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Nick Offerman Woodworked His Way to Playing the President

October 14, 2025
in News
Nick Offerman Woodworked His Way to Playing the President
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Nick Offerman has been known for playing an archetype of modern masculinity: the laconic, mustachioed, libertarian Ron Swanson on “Parks and Recreation.” In the decade since that show ended, he’s been drawn to roles that subvert or undermine the manly man image he’s come to represent, with roles that include the despotic president of the United States in Alex Garland’s “Civil War” and Bill, the gay survivalist in “The Last of Us,” for which he won an Emmy.

Mr. Offerman is still regularly subjected to homophobic online slurs from Ron Swanson fans who felt betrayed by his embodiment of Bill. “Anybody who would go out of their way to criticize Nick for not being more like his character on TV is struggling with their own manliness and sense of self-worth,” said the musician Jeff Tweedy, one of Mr. Offerman’s good friends.

Most recently, Mr. Offerman was cast as President Chester A. Arthur in Netflix’s upcoming historical drama “Death by Lightning” and as a central character in Apple TV’s forthcoming David E. Kelly adaptation of the best-selling novel “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” alongside Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning. All of which is to suggest that, at 55, he’s finally earned the serious actor status that he’s been pursuing since he drove his high school girlfriend to a dance audition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign more than 30 years ago, and discovered something called theater school.

“There was no path,” Mr. Offerman said, recalling his limited perspective as a performing arts-curious high school student growing up in rural Illinois in the mid-1980s. “I didn’t even know to ask the question, like, how do I get to be on ‘Taxi’ like Christopher Lloyd? I couldn’t even articulate my career goal, but that’s what it was. It was, how can I use what’s weird about me to entertain people?”

Long before Mr. Offerman started being considered for blue chip roles, he was perhaps best known in Los Angeles as the guy you called when you found a good-looking tree downed in the street. In 2001, four years after moving to L.A., he opened Offerman Woodshop, a woodworking collective in East L.A. that in its ethics and execution stands as a living expression of his life philosophy. It’s also the emotional center of his creative life, which includes what Mr. Offerman called his work as a “humorist” (he performs a live show that blends jokes with self-penned songs) and five best-selling books as a solo author. Mr. Offerman’s sixth book, “Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery,” a woodworking guide for children, will be published on Oct. 14.

“What I love about making things is that you get your chisel or your yarn or your pasta and then you spend the weekend having spent $21, or whatever, and you come out of it with lasagna or a scarf and you haven’t given Jeff Bezos any money,” Mr. Offerman said. “It’s become a radical act to make something on your own.”

A Love of Wood

Mr. Offerman has always been into wood. He can identify an astonishing variety of woods while blindfolded, just by smelling, biting or licking, as demonstrated by a promotional clip for the craft reality competition show “Making It,” which he created with his Chicago theater pal and “Parks and Recreation” compatriot Amy Poehler.

“It is not a surprise that Nick loves woodworking, because he has a lot of the qualities found in wood,” Ms. Poehler said. “A sturdiness, a complexity — when you carve away the hard exterior, you find the soft and pliable material within, and that material makes beautiful things.”

Mr. Offerman’s love of wood, and his temperamental similarity to it, runs in the family. His father, Ric Offerman — a retired teacher and the mayor of his family’s hometown, Minooka, Ill. — is also very good at making stuff. He reassembled the farmhouse in which Mr. Offerman and his three siblings were raised after acquiring it from a neighbor (in exchange for a set of hand-built cabinets) and then having it moved down the road.

Mr. Offerman once lived a life more closely fit with his corn-fed, hunky good looks. He played baseball and basketball, was a captain of the Minooka Community High School football team and was the student council president. On the podcast “Armchair Expert,” hosted by Dax Shepard, Mr. Offerman summarized his status as a teenager this way: “Me and someone else close to me would go out and spray graffiti on the football field, and then the next day, I, as president of the student council, would form a committee to go clean up the graffiti. I was always figuring out, what can I get away with?”

Mr. Offerman did plays in high school and was president of the drama club but “instead of not fitting in and dropping out, I pretended to fit in,” he said. He wanted to be an actor in the way little kids want to be astronauts or major league baseball players. “I kept saying to my world, I think I want to be an actor, and my world was like, I don’t think you can, it’s simply not done,” he said. “I was at an impasse because I didn’t have the wherewithal to go deeper.”

Then came the early spring day in 1987 that he dropped his girlfriend off at college. “I took her to the building that ended up being my temple, where I met Shozo,” Mr. Offerman said, referring to Shozo Sato, a Japanese professor, artist and playwright, who would become his mentor and later officiate his wedding to the actress and singer Megan Mullally. He auditioned and enrolled there.

“I quickly learned that my suspicions were correct — I sucked,” Mr. Offerman said. Fittingly, Mr. Offerman possessed a talent that none of his more naturally dazzling thespian peers had: carpentry skills. “The world said, look, maybe you’re not going to get a lot of dialogue onstage,” he said, “but these people will value you if you build the scenery and the props.”

And so Mr. Offerman woodworked his way through college, graduating as co-valedictorian. Then through the Chicago theater world, with the theater company he founded in college, Defiant Theatre, building sets and doing choreography at Steppenwolf, and eventually working, in one way or another, alongside rising stars like Gary Sinise, and his “Death By Lightning” castmate, Michael Shannon. Mr. Offerman moved west in 1997 and discovered that he could build decks to make rent in between auditions. And eventually, he woodworked his way into his relationship with Ms. Mullally, who he referred to as a “goddess.”

The wooing began in the year 2000 on the set of a play called “The Berlin Circle,” which starred Ms. Mullally, fresh off a second award-winning season as Karen Walker on “Will & Grace.” At the time, Mr. Offerman — also cast in the show — was a depressed theater actor surrounded by peers “trying to get on ‘Friends’ and not onstage.” He was thrilled simply to be participating.

“I was sort of strapping the cleats back on and she was seeing me with my tool bags,” Mr. Offerman said. ”You know, like, let me just brush off this sawdust and sweat and sit down and make you laugh at the table read.” They married in the fall of 2003.

“I’m still learning”

During a hike in Griffith Park, the subject of Yoko Ono came up. Mr. Offerman is a big fan. His 2015 book “Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers,” includes an essay on Ms. Ono, and the cover features an image of Mr. Offerman with a chisel in hand having reshaped Mount Rushmore to his liking by replacing Abraham Lincoln with Willie Nelson and Thomas Jefferson with Yoko Ono.

“Megan said, ‘We’re going to an art show tonight of Yoko Ono,’” he said, remembering the night when he first met her. He was not educated about Ms. Ono’s work. “Yeah, I was still one of the ignorant hordes that had succumbed to the propaganda,” he said. “Megan was like, ‘Do you even know about her art?’ She hands me ‘Grapefruit.’”

A recurring theme during the Griffith Park ramble was the integration in his wider life of his core mantra, which he originally gleaned from Professor Sato: Always maintain the mind of a student. He’d teared up recalling how, while touring Japan with Professor Sato and the Illinois Kabuki Theater troupe as it performed an adaptation of “The Iliad,” a friend who has now passed away gave him the first piece he ever read by the writer Wendell Berry, who joined Professor Sato as two of the members of Mr. Offerman’s personal holy trinity.

The third is, of course, Ms. Mullally. A number of times Mr. Offerman described his relationship with his wife as “student-teacher.” Living with Ms Mullally is ”like living with Mr. Miyagi or Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he said.

He added: “My whole life with Megan has required me to be very open in a lot of ways.” One example: “having a nice shirt put on me.” Another: “I had to discover an availability to empathy that wasn’t there.” Like in many relationships, Mr. Offerman has found that, whenever Ms. Mullally gets upset, he wants to either be able to fix it or not have to hear about it. “I’m still learning,” he said.

A similar search for earned empathy may be part of why Mr. Offerman is drawn to characters that challenge audiences’ perceptions of him, and his perceptions of himself. Is that why he pursues those roles? “I say this with half a smile, but it’s because I think it’s what Jesus would do,” he said, name-checking a man who, among his other credits, is perhaps history’s most famous carpenter.

The post Nick Offerman Woodworked His Way to Playing the President appeared first on New York Times.

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