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Nick Offerman: The man behind the mustache
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Nick Offerman: The man behind the mustache, Nick Offerman stars as Ron Swanson in the NBC comedy “Parks & Recreation.”
September 21, 2011|By Nina Metz Tribune reporter
Television has no shortage of macho archetypes. They show up with an alarming frequency in the world of procedurals, where the testosterone is as thick as the stubble. Men on comedy shows tend to be noticeably less in touch with their virility, but for the last three TV seasons Illinois-born Nick Offerman, who plays the quietly stubborn, defiantly non-urbane and intensely mustachioed Ron Swanson on NBC’s “Parks & Recreation” — which returns for its fourth season Thursday — has been a major exception. Rarely has meat-and-potatoes masculinity been so lovingly and wittily rendered.
“I think that’s the reason people like him, honestly,” said Michael Schur, who created the show and is an executive producer with Greg Daniels. “Men in comedies are often like, ‘Yes, honey,’ you know? Kind of beaten-up by their shrewish wives, or they are very metrosexual or very hipstery and slackery. You don’t often get the guy who unapologetically wears pleated pants and tucked-in rugby shirts and has a mustache and uses Brylcreem and goes hunting.”
Talking by phone from his home a few weeks ago, Offerman had another theory.
“I would say that people in this age of information are really refreshed by a man who lives by a simple set of rules and can’t be bothered with popular culture and consumer media that everybody has forced down their throats every day,” he said.
Like his co-star Amy Poehler, Offerman — who plays Poehler’s taciturn boss on the show — has ties to the Chicago area. In fact, even his wife of eight years, Megan Mullally (who has appeared on “Parks & Rec” as one of Ron’s exes), is a Northwestern alum and veteran of the local theater scene.
“Eighty percent of the talented performers that I’ve ever met or worked with in my life at some point will tell me that they came to Chicago,” said Schur, whose credits also include “The Office” and “Saturday Night Live.” “We would probably save everybody a lot of time if we just relocated the studios to Chicago.”
Presumably that would be fine by Offerman, 41, who grew up in Minooka (near Joliet) and isn’t partial to sunny Los Angeles anyway. “I spent a lot of my youth working outside in the elements, and I kind of revel in defeating tough weather.”
This is precisely the sort of life philosophy you’d expect to find on the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness, a prop employeed on an episode last year that included such bromides as “Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart, and who is poor,” “Torso: Should be thick and impenetrable” and “Honor: If you need it defined, you don’t have it.”
Offerman’s voice has clearly seeped into the “Parks & Rec” writers’ room. He has a deliberate, almost formal way of expressing himself — a “gentlemanly manliness” in the words of his college roommate Joe Foust — that is just a few deadpan degrees separated from his TV character. “Ron is not Nick and Nick is not Ron,” is how Schur put it, “but we wrapped up a lot of Nick Offerman and stuffed it into Ron Swanson.”
Offerman’s self-reliance, Schur said, is baffling to his LA compatriots.
“We had this discussion in our writers’ room early on: If the apocalypse came, we all agreed that what we would do is gather up our families and try to find Nick.”
Growing up in Minooka, where his uncles (Dan and Don) still run a corn and soybean operation, Offerman said “there wasn’t a lot of world beyond my bicycle and my fishing pole.” Culture shock hit hard at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Foust remembers Offerman arriving on campus “looking like James Dean. He was a good-looking guy, people used to say it all the time. He was a jock, very straight-laced, former quarterback type.”
But Offerman also had a subversive streak. “Nick had an elaborate sense of humor,” said Foust (who is currently in “God of Carnage” at Peninsula Players in Door County, Wis.). “He’d dress up as a carpenter and go to the library and see how many tables we could take apart before somebody stopped us.”
In 1993, the pair made its way to Chicago and, along with some friends, formed Defiant Theatre. Before closing up shop in 2004, the company was a force on the fringe theater scene, known for its high-energy, extremely physical shows.
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