Will Arnett trails off midsentence as a publicist places a steaming Americano in front of him.
“God, this will be my fourth coffee of the day,” he says, his eyes growing as big as the saucer. “What am I doing?”
Over the course of his 30-year acting career, Arnett has become a welcome screen presence playing stressed-out dudes driven to extreme — and extremely funny — coping methods. In his latest role, though, being funny is how he copes.
When we spoke in November, he’d just arrived in D.C. from New York after doing a stand-up set in Greenwich Village. A month had passed since the New York Film Festival premiere of “Is This Thing On?,” the comedy-drama in which he plays a man who processes his marital separation onstage at open mic nights.
Arnett is well accustomed to the hectic nature of a press tour. But he still seems a bit anxious while seated in a suite at the St. Regis hotel. (All that caffeine probably isn’t helping.) “Is This Thing On?” marks Arnett’s first time leading a dramatic feature. The project forced him out of his comfort zone — certainly over the course of the 33-day shoot, directed by his good pal Bradley Cooper, but even now as he reflects on the experience months later.
Cooper “asked me to trust him that I could do it and really try to go there,” Arnett says. “That was daunting as a 55-year-old. That’s why I moved to New York when I was 20, to do that, but I had never really been given the opportunity to do it.”
Arnett has been celebrated for his hilarious turns as a self-absorbed failson in “Arrested Development,” the professional nemesis of Alec Baldwin’s character in “30 Rock” and a depressed animated horse in “BoJack Horseman.” (Together, these shows earned him seven Emmy nominations.) While his role as novice comedian Alex Novak takes advantage of Arnett’s established persona, his performance is grounded in the bittersweet recognition of how miscommunication and passivity hurt a marriage.
You often hear a lot that it’s harder to be funny than dramatic and that the most effective comedic performances, no matter how exaggerated, are rooted in realism. In that sense, Arnett was already at the top of his game. The biggest joke about Gob Bluth on “Arrested Development” is that he’s screaming on the inside. “Is This Thing On?” finally allowed Arnett a chance to pull that kind of emotional torment to the surface.
“For the first time in my life, I wasn’t playing for a result in a scene,” he says. “I was just trying to be sensitive to what the material was and what the situation was in those moments, and trust that whatever happened was going to be the most authentic.”
Seven years ago, Arnett joined friends for lunch on a canalboat in Amsterdam and met John Bishop, a British comedian and television presenter who regaled him with the tale of how he stumbled upon the career.
The story went that Bishop and his wife were on the brink of a divorce. When he swung by a Manchester comedy club to lift his spirits, he decided to sign up for an open mic slot to avoid paying the entrance fee. His confessional set was well received by the crowd, so he returned to the club week after week to work through his emotions onstage.
One night, near the end of their divorce proceedings, Bishop’s soon-to-be ex happened to be in the crowd. She listened to him reflect on their relationship and how much he missed her, and they ended up reconciling. They remain married to this day.
Arnett couldn’t stop thinking about this fateful series of events. About a week later, while driving down Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, he called his friend Mark Chappell, a London-based writer with whom he created the Netflix series “Flaked,” and told him about meeting Bishop. It turned out Chappell not only knew the comedian’s story but had unsuccessfully tried to adapt it into a film himself about 15 years before.
“Mark and I are very in tune that way,” Arnett says. “And so we said, ‘Great. Let’s do it.’”
“Is This Thing On?” tweaks details of Bishop’s life to better suit an American couple: The protagonist and his wife, Tess (Laura Dern), live with their two young sons in the New York suburbs. Tess is retired from playing professional volleyball, a career she sorely misses, while Alex vaguely alludes to being “in finance” (whereas before comedy, Bishop worked in pharmaceuticals). They each vent about their lost senses of purpose to their longtime friends, played by actors who include Andra Day, Sean Hayes and Cooper (whose character, Balls, lives up to the silliness of his name).
Despite these fictional additions, Arnett and Chappell made sure to preserve the primary beats of Bishop’s admittedly too-good yarn.
“There have been a couple people who have said, ‘That’s just outlandish that she would come and see his set,’” Arnett says. “But that’s the part that’s absolutely true.”
Whereas Chappell tends to set difficult scenes aside to revisit later, he says, “the actor in Will gets to those moments almost immediately and makes sense of the emotional truth to them. It forces a sense of immediacy … that creates a nice blend.”
A third screenwriting credit on “Is This Thing On?” belongs to Cooper, whom Arnett met years ago through his relationship with Amy Poehler. The two men are close; in 2022, Cooper appeared on the 100th episode of Arnett’s popular podcast “SmartLess,” which he co-hosts with Hayes and Jason Bateman, and remembered how Arnett helped him get sober when they lived next door to each other in the aughts.
Arnett credits the “SmartLess” conversation with introducing a level of vulnerability to their already meaningful friendship. That same year, Searchlight Pictures signed on to make “Is This Thing On?” after a deal with Focus Features had fallen through during the pandemic. Arnett asked Cooper — already a frequent Oscar nominee — to read the working script.
“He was on a break from shooting ‘Maestro’ and said, ‘Send it to me,’” Arnett recalls. “I just wanted to get free notes from him, really. So I sent it to him and a week later he FaceTimed me out of the blue and goes, ‘If it’s okay, I’d like to do this with you.’”
Cooper reworked the script to underscore the breakdown of communication between Alex and Tess, which “completely elevated it,” Arnett says, adding: “Mark and I always joked that if it was left to us, it might have ended up a really good rom-com.” Cooper’s empathetic approach lends gravitas to Alex and Tess’s midlife struggles.
Alex begins the film as “a guy who lost track of why he’s unhappy,” according to Arnett, who notes that while watching a performance at his children’s school in the opening scene, the character appears “catatonic.” Cooper shoots Alex from a distance early on, mimicking the space he feels in his personal relationships, but finally depicts him head on when he performs in the club and acknowledges the reality of his situation.
“For whatever reason, he’s able to communicate how he’s feeling in front of a room full of strangers,” Arnett says. “It’s the first time he says that he’s getting divorced.”
Despite his extensive résumé in comedy, Arnett had never tried stand-up until preparing to play Alex. And yet there was never a question he would portray the character, Chappell says. It was “exciting as a friend to be able to write a script for him that would be a challenge I had no doubt he would be able to meet.”
Before shooting the film in February, Arnett started swinging by Manhattan’s Comedy Cellar to perform in character as Alex Novak. (The venue’s manager, Liz Furiati, appears in “Is This Thing On?” as herself.) He’d workshop different sets from throughout the film, relaying the various stages of Alex coming to terms with how he contributed to the demise of his marriage, and then go home to rewrite lines the next day.
“People would laugh and think I’m having a nervous breakdown,” Arnett says. “Stand-up is incredible. It’s so scary. There’s nowhere to hide. You can’t really bulls—, either. People either like it or they don’t. And I bombed a bunch, really hard.”
In many ways, Alex resembles the version of Arnett that film and television audiences have come to love. His distinctive baritone endures, its trademark rasp lending welcome texture to the finance-bro character. “SmartLess” fans will recognize Arnett’s dry, playful wit in the protagonist, whose humor shines through even in his depressive state.
Arnett and Chappell couldn’t help but pull from their own lives while writing their initial drafts of the film. Chappell looked to his marriage to better understand how a long-term relationship can evolve over time. (His wife is actually the one who told him about Bishop: She “heard this story on the radio — not even a podcast,” he says. “That’s how far ago it was.”) Arnett and Poehler split amicably in 2012 after nine years of marriage, though he remains coy on the specifics of how this influenced the script. (The actor is currently dating supermodel Carolyn Murphy.)
“I think it’s impossible when you’re working on something in whatever capacity, whether you’re writing or acting, to not bring your own experience into something,” he says. “That’s what we do as humans, and I think that’s what we do as artists.”
And yet, the actor also shows up in “Is This Thing On?” as we’ve never seen him before. There is little buffoonery here. And no magic tricks (sorry, Gob). Pain lurks behind Alex’s eyes, and in the smile with which he greets Tess after they separate. As this sad man fumbling through life, Arnett feels like a mild revelation.
He credits the film’s authenticity to the understanding — fostered by Cooper’s rewrite — that some of the biggest moments in life, the ones that make you change course, happen “in a bathroom, in the kitchen, on the staircase — and there’s no buildup.”
“It’s the banality of those moments,” Arnett says. “There’s emotional buildup, of course, but there’s no, like, ‘Let’s go and have the talk.’ It doesn’t happen on a beach. It happens in the car in the parking lot of a grocery store. When somebody says to somebody else, ‘I’m not feeling it.’ ‘Me, neither.’ And then you realize it’s over.”
One of the earliest scenes in “Is This Thing On?” sets the tone for what is to come. Alex and Tess are beside each other in the upstairs bathroom, brushing their teeth, as their kids sleep in a room down the hall. Tess turns to her husband, with whom she has been romantically involved for a total of 26 years, and says, “We need to call it, right?” Alex responds, “I think so, too.” That’s it. No fuss. It’s just how things go.
“S— happens on a Wednesday,” Arnett says, taking a sip of coffee.
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