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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Ricky Gervais, the comic whiz behind "The Office," aims his nervy, discomfiting humor at the stand-up stage and movie stardom.
By Mark Follman
Read more: Hollywood, Comedy, HBO, BBC, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features, The Office, Mark Follman
July 8, 2008 | NEW YORK -- Ricky Gervais, speechless, is gazing longingly into Leonard's eyes. Seated in a plush armchair, his face within intimate range of Leonard's, all he really wants is for Leonard to bark. Just once. This is a genuinely awkward moment for Gervais, the celebrated British actor-comedian who has made an art of playing characters prone to terribly awkward moments.
Leonard is being played by a pampered performer named Jazz, a Great Dane supposedly trained to deliver on cue. But the hound with the Hollywood gravy train is gazing right back at Gervais without so much as a sniff. After a moment, he lets loose a floppy tongue, pants a couple of times. He is going way off script. Everyone on the set is holding their breath. The stone-faced Gervais normally loves to improvise, but this time he's baffled. It's hard to decide if the impasse between the two is hilarious or weird or a fair bit of both.
It's mid-December in Brooklyn, and Gervais is hard at work on the final day of shooting for "Ghost Town," a romantic comedy due in theaters this September. Alongside actors Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni, Gervais stars as a misanthropic dentist whose near-death experience leaves him with special powers of perception and caught in a wacky love triangle reaching beyond the grave. This is rather a departure from the kind of material with which the comedy whiz made his mark -- two acclaimed TV series, "The Office" and "Extras," which sent up workplace and celebrity inanity by way of brutally funny satire.
Although it's been two months and a rare long stint away from his home in England, Gervais says he loves spending time in New York City, the world's primo fondue pot for pop culture. He is characteristically jovial about his first lead role in a Hollywood film. But this production is a different pile of string than the TV projects that brought him international fame. The scene at hand will require several more takes and a little postproduction magic to coax the hound's compliance.
Gervais looks anxious as he steps over to view the footage on a nearby monitor and begins suggesting how the different takes might be cobbled together. He catches himself: "Look at me. I'm such a control freak!" He seems at once excited and agitated with this attempted transition from cult phenom to movie star. His TV success has already led to side roles in several Hollywood productions, but the forthcoming movie promises to plaster his mug on full-page ads across America.
Even so, maybe it's the pampered pooch who's acting the prima donna here.
"Yeah, it's tough," Gervais muses. "He was never going to bark and I knew it. He just wasn't going to do it."
A bit more on this point, before we get to chatting at length about his improbable TV career and emerging Hollywood trajectory.
"Have you worked with animals much before?"
"Only in porn," he quips. His deadpan look cracks open with that signature thousand-watt grin, the one punctuated by the pointy incisors and the high, impish guffaw.
It's an apt moment. Gervais has long frolicked at the edges of taste, heckling what he calls "broad comedy" and insisting that he does creative work only on his own terms. He says flat out that he doesn't want any dummies in his audience. (The misery of selling out to a mainstream audience was a central theme of "Extras.") Yet he loves American pop culture and admits to indulging regularly in watching "reality TV." And he is eager to make a bigger splash across the pond -- here he is, wrapping work on what by all appearances is an archetypal Hollywood tale.
Indeed, as he stands at the Hollywood crossroads, Ricky Gervais also stands as something of a paradox. Shortish and rotund, he makes up in comedic charisma what he lacks in leading-man looks. He's a genial and witty conversationalist, zinging one-liners like ammo fired from a toy gun and then giggling along with you as you duck and dodge. But can the unlikely middle-aged maverick -- who favors uncomfortable humor but only jumped into comedy in his late 30s -- really make the leap to Hollywood movie star? And why, exactly, does he care to try?
If it's not so much about seeing his "big fat face" on the screen, as Gervais goes out of his way to put it, the answer may lie in his zeal for collaboration. It starts with the writing and spills into all manner of revising and tinkering, a hallmark of his carefully sculpted TV creations. Even when peppering a comedy with blatant gags, he says, "It's not the jokes that keep you hooked. It's the story that keeps you hooked."
After television success delivered Hollywood scripts to his doorstep, Gervais resisted for a while. "A project really has to offer so much potential and possibility," he says. He found the script for "Ghost Town" distinctively funny. Additionally, director David Koepp, who also co-wrote the movie, offered the kind of access Gervais craved. "We fiddled with the script together for a couple of days and then I knew I was definitely in," Gervais says. "I feel like I was part of it from the beginning."
The Brit's approach impressed Koepp, who has written scripts for several Hollywood blockbusters. "You want input from your actors; they're not really doing their job if they're not actively involved," Koepp says. "For someone who has written so much himself, Ricky was an interesting combination of wanting to play the part as written on the page but also paraphrasing and going off on riffs."
As the day sprawls forward inside the cavernous Brooklyn studio, Gervais looks a little weary. It's been 12-hour days, here and around the city, for eight weeks straight. But the gleam stays in his eye. "I love the hard work," he says. "Winston Churchill said, 'If you find a job you love, you'll never work again in your life' -- and it's true." Gervais ponders this for a second. "He also said, 'Give me some more brandy.'"
The laugh that bubbles up when he delivers such lines is familiar to actor Aasif Mandvi, who has a supporting role in "Ghost Town." "We've had a hard time getting through the scenes because we kept cracking up," says Mandvi, who gained notice as a correspondent on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," the popular fake newscast on Comedy Central. "Ricky is a great person to bounce stuff off of because he likes to play. I love to work with people who just want to explore the possibilities like that. Sometimes you come up with crap, but sometimes you come up with gold. It makes it very alive."
"I get very excited about creating stuff just from scratch," Gervais says. "You've got to be in this work for the right reasons -- being rich and famous ultimately doesn't mean anything."
It would be hard to overstate Gervais' fortune and fame, both due primarily to "The Office," which he wrote and directed with his longtime creative partner Stephen Merchant. Although the series didn't get much attention when it first aired in the U.K. in 2001, it soon became one of the most successful television comedies in British history, winning prestigious awards, selling more than 4 million DVDs and catching fire with audiences beyond U.K. shores.
Set in the dreary town of Slough, England, the meticulous portrait of workplace tedium, insecurity and latent depravity starred Gervais as David Brent, a pitifully self-inflated middle manager of a paper company. He was a transfixing spectacle of awkward bravado and inappropriate conduct -- a royal putz of a guy who, acutely aware of the faux-documentary's camera, was desperate to impress more than just his employees with his off-color jokes and bungled truisms. The ensemble cast was equally vivid, both in their aversion to David Brent and their own moronic and degenerate behavior.
Reaching across the Atlantic, the series won two Golden Globe awards and rare critical reverence. It's not often that you see a top TV critic gushing like this: "Nobody who has seen the BBC series 'The Office' has anything bad to say about it, and there's a reason for that: It's perfect," wrote the New Yorker's Nancy Franklin in October 2004. "It's a comedy that doesn't make you laugh, and at times it is close to unbearable; some people like it so much that they can't watch it. That's how good it is."
Yet, although the show found a strong cult following here, Gervais is hardly a household name in America. Survey the pop-culturally savvy in, say, New York or San Francisco, and you'll find devotees. But mention "The Office" to most American TV viewers and you're likely to hear only about NBC's hit spinoff of the same name, set in Scranton, Penn., and starring funnyman Steve Carrell. Ricky Gervais? Who the hell is he?
