"David Duchovny"

Ok with the pretzels; it’s David Duchovny. A ship of fools, Dads’ novels, making music, and finalllllly teaching Jason how to read. “I mean, dishwashing liquid is pretty good.” …on an all-new SmartLess.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sean Hayes?

  This episode of Smartless is sponsored by Google Book. You know, I'm lucky to have a lot of friends and having them over is great, but with hosting comes all the tedious stuff. The planning, keeping track of who's coming, managing schedules, making sure everything actually comes together. That's where Google Book comes in. It's a whole new kind of laptop. It comes with Google AI Pro, so you can create custom tasks with Gemini. For example, you can tell it to track RSVPs and manage your calendar, and it does that for you, even when the laptop's closed. So there's more time to focus on the fun parts of hosting. Basically, Google Book works hard, so you don't have to. Visit googlebook.com. Available in the Gemini app to Google AI Pro users

• 0:45Sean Hayes?

  in select regions for 18-plus users. Check responses for accuracy. Supervise closely. Interrupt when needed.

• 0:54Jason Bateman?

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• 1:34Sean Hayes?

  The place you call home is important to you. So it's important to Allstate. Because home is where you make all your memories. Things like inviting your friends over for game night and discovering that one of them takes charades way, way too seriously. It's these memories that make a house feel like home. If it's important to you, it's important to Allstate. Switch to Allstate, and you could save hundreds on home insurance today. Not available in every state. Potential savings vary, subject to terms and qualifications. Allstate North American Insurance Company and Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.

• 2:10Sean Hayes?

  Sitting in traffic, huh? Watching an old lady with a walker make it further up the road than you have in the last 15 minutes? And of course, your gas tank is in the perfect spot between not a problem to stranded on the highway. Hit your booking point? Book with Southwest and enter airplane mode. Experience award-winning reliability, fly with the best crew in the sky, and never worry about change or cancellation fees. Now tell that old lady to slow down. Kids live around here. Southwest Airlines, enter airplane mode.

• 2:54Will Arnett?

  Hey, guys. This is, welcome back. This is the first time, um, this is the first time I've done this, that we're doing the show since we, uh...

• 3:03Jason Bateman?

  Did it last?

• 3:04Will Arnett?

  Well, no, we made a, didn't we make a blood pact?

• 3:08Jason Bateman?

  I mean, I, not that I know of.

• 3:10Will Arnett?

  Did we not make a blood pact? Who did I make a blood pact with?

• 3:13Jason Bateman?

  Oh, no.

• 3:16Will Arnett?

  I'll figure it out later. All right. In the meantime, let's go to an all-new Smartless.

• 3:38Will Arnett?

  Hey, you know, JB, somebody said to me the other day, you've become like the Jack Nicholson of, of the Dodgers.

• 3:43Jason Bateman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:44Will Arnett?

  Um, you're at the Dodger, you're on the broadcast, uh, a lot.

• 3:48Jason Bateman?

  What a high compliment.

• 3:49Will Arnett?

  I know, I know. And Shawnee, you were there with them, and the guys were like, somebody said that the guys were like, hey, there's two-thirds of the, the Smartless crew, and, um, where's our buddy?

• 3:59Jason Bateman?

  We really, we had such a, we had such a joy. I mean, Willie, if I had three tickets.

• 4:04Will Arnett?

  I know, sure, sure. This is, last week it was dinner, this week it's the game. I mean, you know, most people would be like, hey!

• 4:12Jason Bateman?

  And Shawnee, we're, we're still good for Rome, right? Yeah.

• 4:16Will Arnett?

  Oh, this is what it is. This is a, you're getting me back for all the holidays that Shawnee and I went on.

• 4:21Jason Bateman?

  I mean, the stamps on your passports.

• 4:26Jason Bateman?

  No, you, we missed you, Willie. We really did have a nice time, didn't we, Shawnee? Oh, my God, it was so easy, breezy. We haven't, we haven't done that in, uh, in ever. And ever, and, you know, it reminded me, Willie, of, uh... Yeah, I took you to the, uh, was it game one of the World Series last year?

• 4:43Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Jason Bateman?

  When Freddie Freeman hit that walk-off grand slam.

• 4:47Will Arnett?

  How good was that?

• 4:48Jason Bateman?

  We were jumping around like.

• 4:49Sean Hayes?

  What was the last game?

• 4:50Jason Bateman?

  Beauty contest. The last game of what?

• 4:53Sean Hayes?

  Is that where, is that, was that the famous last game last year where?

• 4:56Jason Bateman?

  It wasn't the last game. I believe it was the first game.

• 4:58Will Arnett?

  It was the first game and it was a walk-off.

• 5:00Sean Hayes?

  Yeah. Where he just like got a bases loaded homerun like at the last.

• 5:03Jason Bateman?

  And then the series continued for the, uh, the Yankees to go ahead and they kind of dropped the ball on the whole series.

• 5:10Sean Hayes?

  Get it?

• 5:11Jason Bateman?

  Yankee fans will know that pun.

• 5:13Will Arnett?

  Oh, gosh. Well, you just, you alienated 50 million people, so.

• 5:17Jason Bateman?

  Listen, the Yanks are gonna get another chance. Well, who knows when this is gonna air?

• 5:21Will Arnett?

  Who knows?

• 5:21Jason Bateman?

  But it seems like they might get another chance.

• 5:23Sean Hayes?

  I also, look what I just fucking did like five minutes before we came on.

• 5:27Jason Bateman?

  What'd you do?

• 5:27Sean Hayes?

  Playing with the dog outside and I ran inside and I fucking tripped over him and to break my fall, I grabbed the door and my fist finger went all the way back here.

• 5:38Will Arnett?

  Oh, God.

• 5:38Jason Bateman?

  Really?

• 5:39Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, just like five minutes ago. I was like, ah.

• 5:41Jason Bateman?

  Wait, so you're on ice right now?

• 5:43Sean Hayes?

  Well, just in case, yeah.

• 5:44Will Arnett?

  Yeah. Well, luckily, I'm no, no joke. Luckily, you're, you're done with the, with the play.

• 5:49Sean Hayes?

  I know. Could you imagine? Could you imagine?

• 5:51Will Arnett?

  No.

• 5:52Sean Hayes?

  No, come play. Won't be able to play.

• 5:54Will Arnett?

  I know.

• 5:54Jason Bateman?

  Oh, that Ricky.

• 5:55Will Arnett?

  It would be good night Oscar if that were the case, you know?

• 5:59Jason Bateman?

  Incredible.

• 6:02Jason Bateman?

  Wait, Sean, why do you? Sean, why have you asked me and then my wife separately if my dogs are good with other dogs?

• 6:09Sean Hayes?

  Because I want to bring Ricky over, but I don't want to bring him if your dogs are gonna attack.

• 6:14Jason Bateman?

  Why would you be bringing Ricky over?

• 6:16Sean Hayes?

  Because I might come see a movie this weekend.

• 6:19Will Arnett?

  Okay.

• 6:19Jason Bateman?

  But, but you, you spend three hours plus over at Jen's every week you don't, you don't bring Ricky?

• 6:25Sean Hayes?

  Look at the judging face.

• 6:27Jason Bateman?

  I just don't understand, like, what's going on? Is Ricky having separation anxieties lately?

• 6:30Sean Hayes?

  No, no, it's just a thing. And as a dog owner, I just don't like to leave him alone for like three, four hours.

• 6:35Will Arnett?

  Jimmy, I would describe your face as a scowl right now. It's a scowl.

• 6:38Sean Hayes?

  No, but I would like, I would like to bring him over to Jen's, but he, they don't get along.

• 6:43Jason Bateman?

  Well, yeah, but.

• 6:45Sean Hayes?

  So I was like, oh, if your dogs get along, it'll be great. I could just bring him over. And if not, by the way, that's fine too.

• 6:50Jason Bateman?

  But I, but the bigger issue is why, why do you and Scotty feel like Ricky needs so much constant? Like, dogs can be left alone. And by the way, you just spent almost a full year out of the country.

• 7:03Sean Hayes?

  I know. I don't know how he fed himself. He fed himself. I don't know how he drove himself around.

• 7:07Will Arnett?

  Listen, this is gonna be controversial, but, but we live in an era where people bring their dogs over to other people's houses a lot. And, and I don't, I'm not judging you, Sean, on this, but people do, and they just, and they're like, I got my dog with me. I'm like, what do you mean you got your dog with you?

• 7:20Jason Bateman?

  It's not okay.

• 7:21Will Arnett?

  Yeah. And I'm a dog, I love dogs. I've had lots of dogs. I have a dog. But you don't need to bring your dog with you when you go to somebody else's house.

• 7:27Sean Hayes?

  I like, I like the dog.

• 7:29Will Arnett?

  I'm not saying that you don't.

• 7:31Jason Bateman?

  Then, then continue having more morning playtime with him then.

• 7:37Will Arnett?

  Yeah, people show up, I got my dog with me. Oh, you've got your dog with you? What if everybody brought their dog everywhere? It would be mayhem.

• 7:43Sean Hayes?

  This is what I love. This is what I love.

• 7:45Will Arnett?

  You're like, well, I'm a dog person. You must be, you're a monster.

• 7:48Jason Bateman?

  Oh, sorry. He peed. Where are your paper towels?

• 7:52Sean Hayes?

  No, this is what I love. I love, I love the, I love the conversation that I know happened this morning. And Jason's face as he was having it with Amanda.

• 8:01Jason Bateman?

  It was a couple of days ago, and I've been really stewing on it.

• 8:05Sean Hayes?

  Sean, Amanda's like, Sean just texted me if, if our dogs are okay with other dogs. And you turn with your cup of coffee or just sludge, your cup of sludge. And I said, fucking what?

• 8:15Jason Bateman?

  What?

• 8:16Will Arnett?

  By the way, he's, you know where he is.

• 8:18Sean Hayes?

  He did the same thing to me.

• 8:18Will Arnett?

  He's, he's in his chair in his little study with the wire going and he's watching MSNBC. And then he barely moves and he looks at her and she's at the door. She's too scared to come in because she sees the preschool. She sees the preschool. Who knows what stage of gummy he's at?

• 8:35Will Arnett?

  You know what I mean?

• 8:36Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, I will scratch.

• 8:37Will Arnett?

  And he's afraid of dad.

• 8:38Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Will Arnett?

  You know?

• 8:39Sean Hayes?

  She does a very tentative little.

• 8:43Will Arnett?

  Yeah, a little knock.

• 8:44Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Will Arnett?

  Honey.

• 8:46Jason Bateman?

  Sorry. Are you, sorry, are you not on commercial? Is it not commercial?

• 8:49Will Arnett?

  I tell you what, I tell you who's not tentative is our guest today. Nice, nice.

• 8:52Jason Bateman?

  Oh, let's get into it.

• 8:54Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 8:55Jason Bateman?

  Uh, check the, check the chat.

• 8:58Will Arnett?

  Hang on one second. Oh, yeah. Oh, by the way. Yeah, sorry. Before we, before we go, before we get into our guest who we wanted to talk to immediately. Tickets to the Hollywood Bowl, November 15th. Uh, for Smartless Live.

• 9:12Jason Bateman?

  Wait, do I need to buy tickets for that? I'd really like to go to that. Do I need to buy tickets?

• 9:17Will Arnett?

  No, we're giving you two cups. We're gonna give you two cups. One for you and then plus one.

• 9:21Jason Bateman?

  I'd love a stage, I'd love a stage seat. If you have a stage seat.

• 9:25Will Arnett?

  You go, you go to smartless.com/live.

• 9:28Jason Bateman?

  You go to smartless.com/live for the Hollywood Bowl show on the 15th of November. Guys, this is gonna be, it's gonna be very nerve wracking for us. Because what are we doing up there at the Hollywood Bowl?

• 9:41Will Arnett?

  We can barely do this. We're barely doing this this morning.

• 9:45Jason Bateman?

  I will tell you that my guest is, is one of our biggest stars in, in, in the movie industry.

• 9:52Will Arnett?

  So is my guest.

• 9:53Jason Bateman?

  Really?

• 9:53Will Arnett?

  Really? Yes, my guest also is one of the biggest stars out there.

• 9:57Jason Bateman?

  Let's have a little side bet. You and me.

• 9:59Will Arnett?

  I gotta really, I can't wait. I'm gonna have a single up on a, on a camera. We're gonna, we're gonna single up on you. When JB, when, when my guest comes out, gets announced.

• 10:08Jason Bateman?

  Oh, and you think?

• 10:09Will Arnett?

  Oh, yeah, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be great.

• 10:11Jason Bateman?

  It's gonna be a guest that's gonna make me nervous?

• 10:13Will Arnett?

  It's, it's gonna be, it's gonna be so great on so many levels. I can't wait.

• 10:17Jason Bateman?

  All right, Shawnee, you can, Shawnee, you can be the judge between Will and I's guest. Will, let's you and I have a little side $10 bet of who is the bigger guest. And Shawnee, you get to decide and then.

• 10:28Will Arnett?

  We'll just do like, oh, we'll do 10, 10, 20. Be right, be a big reveal. We'll do a 10, 10, 20 and presses.

• 10:35Jason Bateman?

  Automatics.

• 10:36Will Arnett?

  Automatic presses, okay. Um, all right. I'll tell you what we are. We're pressed for time because we want to get into our guest who is. Get this, award-winning actor, writer, director, New York Times bestselling author, What? Podcaster, singer-songwriter, multiple albums, multiple Golden Globes, multiple Emmy nominations, SAG Awards. He's known for his iconic TV show, which was his sort of breakthrough, even though he'd been doing it for a long time. He's got a degree from Princeton, he's got a master's from Yale in literature. Oh, wait a minute. He still has an unfinished PhD that I want to ask him about. I'm too afraid to say. He's one of the all-time greats, you guys, it's David Duchovny. Oh, David Duchovny. Yes.

• 11:21Jason Bateman?

  Hey, David, was that not who you were gonna guess, Shawnee?

• 11:24Will Arnett?

  No, I thought it was David Duchovny or Louis CK.

• 11:27Jason Bateman?

  Oh.

• 11:28Will Arnett?

  Wow.

• 11:29Jason Bateman?

  Often, often mistaken for one another.

• 11:32Will Arnett?

  I don't think Louis has a master's in literature, all due respect, from Yale.

• 11:36Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. But you said Princeton, you said Princeton as well.

• 11:38Will Arnett?

  And Princeton first.

• 11:39Jason Bateman?

  Is that true? David, welcome.

• 11:41Will Arnett?

  Christ.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Is it true?

• 11:42Will Arnett?

  Yes, it's true.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 11:44Jason Bateman?

  God.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  This is so wonderful.

• 11:47Will Arnett?

  David, why would you, why would you, you're such a, you know, I remember the, we spoke about a year ago where you had dinner.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Let me just say, I don't like the tone of that. Why? Immediately, why?

• 11:57Will Arnett?

  Why would they give you a degree? No, no, no, it wasn't that, it wasn't that. It wasn't that.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Go ahead, why would I what?

• 12:03Will Arnett?

  The why would you, because you graduated, you were head of your class in high school, and then you go to Princeton, and then you go to Yale.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Jesus.

• 12:14Will Arnett?

  And then I feel like you lowered yourself to come into show business a little bit, you know, a little bit. Why would you do that, David?

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Clearly, I have a gaping hole. A gaping hole inside me.

• 12:26Will Arnett?

  Yeah, he's decided to slum it.

• 12:28Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:28Will Arnett?

  He slummed it with us morons. Yeah, what is that?

• 12:31Speaker 03

  What, go ahead.

• 12:33Will Arnett?

  No, that's it.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  No, I want, I just want to, I want you to walk me through your academic prowess. I'm fascinated with all this stuff. Well, I, at Princeton, I majored in English literature and I wrote my thesis on Samuel Beckett's novels.

• 12:49Jason Bateman?

  Come on.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Of all those.

• 12:51Jason Bateman?

  Wow.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Because, well, let me tell you why I wrote on the novels, because nobody writes on the novels and I didn't have to do that much work and research. Because I could just make the shit up myself.

• 13:01Jason Bateman?

  All right, this is pre.

• 13:03Will Arnett?

  There's nothing to compare it to.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:05Jason Bateman?

  No chat GPT cheating.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  It was an open field.

• 13:08Jason Bateman?

  And then what happened at, that was Princeton or that was Yale?

• 13:11Speaker 03

  That was Princeton. And then I took a year off and I traveled and I didn't really know what I wanted to do at all. I just knew I wanted to be a writer. And then I thought, I applied for a Mellon Fellowship, which I got from the Mellon Foundation, which they were trying to lure people that might go into money-making businesses and steer them towards academia. So it was for people to get PhDs who might, you know, not be able to afford staying in school. So I got one of those and I went to Yale and I thought that I'd become a professor of English literature and then write novels in my summer times. That's, that was the plan.

• 13:48Jason Bateman?

  Wow. And, and, and forgive me, have you written like a hundred novels and I'm an idiot?

• 13:54Speaker 03

  I've written five, four or five novels.

• 13:58Jason Bateman?

  Wow.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I just had a book of poems come out.

• 14:02Jason Bateman?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  David, this is.

• 14:04Will Arnett?

  And then, by the way, by the way, he's also, he's admitting the fact that he's put out a, a number of records. He just finished a tour. Am I right? You just finished a tour in Europe.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, this was in the States, this one, but, but go ahead.

• 14:16Will Arnett?

  But last year you were on tour in Europe.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:19Will Arnett?

  And, and I listened to your records. By the way, your music is great. And you know.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 14:23Will Arnett?

  Sometimes, and I mean this all the same, sometimes when you see people who do multiple disciplines, they're like, I'm gonna put a record out. You listen, you're like, yeah, it's pretty good. Your records are really good. I mean, they're very, these aren't just hobby records.

• 14:35Jason Bateman?

  Very good musical taste.

• 14:36Will Arnett?

  I'm a music lover. Really, really good stuff. I mean.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Thank you, Will.

• 14:39Will Arnett?

  I love that tune, Hell or High Water. I think that's a great tune. Yeah.

• 14:43Jason Bateman?

  What, what, what type of, is it rock and roll?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess it's, I'd say it's rock and roll. Yeah, like seventies rock, you know, late sixties rock.

• 14:52Jason Bateman?

  Like, like yacht, yacht rock?

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Not quite like yacht rock. I'm not. I'm not very jazzy. I stay off the water. I try to stay off the water.

• 15:00Will Arnett?

  No, it's kind of like indie rock in a way. I mean, sorry to forgive me for saying that, but I'm a 90s indie rock dinosaur.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, well, the 90s was kind of like the garagification of 70s rock in my mind.

• 15:11Will Arnett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  And so I think 70s and 90s have a lot in common.

• 15:15Jason Bateman?

  And you're playing the guitar there and you're singing as well?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  I don't play the guitar on stage because I'm, I'm kind of self-taught on the guitar. So I have an inability to play it the same way twice, which is not very nice for my band. So I, I write the songs.

• 15:32Jason Bateman?

  And you sing them?

• 15:33Speaker 03

  And I sing in my, in my fashion.

• 15:36Jason Bateman?

  So onstage, you don't, you have no, you have no guitar as a crutch?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Nothing to do with my hands. I think that's where you're going.

• 15:42Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, so you just, you just kind of work the mic and the, and the core?

• 15:46Speaker 03

  You know, you hold on to that fucking mic stand for dear life is what happens.

• 15:49Jason Bateman?

  I wouldn't know what to do.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  It's like a life jacket.

• 15:51Will Arnett?

  You're like, you're like Liam Gallagher does that, you know, with the?

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Liam is amazing because, you know, when I first, when I first started performing live, I just thought, well, I'm like the MC. And I want, I want people to have a good time, you know? And I, I'm dancing around and making a fool of myself.

• 16:08Jason Bateman?

  Others dancing.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  It was actually my, my, my wife said to me, you know, you don't have to move around so much.

• 16:14Jason Bateman?

  Oh, no.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  And then I, and then I saw, you know, then I saw Liam and Liam is just still, you know? He's just still, he's got his hands behind his back for the most part.

• 16:24Will Arnett?

  Yeah, kind of leaning up in a way, you know?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  And it's really, it's really powerful to be still.

• 16:28Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. Do you close your eyes a lot?

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Sometimes. Sometimes I close my eyes and then I go, this isn't good. There could be shit happening out there that I need to keep an eye on.

• 16:37Jason Bateman?

  Do you ever go full Sia and just turn your back to the audience?

• 16:44Will Arnett?

  But, but David, David, I just want to say, so you were, David, you were self-taught on guitar. I think you only started playing guitar a couple of years before your first album. Is that true?

• 16:54Speaker 03

  True, yeah.

• 16:54Will Arnett?

  So, so you barely, you basically teach yourself how to play guitar for a couple of years. Then you have the audacity to be like, all right, well, I'm going to write a record. And how are you? Do you know how to read and write music? How did you do that? How was that process?

• 17:08Speaker 03

  No, I don't know how to read and write music. But here's something that you guys might appreciate as actors. When I decided I wanted to learn guitar, I'm not 100% self-taught. When I decided I wanted to learn, I was doing Californication at the time. And I said to the, I said to Tom Kappanos, the producer, I think Hank Moody should learn how to play guitar. So I could get the free lessons.

• 17:31Jason Bateman?

  That's amazing. The intelligence permeates everything you do.

• 17:35Will Arnett?

  I know, I know. He's playing four dimensional chess, if that's a thing.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  So I, also with singing, I'm not, I'm not like Sean. I can't, I'm not that kind of a singer.

• 17:48Jason Bateman?

  I'm not either.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Yes, you are. And it's been, it's been a journey to try and put over the song. Cause I can hear melodies that I can't, that I can't necessarily sing, which is weird. I never thought that was a possibility.

• 18:02Jason Bateman?

  Well, you know, just really quick, sometimes the best singers are the quote, untrained singing, you know, because you don't think about it. You're not in your head about it.

• 18:10Will Arnett?

  You know, David, when we, we had Michael Stipe, our friend from R E M on here a while ago, and he was talking about that.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Wonderful singer.

• 18:17Will Arnett?

  It was so good. And that first record that he made when he was down in Athens, Georgia with those guys. Radio Free Europe, I think was their first single. And he was talking about, he basically was singing gibberish and he didn't know how to sing. Do you remember that guy? He was talking, he was like, I just kind of winged it.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:33Will Arnett?

  Cause he didn't know what, and he kind of taught himself how to, and he got better as he went.

• 18:38Jason Bateman?

  I think the correct term is wang. He wang it.

• 18:40Will Arnett?

  He wang it. Sorry, Jason.

• 18:42Jason Bateman?

  I don't mean to embarrass you, I'm so sorry.

• 18:44Will Arnett?

  Stickler. He got an actress in English to provide a school bus.

• 18:47Jason Bateman?

  So, hey, hey Sean, hey. Yeah. Okay?

• 18:53Will Arnett?

  Really, speaking of music, struck a chord with Sean.

• 18:55Jason Bateman?

  Now, David, this, this is, I don't, I don't read and I'm not, I'm not proud to say that.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  You strike me as a reader, though. I'm surprised to hear that.

• 19:06Jason Bateman?

  I appreciate that. He reads scripts, he doesn't read. A lot of this is the glasses.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  It's just the glasses.

• 19:10Jason Bateman?

  But to be an English major and to, and to say you want to be a writer and you are a writer and to be a professor, it just, it sounds like a lot of reading. A lot of.

• 19:26Jason Bateman?

  Of sitting down.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Can't get anything by you.

• 19:29Jason Bateman?

  With nothing else going on. There's total silence in the house. Maybe there's a little bit of classical music or something. Nothing with lyrics, because that'll distract you.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Exactly right.

• 19:38Jason Bateman?

  But like, and Will, I wanted to ask you about this too at times. And then I just, fuck it, I don't want to talk to Will.

• 19:48Jason Bateman?

  How do you do that? How do you just say, of all the things I could be doing, I would rather just sit in this chair and shut out the world and stare at this stack of paper and go left to right, top to bottom, word after word after word after word.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  So I'm not reading Hebrew at all, is what you're saying?

• 20:07Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, I mean, I just, I wish my, I wish my parents, for all the good that they did, I wish they had somehow tricked me into really loving that process. Because there's so much that I'm missing.

• 20:17Will Arnett?

  Are you talking about writing or reading?

• 20:18Jason Bateman?

  Reading.

• 20:19Will Arnett?

  Reading, yeah.

• 20:20Jason Bateman?

  Writing I've got, but it's the reading that's, I don't know.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Have you ever, have you ever loved reading a novel or reading?

• 20:27Jason Bateman?

  I have, I've had, I backed into a couple of those, but it was, you know, it wasn't by choice. I do not read for pleasure.

• 20:33Will Arnett?

  All the jokes JB that I make about you not reading, I will say of the handful that I mentioned that you have read, you've always said you really enjoyed reading them. So that's what's surprising to me. I'm like, well, why don't you double?

• 20:44Jason Bateman?

  It is the time allotment. It is the decision to go sit in a chair in a quiet corner of a house and shut everything out and do that. There's so much discipline that I have for other things, but I just don't have for reading. I'm so envious of that.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think it's just, it really is just comes from my parents, I think. On my mother's side, she was a, from a small town in Scotland. And the only way to advance for her family, which were generations of, I did that 20, I did that Finding Your Roots show. So I found out that I come from a long line of fishmongers.

• 21:24Will Arnett?

  Oh, wow. That's wild.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  So the only way out of the fishmongering business. In fact, one of, one of my ancestors' occupation was widow of fishmonger.

• 21:37Will Arnett?

  I didn't even know that was a job.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I know, I was like, how does that pay? How does that pay? Not well, is my guess.

• 21:45Will Arnett?

  Well, you need the person to die, first of all.

• 21:47Jason Bateman?

  You need to be included in the will.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  And so the only way out of, the only way out of that place in society was education. For my mother. So, my mother was the first woman, first person in her family, and a woman in, in the 1940s to go to college. And so she was very much just somebody who believed in the power of education and of reading and writing as a social climbing tool.

• 22:19Jason Bateman?

  Is, is, is also is the appeal, the appeal of reading sometime, like the pure escapism of, because I do remember this one book I really enjoyed reading once, I was once on a job that I, that I didn't, I didn't enjoy, I wasn't, I didn't like where I was, I was on location somewhere and I was lonely. And it was great to just like, I was dying to get back into the book, any chance I could, because it would travel me from where I was.

• 22:43Will Arnett?

  That feeling is amazing.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Well, it used to be, you know, I think the, the place of books has, has been taken by, you know, TV and movies, you know, that, that, that escape. But before there was that technology, you know, this, this is what you had.

• 22:57Will Arnett?

  You had the, and people used to read books on set, I think way back in the day, but JB, I would say that you, as somebody who travels a lot, you're on a lot of, you're on planes a lot. It's such a great time to, to get that escape where you're not watching.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Can I send you one of my books?

• 23:12Will Arnett?

  Yes, please.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Yes, send you one of my books for a plane ride. It's, it's baseball contingent.

• 23:17Jason Bateman?

  Is it?

• 23:18Speaker 03

  It's near baseball. It's called Bucky Fucking Dent. I made a movie of it. I made a movie of it, but I want you to read the book. I'll send you the book.

• 23:25Jason Bateman?

  Now, well, that sounds like nonfiction.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  No, no, it's fiction.

• 23:29Jason Bateman?

  Is it?

• 23:29Speaker 03

  It just uses that, that moment in time as a.

• 23:32Jason Bateman?

  Okay. And then, does that make you a big Yankee fan?

• 23:35Speaker 03

  I am a big Yankee fan, and I heard what you said earlier.

• 23:37Jason Bateman?

  You got a big day today. Big day today.

• 23:41Will Arnett?

  So David, all of this to say?

• 23:44Speaker 03

  So then my father, my father's, my father's family, his father wrote for the Forward, which was the only Yiddish daily newspaper in America, the longest-running one. And he wrote, kind of in a Dickensian way, he wrote cliffhangers for the paper. He wrote stories about Little Nell, or whatever, somebody being tied to the train tracks, that kind of a thing. And my father, his entire life, my father had to work kind of a nine-to-five job, but he always said he was a novelist. He always said he was a novelist. And at the age of 73, two years before he died, he published his first novel. So he was a hot young novelist at the age of 73.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  So I'm coming out of that kind of history of respect for the word, respect for the efficacy of the word, respect for education. Just it was all, that was part of my growing up. That was part of my foundation.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  And we will be right back.

• 24:49Sean Hayes?

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• 25:31Jason Bateman?

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• 26:11Sean Hayes?

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• 26:47Sean Hayes?

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• 27:32Sean Hayes?

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• 28:00Jason Bateman?

  And now, back to the show.

• 28:03Will Arnett?

  That's funny, David. My dad also, who worked forever, and he's been retired for a while, but since COVID has written two novels. Amazing. And he wrote his last one, and it came out when he was 86. He's just written it. Oh, my God. It just came out last year, yeah.

• 28:16Jason Bateman?

  What is the name of it, and where can purchasers find it?

• 28:19Will Arnett?

  Plug it. Yeah, well, his latest is The Monmouth Manifesto, which is an interesting, interesting novel, and it's sort of historical fiction, if you will. This is about when caterpillars change into... No, it's about, it's about, it's sort of pre, it's about the American Revolution in a way. Monmouth County, New Jersey is the reference, and about loyalists going to Canada, based on one of my ancestors, and about really at the heart of the revolution. I was just trying to do a moth joke. Okay, sorry, you didn't want to get into it. Not really.

• 28:52Jason Bateman?

  This is why you're a Canadian. Let the readers buy it and discover it.

• 28:55Will Arnett?

  What's his name? My dad's name is James Arnett. You sure? Yeah.

• 29:01Will Arnett?

  Emerson James Arnett, if you will. Oh. Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  My dad, my dad wrote, my dad wrote Me Off.

• 29:07Jason Bateman?

  Oh, no, Sean.

• 29:10Will Arnett?

  Sean. God, it would be funny if it wasn't so true. He wrote me off. I know. No. All right. He wrote a goodbye note. His, he wrote, "See ya." That's where "bye" came from, by the way. It came from Sean's dad. Bye. Wait, wait, David, David, David. So you, so I do want to, so you get in, you graduate, you go to Princeton.

• 29:36Jason Bateman?

  You kind of want to stick with Sean.

• 29:37Will Arnett?

  I know, I do. We've done a lot. Anytime you have a question on Sean, please, don't interrupt me. But you decide, and you're studying English Lit, and you get a master's, and then what's the moment you go like, "All right, I'm gonna put this down for a second, I'm gonna dip my toe"? What was your first acting job, and why did it come about?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  I was at, I was at Yale. I was, I was getting my PhD, or so I thought. And Yale is famous for its drama school, and they have a lot of, they have a lot of productions going on all the time. So I decided I was gonna start trying to take classes over at the drama department. And they were very loose about it. They would just let me walk in and do writing classes. Because I thought, maybe I'm gonna write plays. Because the idea of writing novels or poems seems so very lonely to me. You know, and I was 22, 23 years old and I was just sitting in a room all day long alone, trying to write. And I was like, this is fucked up, you know, this is not. You know, I like people.

• 30:36Will Arnett?

  Not as romantic as you thought it was gonna be.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  No, but I liked, I like collaborating. I like, so I thought, okay, I'll write plays. And that way, at least I'll, I'll get out into the world. And so I met these, all these actors and they're always looking for bodies. Because there's so many productions going on around, and you know. And they said, hey, you know, come and do this, this thing, this Arthur Schnitzer play, Schnitzler play we're doing, which name escapes me. But you can play the Count de la Tramway or something. I had one or two lines. And I liked it. It wasn't like, oh, this is a revelation. In fact, I thought, oh, well, I'm comfortable. And I was so comfortable, in between the first and the second performances, I smoked a joint.

• 31:18Will Arnett?

  How'd the second one go?

• 31:19Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Not so good.

• 31:23Jason Bateman?

  That's really funny.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  I got, I was so cocky. I was like, I got this. And then I was like, oh, I don't have anything. Why are people looking at me?

• 31:31Jason Bateman?

  Did you then sign up for acting classes? Or did you?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  I started taking classes in, in New York with a woman named Marcia Howfrech, who taught Strasberg method. She was associated with the Actors Studio. And that was wonderful, because she was completely supportive. You know, it was all about the interior world. All the things that are so difficult to work on when you're actually a working actor.

• 31:52Will Arnett?

  But were you thinking about it in terms of like informing your playwriting? Was that part of it?

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes, that's what I was telling myself.

• 31:58Jason Bateman?

  So it wasn't, wasn't like, this is gonna be my, this is gonna be my future occupation?

• 32:01Speaker 03

  No, I thought, if I'm gonna write plays, I should probably know what it's like to say these, whatever lines I'm gonna write, and see if they're sayable up on stage.

• 32:09Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  And so that was my approach. And then at some point, I was just like, I liked, I'd played sports my whole life and I liked, I liked the team aspect of acting and of. Of making things, I liked the high wire, kind of, you know, put up or shut up feeling.

• 32:25Jason Bateman?

  Did it ever frustrate you that it didn't hold the same sort of academic rigor?

• 32:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 32:32Jason Bateman?

  That, that.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 32:33Jason Bateman?

  Because it is not, with all respect to our colleagues that are actors, it's not the, it doesn't have this sort of highbrow, sophisticated reputation that a playwright would.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  It's just a different game. It's just a different game. It's like baseball and basketball, whatever. It's just, I look at life as a series of games or setups, and this was just another game. And I, I knew it had different rules, and I knew that, that I would have to examine different strengths in order to.

• 33:03Will Arnett?

  Yeah, and probably, probably less constraints too than writing, because it is such a different discipline. It probably started exercising a different muscle creatively that you're like, oh, this feels good.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yes, it was the emotional, emotional aspect of my life which had been neglected because I was, you know, I was in academia, which doesn't really prize, you know, being volatile.

• 33:24Jason Bateman?

  Right. So the emotional side of it and the teamwork side of it is being satisfied. But do you feel like this fucking academic superhero that you have inside of you has been satisfied, has been utilized properly in your life thus far?

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Yes, now, now that I, when I started writing novels, about, about 10 years ago now. And, you know, people, I go on Goodreads and I'll read, I'll read, you know, people's suggestions.

• 33:55Will Arnett?

  Yeah, oh, you will, you will.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Stupidly, yeah. But people, I will, I will be accused of showing off my learning, when in fact, I don't write with any books around. It's all in my head, you know. If I'm quoting something or if I'm referencing another, a great work of literature. It's coming from my head. It's coming from my memory.

• 34:18Sean Hayes?

  That's crazy.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  So I'm not doing it just to show up, but it's part of me. And I really feel like I finally joined in the conversation with these people that I grew up reading and loving and feeling like this is the conversation I want to be involved with. And I'm sure you guys have had this as actors where you're like, okay, now I'm in conversation with the people that I want to be in conversation with.

• 34:41Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 34:42Jason Bateman?

  And then what about, did you, sorry, Shani, did you ever end up writing any plays or any screenplays? Have you kind of married the two?

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:50Jason Bateman?

  Yeah?

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, in fact, the novel writing came out of not being able to make a screenplay. Bucky Fucking Dent, I wrote as a screenplay probably in 2005 or '06.

• 35:05Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  And then I couldn't get it made. You know, usually my soul goes towards like more independent kind of stories.

• 35:13Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  And so Bucky I couldn't make. I got close. I got close. I got close. I couldn't make it.

• 35:19Jason Bateman?

  But then finally did.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  And then I was like, I'm gonna write as a novel. And then I made it as a movie. So you flipped it. You went the other way. So you write a screenplay.

• 35:26Sean Hayes?

  Because Will always talks about it's IP now, because now your book is IP. So they love that, right?

• 35:32Speaker 03

  I don't know if they love that.

• 35:34Sean Hayes?

  Reverse engineering. I mean, no, Hollywood loves that. Was it a book first, then we'll make it?

• 35:38Speaker 03

  I'll just say that as a director, you know, writing the novel of the screenplay was the best preparation I could have done as a director.

• 35:45Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, sure.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  Because I just knew. So now I'd be remiss. I'm not suggesting that you have to do that next time you direct, guys. No, no. But I'm just saying, for me, that worked.

• 35:53Jason Bateman?

  Is there a genre that you like writing more of than not?

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, I'm just of the, I guess, you know, I go back to the movies when I started acting, you know, like James Brooks, just these movies that can live in.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  A real, in terms of adearment, you know, sobbing, but also laughing. Yeah, great. David O. Russell stuff? Yeah.

• 36:20Will Arnett?

  Just like real emotional stuff that like.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Emotional but fucking funny. Yeah, flips back and forth. Yeah, so that's, that's always the balance that I'm looking for. As an actor too, it's always the balance I'm looking for. That's where I live.

• 36:33Will Arnett?

  So what ended up because, so, so to go back to my, what ended up becoming the first professional acting gig that you had? That you went up for and you got?

• 36:42Speaker 03

  Professional's a funny word.

• 36:44Will Arnett?

  Well, you know, that you got paid, that you got a paycheck, that you had to fill out a W four or whatever, you know?

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Well, I'll tell you about two. One, the first one I got paid for, and then there's the first one I did, which was even better. But the first one I got paid for, I believe, was a Michelob beer commercial. Wow. And I, I got on set and the guy told me, okay, you're at the bar here. The guy, the director, said, you're, you're at the bar here. That guy. Yeah, that guy, some guy said, you're at the bar. I said, okay, this guy says I'm at the bar. And you, you run into an old professor of yours and you guys have a conversation and you know, you're happy to see him. And I was so fucking tight. I was so nervous. I mean, I'm twenty, I'm twenty-six years old. I mean, I'm not young, young, you know?

• 37:34Speaker 03

  And, and I had kind of staked my life on this path. Like, I wasn't, I wasn't gonna get my PhD. I wasn't gonna be a professor. And I just thought, okay, I'm gonna do this thing and I'm gonna be good at it. Now I get on set and I'm like, I'm just tight. Because you feel like you needed to do so much? I just didn't know. I didn't know it was gonna be so fucking tight.

• 37:57Will Arnett?

  I know exactly what you mean, man. I know.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  You needed that joint. It wasn't that, yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, oh, I'm in the right place. Yeah, right. It was like, no, I'm in the wrong place. Yeah, the cameras pointed at you, the boom guy comes in, yeah. I can't do, I can't go on, I can't lie on the ground and go, huh.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Right. So, um, I, there's pretzels there and I start, I toss one up, you know, catch it in my mouth. And the director's like, that's, I love that, I love that. Oh, no. And I just remember, again, that was my lifeline. And I was like, so I did it for like ten minutes. And then I just remember the director going, okay with the pretzels. We got the pretzels.

• 38:40Jason Bateman?

  I thought you were gonna say you could never get it in your mouth again.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  No, no, that I could do.

• 38:45Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Uh, so that was the first paying job was was Michelob. The first job that I remember was my acting class went and uh, my my acting class put on uh, a night of one acts. And I decided to adapt this Charles Bukowski short story called The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California.

• 39:04Jason Bateman?

  Sure.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Sure, as one does.

• 39:08Will Arnett?

  Sean's always referencing that.

• 39:10Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. It's a painting Sean has. I just call it mermaid, yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in this in this story, these two guys, kind of unemployed guys, watched the hearse unload at the Venice morgue. This is not a true kind of geographical thing, but they can see it from the beach. And they know the timing of it. They know when the guys are gonna come around. They know when the body's gonna be unattended and they're gonna steal a body. So, they do, they steal a body and they, you know, and here's where, you know, it's Bukowski and it's like the logic kind of fails you. But they open it up and it's a beautiful woman and I decide I'm gonna have sex with her. And then I'm so ashamed of myself that I forced my buddy to have sex with her.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  You sure you have this on your wall, Sean? I'm not sure.

• 39:57Jason Bateman?

  It's how I go to sleep.

• 39:58Will Arnett?

  You should see the poster, it's bizarre.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  So then I I said, we go, what are we gonna do to the body? I don't know. I swim her out to the ocean to get rid of the body. And then I come back and I say, she wasn't dead, she turned into a mermaid, she was beautiful, she swam away. So it's this like beautiful, not beautiful after this, it's this gross, horrible necrophilia and then coupled with this high romantic, it's just Bukowski.

• 40:24Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  So we decide we're gonna do it. And I asked the class, you know, which which which of the women in the class is gonna be the corpse? And everybody's like, yeah, it'll be me, it'll be me. But then when the time comes to do it, nobody shows to be the corpse and we're stuck. And we had been, the place where we were making these plays was a a uh, it was an S and M dungeon.

• 40:47Jason Bateman?

  Sure.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Wow. You know, of course.

• 40:50Jason Bateman?

  They're not they're not used during the day and so.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Well, they're not used during the day and and uh, we got to use it for two nights by cleaning up, we had to clean up. And that was a whole other different story.

• 41:00Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  But um, there was the the uh, madam there was named Magda.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  And she heard that we didn't have a body, so she said, "Why don't you use one of my blow up dolls?" Mm-hmm.

• 41:12Sean Hayes?

  Oh, my God.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  This is how things happen. They're at Yale. So, oh, she, yeah, right. And I'm thinking, maybe I should have stayed at Yale.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  So, I, um, I, I put up a, I had always put up like a bulwark on front of the stage to lay a body down, so nobody could see the body. They couldn't see what was going on when I was supposedly making love to this, uh, body. And, um, so I had this blow up doll, and, uh, what I, I hadn't been able to rehearse with her. Sure. And, uh, She wasn't available. She didn't know her lines or anything. As I was copulating with her, her arms and legs started flying out.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Because she's only made of air, right? So, the audience sees this. Sure.

• 42:00Sean Hayes?

  Like a used, like a used car lot, the things that used car lots.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  I'm trying to do this most intense scene, young actor, like, I'm really like, I'm fucking edgy. And these arms are going, and the audience is laughing and laughing. And so, in between performances, I went to Paragon, I hope you know it. It's a sporting goods store. Sure, very well. And I got four ankle weights, and I weighed down her wrists and her ankles. So, the next time, she, she didn't, she didn't have as much mood on. But she still had the squeaky.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  The other part of it was, when I, I walked through the audience, and I, I go, I put a pail of water offstage where I was gonna go, because I swim around, and I'm, I gotta be wet. And so, I walked through the audience, and I'm sure the audience is like, "Oh, my God, this is the worst thing I've ever seen." And I'm thinking, yeah, that's right, I'm an, I'm an edgy motherfucker. And, uh, I go, I go around the corner to, and I realize, it's totally quiet, there's no door. They can just hear me sponging myself down back there. They can just hear me.

• 43:07Jason Bateman?

  Oh my god.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  So that was, that was my first play.

• 43:10Jason Bateman?

  Ay, ay, ay.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  How long did it last? It was two nights. Okay, great. Those two nights.

• 43:15Will Arnett?

  Two full nights. Two, two full nights. So you, so you do, so you do the Bukowski, um, where you're, as you described, making love to a inflatable doll in an S and M dungeon.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:26Will Arnett?

  You do the Michelob.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  You threw away a PhD at Yale for this. Which is what I hear my mother saying.

• 43:30Will Arnett?

  Yeah, your parents, your parents must have been, at this point, they're, they're beaming with pride. And so then, but then, what's the sort of the first, because I'm, I'm leading up to X-Files, so I want to get into X-Files a little bit. We'd be remiss if we didn't get into X-Files, because I was a fan of X-Files and I watched it.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, same.

• 43:47Will Arnett?

  So, you, so you get that, and that leads to what? You, you, because what was the first film you did?

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Um, an old girlfriend of mine, whose name is, is Maggie Wheeler, that's her married name. She's a terrific actress, she was on.

• 44:02Jason Bateman?

  Want to give an address or a phone number?

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Friends quite a lot.

• 44:05Jason Bateman?

  First and last, okay?

• 44:07Speaker 03

  She was on Friends, she was Janice on Friends.

• 44:09Jason Bateman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Chandler's, uh.

• 44:11Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Will Arnett?

  Yes, oh, yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Maggie was doing this film with Henry Jaglum, who just passed, uh, last week. And Henry's this maverick independent filmmaker.

• 44:22Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  And Maggie was gonna be one of the three stars of this film called New Year's Day, and she asked Henry, you know, can you, David's acting now, can you, can you see if you can put him in? So Henry did, and I had a couple scenes in the movie, and they were, they were good, they were kind of notable enough to kind of get me going here in LA and get an agent, and, you know. At that point, it was like, it wasn't like get your SAG card, it was like, how do I get film on myself? You know, how do I show people that I'm not a vampire and I don't disappear when I'm on film?

• 44:52Will Arnett?

  Well, people didn't have, they didn't have phones, and you couldn't put shit on YouTube the way kids can now and create their own stuff.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Right. So it was really this one, it was one long scene in, uh, New Year's Day that really kind of opened it up for me in LA. And then I, you know, I auditioned forever here and didn't get tons of stuff and would get, you know.

• 45:11Will Arnett?

  So you moved to LA?

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Feedback.

• 45:12Will Arnett?

  You moved to LA to be, to do it, to go all in?

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 45:15Jason Bateman?

  What were you doing to pay the bills while you were, uh, swinging and missing?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  I was doing commercials. I would, I would get commercials, yeah.

• 45:21Jason Bateman?

  So no, no, no waiting tables, no bartending, no typical?

• 45:25Speaker 03

  I bartended, um. I catered.

• 45:28Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Sean Hayes?

  Where did you, where did you live when you were here in LA?

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Uh, I lived on Fourth Street in Santa Monica. I got a sublet there.

• 45:35Sean Hayes?

  Oh, way down there.

• 45:36Speaker 03

  An efficiency apartment, which means it didn't have a kitchen, which means I did my dishes in the shower. When I.

• 45:41Jason Bateman?

  Ah, David.

• 45:43Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Jason Bateman?

  Wow.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  I mean, dishwashing liquid is, is pretty good.

• 45:46Jason Bateman?

  Wait, fourth, fourth and what? I lived on Ocean Park and Second for years.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  Ah, uh, fourth between California and Washington.

• 45:53Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Sean Hayes?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  Right by the, the stairs, you know, like, and that was my gym. I'd go to the stairs and.

• 45:59Sean Hayes?

  I catered too. I catered for Anthony, a wedding at Anthony Edwards' house.

• 46:04Jason Bateman?

  Oh.

• 46:04Sean Hayes?

  When I just moved here and I was like, oh my God, it's the guy from ER and I'm in his kitchen.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:09Sean Hayes?

  It was so wild.

• 46:10Jason Bateman?

  And then, and then you were shooting pretty much next door to him when you guys were doing Will and Grace, right?

• 46:15Sean Hayes?

  That's right. It's crazy. Yeah.

• 46:17Jason Bateman?

  Oh, my God.

• 46:18Will Arnett?

  And you did a lot, Shawnee, you did a lot of commercials too back then. I remember.

• 46:20Sean Hayes?

  Tons, yeah. It's the only way to pay the bills.

• 46:22Will Arnett?

  We talked about, I remember you had those commercials that you were doing, like when Will and Grace was on, some of them came out.

• 46:28Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, I know. Yeah.

• 46:29Will Arnett?

  Oh, no.

• 46:30Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Will Arnett?

  That, yeah.

• 46:31Sean Hayes?

  That was wild. I had two, I had two commercials, two on the Super Bowl in 1998.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  What were they?

• 46:39Sean Hayes?

  One was a Bud, um, Bud Light commercial.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  I did a Bud, I did a Bud Light commercial.

• 46:44Sean Hayes?

  Oh, really? When?

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine.

• 46:48Sean Hayes?

  You did Miller Lite and Bud Light?

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:50Will Arnett?

  Michelob.

• 46:51Sean Hayes?

  Look at you. No, Michelob, sorry.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  I did Michelob and Bud Light. I was all over the beers. I was king of beers.

• 46:56Sean Hayes?

  Wait, so David, so, so when did you, I mean, cause I was a, I'm a big sci-fi nerd person.

• 47:01Will Arnett?

  So, so X, yeah, so X-Files, how did, that's what you're getting to, right Shawnee?

• 47:04Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Will Arnett?

  How did that, how did X-Files?

• 47:06Sean Hayes?

  I know you're sick of talking about it, I'm sure, but.

• 47:08Will Arnett?

  And forgive us, forgive us, we're just fans.

• 47:10Jason Bateman?

  I didn't ask.

• 47:14Jason Bateman?

  But I'm ready to listen.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Um.

• 47:17Will Arnett?

  Jason read the books.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  It was just an audition and I remember at that point I was not wanting to do television. You know, at that point, there was a real divide between television actors and movie actors, which has been erased in the past few years or the past 20 years. So it was really, you know, I'm not a TV actor. That was my sense. Who was your North Star in film? Who did you want to be? Well, I mean, I didn't want to be Brando, but he was my North Star. Gotcha, right. Did you ever, did you ever write any of the X-Files? Yeah, I did. You did? I wrote and directed two or three of them, yeah. That's cool. One of them was a baseball one, Jason. Oh, yeah. I can't believe we haven't made this.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  I know.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  We'll be right back.

• 48:12Sean Hayes?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 48:54Sean Hayes?

  This episode is sponsored by US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings. Smart is sponsored by Smartly. Well, that's just smart, but it's not just a fun name. You earn rewards, access fee waivers, and get better savings rates from day one. That means less time overthinking your money and more time thinking about other things. And who doesn't need that? Sign up for US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings today at usbank.com/smartly. Member FDIC. Copyright 2026 US Bank.

• 49:30Sean Hayes?

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• 50:06Sean Hayes?

  And now, back to the show.

• 50:09Jason Bateman?

  So wait, so you get this gig and you sign the five-year or seven-year standard thing before you go in and you test. So you know that if you get this, you're stuck with something that you're not really kind of excited about. Then you get it. Was your...

• 50:27Will Arnett?

  Yeah, are you excited when you get it because of that?

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Well, you know, you're not excited to think it's gonna go forever, which is a blessing when it does, but you get competitive. You know, you're just like, if I'm gonna do it, I want it to win. I want it to go.

• 50:43Jason Bateman?

  You do the pilot, you want it to get picked up.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, every step of the way.

• 50:47Jason Bateman?

  Then it gets well received and you're like, well, all right.

• 50:49Will Arnett?

  So can I just, can I just stop for Tracy? Can I just say, so the testing process, you don't know, Jason just alluded to and David knows, we all know. You used to be, I don't know if it still is the way, but what would happen is you'd go in for a show, whether it's X-Files or Will and Grace or whatever it is, and you get the audition and you go through and then they get a call back and you'd read for producers. Then what they do is they sort of take, for any given role, they might have three or four people who they decide that they're gonna, as they call it, bring to the network. And that means that they're kind of, they're select pick, three or four people for each role. And before you go and do this final audition, usually like in a conference room or something, in an office building, the most uninspiring place you can imagine.

• 51:33Will Arnett?

  Before you do that, for a day or two before, your agents and the, and the show negotiate your contract, a five-year contract, and you sign it before you go in for the final audition.

• 51:45Jason Bateman?

  In the lobby.

• 51:46Will Arnett?

  In the lobby.

• 51:46Jason Bateman?

  Right before you walk in.

• 51:47Sean Hayes?

  So they got you.

• 51:47Will Arnett?

  So you're broke, and then your agent goes like, here's your contract, you, we've agreed you're gonna get $25,000 an episode for the next five years.

• 51:54Jason Bateman?

  It's a lottery ticket.

• 51:55Will Arnett?

  Yeah, and you're like, oh my god, I'm so broke, and I'm gonna get $25,000 an episode for the next five years, and you're doing the math, and you're like, and then I'm gonna buy it, I'm gonna buy a new car.

• 52:04Jason Bateman?

  And if you weren't nervous before, you're petrified now.

• 52:07Will Arnett?

  And you sign it, and then you go, once you sign it, they take the signed executed uh, uh, contract.

• 52:12Jason Bateman?

  So that you have no leverage if they give you the job.

• 52:14Will Arnett?

  You go in, and you then audition for all the execs at the network, and then you're waiting, and they decide whether or not you got the part. So, you, you, they have you so over the barrel, you never realize, you're never not over the barrel in that, in that, uh, process, and it's really uninspiring, and it's a very specific thing to get good at that, to be able to block that part of it out, to, to then go and deliver at the final moment. Uh, it's, you, you're kind of.

• 52:43Jason Bateman?

  Torture.

• 52:43Will Arnett?

  Yeah, you're fighting out of a hole, right?

• 52:46Sean Hayes?

  What, what if after that, David was like, it was an offer, but anyway.

• 52:48Jason Bateman?

  It wasn't, it wasn't an offer.

• 52:52Will Arnett?

  So, so, so David, so David, your process is, you're kind of, you're a little conflicted about doing a TV series, but you wanted to, and you, it's a great paycheck, so you go in, and you sign the contract, you do the test, now you, and then the, you do the pilot, right? And so then, now they've got the extra executed thing, and then the network, sorry again for Tracy, then they decide from all their pilots what shows are gonna make it on the air next year. So you're waiting for a month or two for that.

• 53:15Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Will Arnett?

  And then they go, great, your show is happening, you're in it, and we've got you for five years. And, and then what happens a lot is you go, oh my god, this is so great, I'm gonna make 20 or 25,000 dollars on that episode. And then two years in, if you're lucky enough that it's going, you're like. Hey, man, I deserve way more than 20.

• 53:33Will Arnett?

  Well, I gotta, I gotta get out of here. I gotta stay available for all the feature opportunities. I think are out there waiting. David, so you know that process, right? Like, so you're, you're, you're there and you're doing X-Files and you guys come out of the gate pretty hot. It's a, it's kind of a hit.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's a hit on Fox. And if you can remember that far back, Fox was really like not, not a real network at that point.

• 53:55Will Arnett?

  Yeah, it just started. This is like 93 when?

• 53:58Speaker 03

  93. They didn't have programming, you know, across the board all day, all day long, really. And, uh, you know, they had Married with Children and, uh, I can't remember, you know, they had maybe 90210.

• 54:10Will Arnett?

  Tracy Ullman.

• 54:11Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  But they're really the upstart network, so.

• 54:15Will Arnett?

  They didn't have a big drama, kind of like.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  No, not at all. And we didn't need to get like huge numbers to be a hit for Fox, which was nice because we, Fox wasn't even in all the homes.

• 54:25Will Arnett?

  Who was running Fox at the time when you guys were there? Do you remember?

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Who was running it?

• 54:28Will Arnett?

  Garth Ansell?

• 54:30Speaker 03

  Who? Was it Garth Ansell?

• 54:32Will Arnett?

  He was at NBC, I think, wasn't he? Yeah, he was, he was one of the starters of Fox.

• 54:35Sean Hayes?

  Yeah. I can't believe you remember that name, Jay.

• 54:38Will Arnett?

  What was it WB? He didn't want me for a gig and I, I had to re-audition. You ready for this? I, for my buddy Mike O'Malley's show, we did the pilot, I get the pilot, we do it, we shoot it. It gets picked up to series and then he didn't want me. And I had to go back. Sandy Gershaw. Two months later. It might have been Sandy. I had to go back two months later and re-audition for a part and do a scene in a conference room, a scene, holding up pages, that I had already filmed.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Terrible.

• 55:05Will Arnett?

  That existed on film to get my job.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  Terrible.

• 55:09Sean Hayes?

  That's crazy.

• 55:09Will Arnett?

  In a conference room in Burbank.

• 55:11Sean Hayes?

  That's crazy.

• 55:12Will Arnett?

  Wait, you don't need to see me do this in the room. It's.

• 55:14Sean Hayes?

  Do you remember what year that was, Will?

• 55:16Will Arnett?

  1999.

• 55:17Sean Hayes?

  That's when I first met you.

• 55:18Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Sean Hayes?

  I met you at the Upfronts.

• 55:19Will Arnett?

  Yeah, that year. That's right. Oh, the Upfronts.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Did you get it, Will?

• 55:23Will Arnett?

  I did, actually, yeah. Again.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  Well done.

• 55:25Will Arnett?

  I got it again.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  You imitated yourself and.

• 55:27Will Arnett?

  What a fucking victory. Do you think, I had, I think I counted, I think I had a thousand beers that night.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  That's not enough. That's not enough.

• 55:37Sean Hayes?

  Wait, David, were you a sci fi fan when you got it?

• 55:39Speaker 03

  No.

• 55:39Sean Hayes?

  Or not? And are you now? Not at all?

• 55:41Speaker 03

  No.

• 55:42Sean Hayes?

  Wow, how about that?

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Not really.

• 55:43Will Arnett?

  So you get X-Files, you go up to Vancouver, you guys start doing it. It's a hit for Fox, and then it really starts to... When's the moment you can feel that it's kind of pushed through to the general?

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Probably like the third year, just globally. It felt just huge, you know?

• 56:00Will Arnett?

  I mean, it was a global hit.

• 56:02Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, massive.

• 56:03Jason Bateman?

  How did you like relocating up into Vancouver for so long?

• 56:07Speaker 03

  Well, I loved it at first.

• 56:08Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Because I didn't really have any roots in Los Angeles. You know, I just, I had come here to try to get work.

• 56:16Jason Bateman?

  And you weren't going to... The blow up doll wasn't going to start crying. I mean, they can perform a lot of duties, but tears are not one.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  I'm not going to speak for her. She, you know.

• 56:30Will Arnett?

  Jesus Christ.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  But I will tell you...

• 56:33Sean Hayes?

  So I hear. This is what I hear.

• 56:36Will Arnett?

  Yeah, oh my god.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  So, you know, I don't know how you guys feel about Vancouver, but it's a beautiful part of the world.

• 56:42Sean Hayes?

  It's great. Never been.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  You've never been?

• 56:45Sean Hayes?

  I've never been. I want to go so bad.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  How is that possible?

• 56:47Sean Hayes?

  It's the greatest.

• 56:48Will Arnett?

  It's so beautiful.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  So, I loved it. And, yeah, I didn't mind being out of LA at all. Yeah. I just loved being up there. And in a way, we got to just focus on doing the work. There wasn't any kind of LA around us. There wasn't any kind of... Whatever heat that was happening, we were kind of cut off from in a really good way. And in many ways, it was my education as an actor, having to go to work every damn day for 14 hours. I mean, these were really long days. And I really taught myself.

• 57:21Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  How to act.

• 57:22Jason Bateman?

  How soon into the run of it and the success of it, did you start thinking, "All right, good here, ready to move on and maybe parlay some of this into..." You know, what did you have your eyes on? Was it still features?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that was really... You know, I had that kind of bias, you know, that was kind of baked in from a young age. You know, the TV shows that I watched when I was a kid, it was quantitatively different, the acting in it, you know, that it's not the way now.

• 57:56Jason Bateman?

  But you... So I just remember that you had very much a...

• 58:02Jason Bateman?

  A movie style of acting. In other words, you're very subtle.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  Well, that's how I would not get. That's why I didn't get. I would audition and not get any roles in television.

• 58:13Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  They would say, he's a movie star. And I was like, well, fuck, I can't. I don't have a pot to piss in either. So can you get?

• 58:20Jason Bateman?

  Good that you didn't change.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Can I please play puppet man? Can I get that part?

• 58:26Sean Hayes?

  David, I want to ask you about like time management because you're a musician. You're you literally write novels, which is amazing. You act, you do some other stuff. I'm sure you haven't mentioned. How do you?

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Do some other stuff.

• 58:38Sean Hayes?

  How do you manage all of that on a daily basis or weekly or monthly, whatever? Do you pick a priority that you focus on? Or do you splice it?

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Whatever's like in front of me is what I'll do. Songwriting can happen at any time. Pick up a guitar. But with writing a novel, everything has to stop. And I have to work on that for a few months. I write really fast and but it's an intense experience of like eight hour days doing that. And then, of course, I can't write when I'm acting. I can't write when I'm directing. So that.

• 59:11Sean Hayes?

  Do you have a goal in your mind that is louder than all the other goals? And that then informs how you allocate your time?

• 59:22Speaker 03

  That's probably the problem that I have is I don't really have a goal except to satisfy some kind of itch or.

• 59:29Sean Hayes?

  And that's a daily itch, not a weekly or a monthly or?

• 59:33Speaker 03

  No, it's a lifelong kind of a thing. It's just, for instance, like I want to make a series out of one of the novels that I've written. And that's really my greatest ambition at this point. But there's also a movie I'm shooting in February that I wrote, but I'm not directing. I'm just acting and so.

• 59:50Jason Bateman?

  You've got a new series airing now. I think we're in November.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:53Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Sean Hayes?

  Oh, really?

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Hey, thanks for not having me on the live show.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Dude, that's for movie stars, bro. I'm pretty good on my feet. Yeah, Malice. It's Amazon. Comes out, I'm not sure, November 3rd or something like that. What's it called again? Malice. Malice.

• 1:00:12Will Arnett?

  Yeah, it's coming in November on Amazon. And by the way, David, we'll get you a seat on one of the, we have these new stage seats.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I heard. I was listening.

• 1:00:22Will Arnett?

  You know, I've always wondered this. We've had people on who have been part of something that's sort of really struck a chord culturally, the pieces, as Sean would say, IP, but part of, X-Files, obviously, over a number of years, you know, has this intense following and had a, and I was one of the followers. I used to watch it religiously back in the 90s. When I saw the film, I saw the first film. I didn't see the second film. The first film was a big hit. Do you, is there that thing when you run into people who are big fans of it? Do you ever feel a responsibility, weirdly, I'm just, like a responsibility as the sort of the, as the caretaker of that thing of X-Files, is, does that,

• 1:01:05Will Arnett?

  I don't want to say there's a burden, but like, you're the guy, you're the front-facing face person of the X-Files.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Do you feel that, yeah? Well, of course, there was a time when I wanted to leave it behind, you know, and reinvent myself. But then, over the years, you begin to respect the kind of power of the show and the size of the show. And the meaning, the meaning that it has for people. You know, at first, when you're younger, you think, oh, it's not because of me, but it's personal. And then you realize it's not personal. It's just that this thing has a place in people's lives. And I represent that to them. And I'm an asshole if I don't respect that. I say that all the time. David's an asshole?

• 1:01:54Will Arnett?

  No, I do say it a lot.

• 1:01:55Sean Hayes?

  I know, I do say that all the time. I said it before on here where you become famous for playing a certain role or in a movie or whatever it is, and then you spend several years trying to distance yourself that because you want to be able to play all these things. And in doing so, you alienate the fans that made you, kind of, because they are in love with you because of the thing that you just said, that you made them feel. And you're doing a disservice, and I always say that, I'm an asshole if I don't embrace the character Jack from Will and Grace and what it did for so many people.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, what character is that?

• 1:02:30Sean Hayes?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:02:32Jason Bateman?

  And you're also depriving yourself the treat that you deserve, which is like, how lucky, how rare it is to be a part of something that holds a spot for people.

• 1:02:44Will Arnett?

  Yeah, it is rare, and you get old enough to appreciate that, you know, that you got to do something that was great, that did strike a chord with people.

• 1:02:52Sean Hayes?

  And when you're young, you don't think like that. It takes a few years to go, oh, I need to appreciate that more, you know?

• 1:02:59Will Arnett?

  No, it's funny, I read somebody, I made the mistake, David, of reading a comment a while ago, somebody saying like, he thinks that he doesn't, that he should have had more of a thing or whatever about me. And I was like, no, motherfucker, I'm so grateful for any time that I was able to do anything that even anybody liked for a moment. What a joke.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, yeah. And I'm a guy, I don't even have my high school diploma, like, the fact that I'm still like a student.

• 1:03:25Will Arnett?

  Stop bragging. The world doesn't owe me, the world doesn't owe me a living. We're so lucky that we've been able to do this at all. It's so not the way I think about it.

• 1:03:34Jason Bateman?

  Now, I'd like to ask a question that Sean's too shy to ask. Did you ever learn anything doing The X-Files that gives you any sort of confidence that we are not alone?

• 1:03:43Will Arnett?

  And Sean promises not to tell anybody if you could just tell us.

• 1:03:46Jason Bateman?

  It's just us four talking.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  I never learned anything, no, but I have the same kind of sense as when I went into it, which is... It seems to me that the impossibility would be that we are the only sentient life.

• 1:04:02Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  I mean, there's just too many galaxies, too many planets, too many Goldilocks planets.

• 1:04:06Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  So, the odds to me are slanted way in favor of the existence of extraterrestrials. Whether or not, you know, we haven't, we haven't advanced technologically enough to reach out to them.

• 1:04:19Jason Bateman?

  Uh huh, yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  And they-

• 1:04:21Jason Bateman?

  And they might be all around us and we just don't have the technology to see it.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:04:24Will Arnett?

  Well, they don't want us to, they're, they're, I always think, look at, you know, when you see all these things, these congressional hearings and stuff about pilots who run into these shapes or things that are moving in ways that we can't understand. I always think, I always think, oh, we're so dumb. We think that they wanna, that we need to connect. And they're like, no, no, no, you guys, you guys-

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  We're good, we're good.

• 1:04:42Will Arnett?

  Yeah, we're good.

• 1:04:42Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Will Arnett?

  We're watching you. We're just watching you guys-

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  We don't wanna have anything to do with you.

• 1:04:47Will Arnett?

  Tripping over yourselves like a bunch of ding-dongs.

• 1:04:50Jason Bateman?

  Didn't, didn't we have, we had a guy on once that had, and, and, I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something that was really sort of interesting, that makes a lot of sense to me, that, that perhaps they are all around us in a way that we can't see, just like our cellphone service or radio waves, you know, from like television with rabidaries-

• 1:05:12Will Arnett?

  It's right here.

• 1:05:12Jason Bateman?

  They live in the space between the space. It's just flying all around. You don't see any of that, that, of the ones and zeros or whatever the hell it is that fly around, that make our phones. They, they could be all in that stuff. Yeah, they, they live in the space between the space. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  The dark matter.

• 1:05:26Will Arnett?

  The dark matter.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  I used to say this thing with, are you aware of like the phenomenon of like a ship of fools? Do you remember that from the Middle Ages where?

• 1:05:35Jason Bateman?

  That was a great Robert Plant song, is that?

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Is it?

• 1:05:38Jason Bateman?

  It's a razor song.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  It could be. But, the idea was that they would take their deviants and criminals, their incorrigible criminals, and they'd put them on a ship, you know, because they didn't have space for them. They just put them on a ship out to sea.

• 1:05:51Jason Bateman?

  Floating Australia.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  And sometimes, well, sometimes, you know, you'd encounter a ship of fools and it wasn't a fun thing, right?

• 1:06:00Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Well, they weren't armed, they shouldn't be armed.

• 1:06:02Will Arnett?

  No, no, they make sure they were.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  But my theory about, because, because so much of alien abduction testimony has to do with being- Probed anally and having their teeth drilled.

• 1:06:15Jason Bateman?

  Sure.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  My theory was that alien civilizations were putting their deviants and dentists on a ship.

• 1:06:24Will Arnett?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Okay, very good. And sending it out into the galaxy and somehow they've come in.

• 1:06:29Will Arnett?

  Good title for a one hour. We can cut this, we can cut this, but why, why are aliens so obsessed with anal? Okay, so.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  Why would you want to cut that?

• 1:06:37Jason Bateman?

  You want to, you want to, if it, don't want to get any comments from an alien?

• 1:06:40Will Arnett?

  David, what do you do, so if you're not, you're not reading and you're not writing and you're not writing music and writing screenplays and doing all this stuff? What is, this is sort of the Sean question that, what are you doing and is there anything you do in your downtime that you're like, what's your guilty pleasure?

• 1:06:56Jason Bateman?

  We'd be surprised to learn.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  What do you do in the space between the space?

• 1:06:59Jason Bateman?

  Is it gardening?

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 1:07:00Will Arnett?

  Anything dumb that you do, you go like, oh man, I'd be embarrassed if people knew I did this stupid thing.

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  I don't really, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm so bad with hobbies, I really should have a hobby.

• 1:07:11Jason Bateman?

  Not one.

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  It's really a problem. Well, you have, you do 25,000 things. It's really a problem.

• 1:07:16Will Arnett?

  Are you playing basketball, you playing golf, or you cross-country skiing, or what do you?

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  I wish I was playing basketball. Um, yeah, no, now I feel bad. I do need a hobby.

• 1:07:25Will Arnett?

  Oh shit.

• 1:07:25Jason Bateman?

  And you're, and when, when people like me, when dummies like me are watching television, you're, you're reading, so you're not watching any like?

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  No, no, I watch, I watch TV. I'm watching Black Rabbit, come on.

• 1:07:36Jason Bateman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:37Will Arnett?

  Black Rabbit, Black Rabbit airing now on Netflix starring Jason and Jude Law. Production from Aggregate Films brings you Black Rabbit, two brothers.

• 1:07:45Jason Bateman?

  So it's not like, you're not watching Below Deck or anything like that?

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  No, but I do watch, I watch Love Island.

• 1:07:52Jason Bateman?

  Sure.

• 1:07:53Will Arnett?

  Oh, you do?

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  But then I realize, 45 hours.

• 1:07:56Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not like a 15-hour season.

• 1:08:01Jason Bateman?

  No.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  They make, somehow they make 45 fucking hours out of that nonsense.

• 1:08:06Will Arnett?

  Uh, but so you watch baseball, is there another, is that your number one sport to watch?

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  Basketball is probably not my, my sport. I hear the Lakers are gonna be good this year. It could be.

• 1:08:16Will Arnett?

  Okay.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  Who's your team? Knicks? Oh, the Knicks, yeah. Now, are you, you're not in New York now, where do you live? I live in, I live in LA. Okay. Why the Knicks? Because I grew up in New York and it's just.

• 1:08:29Will Arnett?

  Were you not awake when we started the podcast?

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  Well, there was, there was, there was some doll fucking and stuff like that there. That just puts you in kind of a state that is neither here nor there. That was just like an hourly thing that you were doing in New York.

• 1:08:41Will Arnett?

  That blow up doll really stayed with you, huh?

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  How are we gonna cut this show? This is terrible. I'm just glad he's not live. What if the next time we watch Jason on TV at the Dodgers game, he's sitting next to a blow up doll?

• 1:08:54Will Arnett?

  He was the other day.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  With the X-Files t-shirt.

• 1:08:58Sean Hayes?

  Wait, David, I have an idea for you.

• 1:09:00Will Arnett?

  Okay.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 1:09:01Sean Hayes?

  So because you write novels and you're not a sci-fi thing, you want to sell a lot of copies of something? Do like, you know, Bucky fucking Dent was baseball adjacent. Do whatever you do brilliantly and just make a little sci-fi adjacent thing, just a little bit, right?

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  Well, well, this is, well, that episode of, of the X-Files that I wrote and directed that I want Jason to watch because it's called The Unnatural and it's a baseball.

• 1:09:25Will Arnett?

  Oh, I like that.

• 1:09:25Sean Hayes?

  Oh, all right.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  So you'll have to, I, I did that.

• 1:09:29Sean Hayes?

  Wilford Brimley do a cameo in that at all?

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  No, but. Wilford Brimley. Emmett Walsh.

• 1:09:36Will Arnett?

  Wow.

• 1:09:36Sean Hayes?

  Wow.

• 1:09:37Will Arnett?

  That's pretty, that's, that's Wilford Brimley adjacent.

• 1:09:41Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Will Arnett?

  I love Emmett Walsh, by the way, just as a quick aside.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was fantastic and he.

• 1:09:48Sean Hayes?

  Did he give you a $2 bill?

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  He didn't.

• 1:09:50Sean Hayes?

  No, he does that, he does that with a lot of, or did. I had one and then.

• 1:09:55Will Arnett?

  Then we just made David feel bad again.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  This is, this is before $2 bills were being made. It's not hard to make me feel bad, but he replaced an actor who got ill. So he was a, he was a, he had short notice and there was a lot of dialogue. His, his character was really the exposition man in this episode. And at one point he turned to me, because I only think he had a couple of days with the script. He got, you know, and he said, this isn't writing, it's typing.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  I was like, well, I did the typing, so. And at one point he, he fucked up. It was so great. Instead of calling me Agent Mulder, he called me Agent MacGyver. And I kept it in. There you go.

• 1:10:41Will Arnett?

  Did you really?

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was too good.

• 1:10:44Will Arnett?

  That's great. That guy was so good. I just remember, uh, what was the one he did with Michael Keaton? No, uh, you know, the great, uh, Cleaning Sober?

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Will Arnett?

  And he was also in Fletch.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Yes, I was.

• 1:10:56Will Arnett?

  He was in Fletch. He was the doctor in Fletch.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's fantastic.

• 1:10:59Will Arnett?

  Yeah, he was a fantastic guy. Um, David, you're fantastic. Yeah, fantastic, David. We've gone over. We rarely go over. We've gone over with you because we, we love talking to you. So, uh, Malice is out, Amazon Prime. We would be remiss if we didn't mention that again. Mm-hmm. And, uh, we, you've got a ton of-

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  Can I plug, uh, Black Rabbit again? Should I do that?

• 1:11:20Will Arnett?

  Please. Yeah. What service is that on? Where do we find that? Very, very nice of you to share some of your time with us, sir. David, I'm so glad we did this. I'm so glad. Thank you for coming on.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  You know, I love your show and, uh, thank you. Thanks for having me. You guys are great.

• 1:11:36Will Arnett?

  Thank you for coming on. Ah, actor, writer, screenwriter, novelist, academic, musician. Smarty pants. An all-around great guy. David Duchovny, thank you so much, David, for your time.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:11:47Will Arnett?

  We've been enjoying having you.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:11:48Will Arnett?

  Thank you, David.

• 1:11:49Jason Bateman?

  Thanks, David.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  All right, bye.

• 1:11:53Jason Bateman?

  Double D. Double D comes-

• 1:11:55Will Arnett?

  Double D.

• 1:11:56Jason Bateman?

  To the Smartless, um, studio, I guess is what this is.

• 1:12:01Will Arnett?

  Oh, yeah. Welcome to the Smartless studio.

• 1:12:03Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Will Arnett?

  Um, he's a- A shot in front of a live studio audience.

• 1:12:08Will Arnett?

  He's real slick and cool. He's just, well, he's confident because he's smart. When you're smart, you're confident. He's very confident. Yeah. I didn't know half that stuff. That's amazing.

• 1:12:17Jason Bateman?

  Because you're not smart. You're not smart.

• 1:12:20Will Arnett?

  That's true. I mean, it is true. I mean, think about it. He, he graduated like head of his class in high school and, you know, he's, and then he goes to, he goes to Princeton, then he goes to Yale, and he gets a master's in English literature, and then he starts to work on his PhD, and while he's working on his PhD, he's like-

• 1:12:34Jason Bateman?

  Gets a Michelob spot.

• 1:12:35Will Arnett?

  Yeah, I wanna go there. I wanna go start doing some acting lessons, just to sort of see how that is. Yeah, I mean-

• 1:12:40Jason Bateman?

  But what, could you imagine being his parents? You're like, oh, boy, baby, we hit the lotto. Look at this kid. We can't wait to brag about this with our friends, blah, blah, blah. And then they go see his first job, he's become an actor. And he's fucking this goddamn inflatable.

• 1:12:55Will Arnett?

  Well, I mean, there's nothing more disappointing than just going, I want to be an actor. And you're like, oh, Christ.

• 1:12:59Jason Bateman?

  All right, well, maybe he's good. Hopefully he's good. And then they go see his banging this doll.

• 1:13:03Will Arnett?

  I know.

• 1:13:04Jason Bateman?

  No. But he landed on his feet.

• 1:13:07Sean Hayes?

  He did.

• 1:13:08Jason Bateman?

  You know?

• 1:13:09Will Arnett?

  Boy, did he ever. He landed on his feet a few times. Yeah, he's such a, we didn't even get into Californication. We just, he's just done so much. God dang it.

• 1:13:16Jason Bateman?

  He did some movies, too.

• 1:13:18Will Arnett?

  He did a bunch of movies and he's just.

• 1:13:21Jason Bateman?

  He's got this new show, new show called Malice.

• 1:13:23Will Arnett?

  Malice.

• 1:13:24Jason Bateman?

  What do you think it's about?

• 1:13:28Will Arnett?

  What do I think?

• 1:13:29Jason Bateman?

  What do you think Malice is about? Is it about, is about, is about a guy's girlfriend who, and her name is Alice? And it's like, it's, it's M apostrophe Alice?

• 1:13:43Will Arnett?

  Oh, oh, M Alice?

• 1:13:44Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. No, this is Malice.

• 1:13:48Will Arnett?

  This is my Alice.

• 1:13:49Jason Bateman?

  This is my Alice. Yeah, maybe it's about that.

• 1:13:53Sean Hayes?

  It could be.

• 1:13:54Jason Bateman?

  Just to throw everybody off.

• 1:13:56Sean Hayes?

  Right away to, yeah.

• 1:13:59Will Arnett?

  Well, Bennett suggested, this is, I'm going, I'm calling, I mean, Jason, you said he landed on his feet. Maybe, maybe on his bipartite. Sessimoids.

• 1:14:11Jason Bateman?

  Sessimoids, which is, um.

• 1:14:14Sean Hayes?

  What is it?

• 1:14:15Jason Bateman?

  The symptoms and treatment options are, um, it's from the Melbourne podiatrist. No.

• 1:14:21Will Arnett?

  You're not gonna take bipartite?

• 1:14:24Jason Bateman?

  No.

• 1:14:25Will Arnett?

  No, okay, all right.

• 1:14:26Sean Hayes?

  Have you, have you, by the way, have you seen the new, have you seen the new show?

• 1:14:32Jason Bateman?

  By chance? By?

• 1:14:35Will Arnett?

  No, we're not taking that. How are you doing that? How are you overruling with that, with just like a?

• 1:14:41Jason Bateman?

  I tried to tee you guys up with, you know, what do you think Malice is about? I thought maybe one of you ding dongs had a body already.

• 1:14:46Will Arnett?

  Well, I thought you were saying, is it a biopic?

• 1:14:50Jason Bateman?

  About a guy's girlfriend named Alice.

• 1:14:59Sean Hayes?

  Whose whistle was that?

• 1:15:01Will Arnett?

  Who did the whistle?

• 1:15:02Sean Hayes?

  That's great.

• 1:15:03Will Arnett?

  That's really good. Oh, we gotta start adding the whistle.

• 1:15:06Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 04

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• 1:16:20Speaker 04

  or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NUR-TAC or visit Nurtac.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

• 1:16:36Speaker 05

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