Original-Cin Chat: Will Arnett on Developing Stand-Up Muscles in Is This Thing On?

By Jim Slotek

Will Arnett is used to being recognized – by Arrested Development fans, certainly. Even more so in Canada after his RBC ad ran during what seemed like every break during the Jays/Dodgers World Series.

“I got a lot of texts from my dad, saying, ‘Geez, your commercial’s on again,” the Toronto-born comic actor says, while in town promoting his new movie Is This Thing On?

Note “comic actor” as opposed to comic or comedian. Is This Thing On?, co-written by Arnett and director Bradley Cooper, is the fact-inspired tale of a finance exec who works out his separation and impending divorce on the open-mike nights at a New York comedy club.

Which is how Arnett found himself being introduced as “Alex Novak” on the stage at the Austin, Texas comedy club Mothership, to a crowd (that included Cooper) that knew darned well he wasn’t Alex Novak. “I had no experience in stand-up when we started prep.

“I went up and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m Alex Novak. Hopefully in about a year this might make sense.’

“And people were confused. And after that set, this comic, Kirk Fox said, ‘Just talk to them. You don’t have to give them any disclaimer.’ And that was really helpful when I got to the Comedy Cellar.”

The Comedy Cellar is a legendary Greenwich Village club that serves as the location of about half of Is This Thing On? (the other half involves Alex’s attempts to reconcile with his wife Tess, played by Laura Dern).

“(Pre-production) I started going to the Cellar for six weeks, go up three times a night, and work on this material that we had written for Alex throughout the movie. And yeah, they often recognized me. But they went with it. People would laugh and think I was losing my mind, which was fun.

“We shot all the comedy stuff at the Comedy Cellar because we wanted to make sure it was a true reflection of the environment. We’d shoot at the Olive Tree upstairs, which is the restaurant that all of the comics hang in, in those corner booths, waiting to go up.

“Liz (Furiati), who’s the manager, is in the film playing herself. All the people playing people who work there are people who work there. And all those comics who come in and out of the comedy cellar, are comics.

“When she finally saw it, she said, ‘That was the most accurate representation of the comedy scene I’ve ever seen.’ And Bradley and I, that was the compliment we were waiting and hoping for.”

The dramatic crux of Is This Thing On? comes when Tess, on a date with another man, comes to the club and is shocked to see Alex onstage talking about the end of their marriage - for laughs. Call it accidental couples therapy, and it actually happened to a British comic named John Bishop.

“Certainly what attracted me to the project was John Bishop, who’s a great stand-up,”Arnett says. “He sells out the 02 Arena nights in a row.

“He told me his story of how he started and how he kind of unwittingly did his first set. He didn’t want to pay the cover charge, because they were having an open mike. So, he puts his name down (as Alex does in the movie), all that’s true!

“He gets called up, goes on stage and feels different. And he talks about what’s going on in his life in a way that was very freeing.”

Then came the night Bishop was moved up from open mike to an actual spot. “And his wife (from whom he was separated) and sees him onstage. Which is incredible.”

For Arnett, the fascination turned into a script, and a certainty that the role should be his. “This was something I wanted to do, I was going to play Alex. And when Bradley decided to come on, he said he wanted to rewrite it, which is actually a vote of confidence. It was him saying, ‘I agree you should play this, and this is what we should do to get it done.’”

For someone known as a comic actor, a movie that addresses deep-seated problems in a marriage was a left turn. “It did make me very nervous. I’d played a lot of heightened characters in my career. But I’d never been in a role like this before. It took a lot of digging deep.”

“Laura and I did a lot of talking. Months before we started shooting, we did a lot of prep work to try to get a deeper understanding of who these people were.

“We knew each other socially, but we needed to get to know each other more. It required us coming to a place where we could be these characters in a really authentic way.”