all have to share everything, so I want to do my best to help us get along with each other.” To that end, he chooses projects that “move us to improve the way that we relate to one another”.
Offerman is picky for another reason. Ever since he and Mullally got together 25 years ago, they’ve never spent more than two weeks apart, so every job offer involves a negotiation between the two. “We say no to a lot of opportunities but we’re never unhappy because I’d rather keep my marriage than get something good on Rotten Tomatoes.”
Few actors have as expansive a hinterland and as enviable a sense of self as Offerman. Could he be content if he quit the day job altogether? He ponders this for a moment. “I think as long as I was making things that people enjoyed, I’d probably be pretty happy.” I believe him.
‘Sovereign’ is out now on streaming platforms. ‘Little Woodchucks: Offerman Workshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery’ is out 16 October. ‘Fulminations’ tour starts on 26 October
