"The Big Door Prize's" Chris O'Dowd: "Being Irish has been nothing but an absolute gift"

"Potential" is a tricky word. It carries all the hope and foreboding of expectation, all the beautiful dread of what could happen, what you could do, but with no promises or guarantees. It's an admonishment, a blessing, a curse. And in the twisty new Chris O'Dowd Apple TV+ series "The Big Door Prize," (based on the novel by by M.O. Walsh), it's a premonition delivered by a mysterious machine, one that upends a small American town by making its residents see the surprising possibilities of what just they might be. 

In the heart of all the new chaos is Dusty, a seemingly satisfied schoolteacher who'd been whistling his way through midlife until the Morpho machine made him question everything he knows about his place in the world. Played with equal measures lightness and unease by "The IT Crowd" and "Bridesmaids" star O'Dowd, Dusty is a down-to-earth everyman tossed into the midst of an existential earthquake. 

"It's right to draw the distinction between destiny and potential," O'Dowd told me on "Salon Talks," "because somehow destiny is so depressing. Always has been." Potential, on the other hand, has a duality that suits O'Dowd's Irish temperament. "You realize when you come from Ireland that comedy and humor is almost a currency," he said. "We use it often as a way to get out of tragedy, or even to f**king ridicule tragedy. I think there's something very noble about that." And as Dusty, O'Dowd gets to explore both the comedy and tragedy of discovering one's potential.

Watch the lively —and unsurprisingly very funny — conversation with Chris O'Dowd here to hear more about what drew him to his mind-bending new series, the secret to learning to whistle and the personal reasons why he avoids doing American accents whenever possible. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What do you tell people "Big Door Prize" is about and who your character Dusty is?

I play a high school history teacher who's married and thinks he's happy. He's got a teenage daughter. He is a very proud member of a small community. We meet him on the morning of his 40th birthday. He's got some midlife stuff going on, but everything seems to be great. Then this machine turns up with the promise to tell everybody in the town what their life potential is, and it upends his life, the community and his perception of whether he was or not happy in the end.

You went to university initially for politics and now here you are playing a history teacher who is — at least in the beginning — skeptical of this thing that's going to tell other people what their lives are. How did your own philosophy draw you to this story? 

I think you're right in that my own philosophy on the world did drive me to the story. One of the things about the book that really interested me was that initial concept — the idea that there is an oracle that if you wish to give weight to it, will dictate your future for you and then you don't really have to do anything for yourself.

I know there is something about the show where it feels they're being set free on this new journey. Actually, you've just got a machine telling you one thing. It may feel freeing, but I think if you've been experiencing the world for the last 20 years and the last 150 years, you could probably see that people can be very easily taken in by one big idea, and can do some wonderful things and some f**king awful things depending on how much weight they put on that idea. I think that Deerfield is somewhat of a microcosm for the rest of society. It's kind of diverse, with an immigrant in the middle of it. It's interesting to throw in a concept where if people follow it, everybody would change their lives, because that seems to happen all the time.

You've said when you were starting out, you used to get sent out on the roles for, and I'm quoting you here, Chris, "the big slow guy."

It's a running joke with my agent. I got her just some gifts recently because it was our 20 years together. One of the things I got her was this embossed key ring with the letters "BSG" on it because of the first few roles. I was probably a good 40 pounds heavier than I am now, so it was with good reason that I was going up for these roles. But it was literally the character description in the first three jobs I got. Somewhere in there it was like, "He was a big, slow guy. He's kind of slow, he's quite big." I don't mind that so much. I feel I got to do so many different types of things over the years that it's never really worried me, really.

You walk that line of comedy and sadness in a lot of the things you do, which maybe to me as an Irish-American also feels very Irish first.

I think you're probably right. We can f**king wallow in tragedy with the best of them. 

But then laugh about it as well.

Yes. That's exactly right.

Growing up, who were the people you were looking to as your inspirations? Were there people who you said, "I want to do what that person does"?

I don't know if it was ever as literal as that, but there were loads of people that I was really enjoying. When I was growing up, to be honest, I used to love sketch show writers. I used to be obsessed with Mortimer, Whitehouse and Harry Enfield, French and Saunders and "Father Ted," a lot of comedy writers. Then when I was a teenager, I started getting really into shows, "Roseanne."

I'm not from a bunch of money, and you felt it was nice to see a working-class family on screen so upfront. I was into a lot of that, and then people like Dave Allen and Spike Milligan and a lot of great literary comics that you kind of find in Ireland, like Dylan Moore and people who really are very smart. You realize when you come from Ireland that comedy and humor is almost a currency. We kind of use it often as a way to get out of tragedy or even to f**king ridicule tragedy or whatnot. I think there's something very noble about that.

It's a form of taking back a narrative in a tragic situation, whether it's mass tragedy, whether it's politics, history. You play a history teacher. The history of Ireland is, it's a sad one, Chris.

Totally but it's interesting because it must be a generational thing, because I haven't had any hassle. It's been f**king easy as pie for me. Being Irish has been nothing but an absolute gift. They say that the greatest revenge is the laughter of your children. Well, I'm f**king laughing.

I want to ask you about the show and this idea of potential, which is such an unusual word. If you were to get a card, Chris, what do you think would be on yours? What would be your potential word?

I don't know. Seaman.

Wait, how's it spelled? 

I'm going to put the A in there. For sure. Yeah, boatman, a handsome boatman, like it says in the song, "A handsome boatman to carry me to my true love to die." That's one of those weird songs where it feels everything is going great, and I wish that I would cross the deepest ocean and over the greatest river if you would just bring me to my true love, and then the final two words are, "to die." It's like Christ, I thought you were going to shag. 

This is why we're all like this.

This is it, isn't it? Maybe it's an Irish thing. I think. It's, I've got this beautiful romantic song, but obviously, she's got to die at the end of the song. You can't have joy. Are you crazy? 

There are touches of that in the show where people are reexamining their lives because even if they feel they're happy, maybe it ends up almost having a placebo effect. It's right to draw the distinction between destiny and potential because somehow destiny is so depressing. Always has been. The idea of being related to any idea with predestination, "So what's the f**king point then?" Whereas I think potential is, even if it's wishy-washy as a concept, as Dusty thinks it is, it's not restrictive, really. It's telling you that you could do this if you fulfill your potential. 

You're a dad, you have young kids. You know how scary that word can also be. It's a very loaded word.

The last two days I've been doing our parent-teacher conferences. Potential comes up. They have the potential to be fantastic or an absolute pain in the a**, it seems, like the rest of us.

You've talked about how after "Bridesmaids," you were offered a lot of things that you described as "very easy to turn down." Looking at your past and moments where you felt there was potential, were there some moments that you think, "Wow, that really was the game changer for me"?

I suppose I rolled the dice a couple of times, emigrated twice, which is a big change to make. Managed to do that twice for more than a decade, and that opened up a lot of opportunities. I don't know if I made all of the right choices or whatnot. A lot of them I've made a very different way than I made decisions early on, where you just want to be working and you just want to get yourself in front of audiences. If you're a creative, entertainment person, you just want to entertain people and then later in life you kind of go, "This is too much." I've got a lot of famous friends and they f**king hate their lives, so there is a limit to how much you could be in front of an audience before you ruin it for everybody.

We've talked a lot about your Irish background. I've watched so many of your performances and almost always you are Irish in the character. I can think of one role I've seen you do an American accent and I've heard you say that you prefer not to. What is that, you're Irish in almost every character that you do?

It's a couple of things. It's always been a representative issue for me. I've been in America for 12, 13 years and I meet people who aren't born in America all the time, every single day. I don't see them on screen that often, which I find surprising. I've discovered Irish people all over the world; we're the most traveled people that have ever lived. So being a part of representing a diaspora as well as a nation has always been interesting to me. And also, it's one less thing to worry about.

I improvise a lot and come from a big improv background. So when I do accents, it involves doing accent work. In the last film, I did a movie for Netflix and I had to be a brother of an American character. So then you obviously have to do it, and that was fine but it does make you just think about the words that you're saying very specifically rather than, what I find more useful is how your character is feeling in that moment, becomes more of a technical enterprise.

Your character in "The Big Door Prize" is a whistler among other things. I heard that you're a good whistler, but that you also had to be dubbed.

We wanted, because he gets it on his card, it's a very specific part of his personality. I'm actually not a bad whistler, but we did want to step it up a bit and give him real runs and turns that might give us a reason to think that the whistler word belonged on the card, if that makes sense.

There's a lot of scenes where I'm like, "I want this to have whistling in it, but I think it needs somebody better than me. So I'm just going to be walking around in the background with my lips pursed, and if you can, add it in in post. Otherwise, I'm going to look like an absolute idiot just walking around, going with no sound coming out. I'm sucking a straw."

I'm a terrible whistler. What's the secret? 

Just try and exercise your tongue as much as you can. I find that helpful. I've been trying to teach the kids to whistle, and it is an odd thing because it's just the shape of your mouth, isn't it?

The Morpho sounds a bit like that. There are parts of this Morpho thing and the iconography of the show, and I suppose the central character, that does remind me a little bit of "Close Encounters" with Richard Dreyfuss. I was watching this really cool clip where Steven Spielberg is being interviewed. Have you ever seen this by James Lipton, who used to do the actor studio?

He has this realization in front of everybody where James Lipton says to him, and I'm paraphrasing, "So your father worked in the sciences and your mother was a music teacher. You've said previously that they struggled to connect. When the aliens come down, how do they connect with everybody?" And Steve Spielberg goes, "Well, I realize now that this movie is about my childhood." It's that incredible thing that I'm sure is John Williams, where it's like, "OK, how do we communicate? We have to communicate on a musical level if we don't understand the verbosity of another species."

"Big Door Prize" releases new episodes on Wednesdays on Apple TV+.