Latest / Half the Picture / Josh Radnor talks How I Met Your Mother, making peace with Ted Mosby & the pressures of fame

Transcript

Josh Radnor talks How I Met Your Mother, making peace with Ted Mosby & the pressures of fame · Half the Picture

• 0:00
  Well, I will say every time I talk about this, it turns into like a news clip.
• 0:04
  I think the finale's aging well.
• 0:06
  Do you like Ted?
• 0:07
  Did you like that character?
• 0:09
  I think of him as like my younger, slightly annoying brother.
• 0:12
  I love him and I also go, why would you do that?
• 0:15
  Look, she's really hot, okay?
• 0:17
  What is your relationship now like with the rest of the cast?
• 0:19
  Are you guys still as close as you were?
• 0:21
  No.
• 0:22
  No?
• 0:23
  Not even a little bit.
• 0:25
  It was my first big thing.
• 0:27
  We were shooting nine days out of a month.
• 0:29
  Mondays we would do a table read, Tuesdays we would rehearse for about three or four hours.
• 0:34
  As far as like TV shooting schedules go, it was pretty cushy.
• 0:38
  It's my first time doing a play in London, yeah.
• 0:41
  You rehearse a play.
• 0:42
  And then you open, and then you're like, oh my God, I have to keep doing this?
• 0:47
  It's like a restaurant.
• 0:48
  You have to keep making the meal every night.
• 0:51
  It was destabilizing to my sense of self to lose anonymity, to be so visible, to have people both love you and not like you, frankly.
• 0:59
  I didn't want to be overly associated with it because I thought it was the end of my acting life.
• 1:03
  Any hint of a single guy in the big city looking for love, I was like, no, thank you.
• 1:07
  And I was offered those roles, but I was like, I can't do them.
• 1:10
  I had more tools in my toolbox.
• 1:13
  I think we could do something amazing together.
• 1:16
  If those bloopers come up, I will watch them because I start laughing.
• 1:20
  Now!
• 1:23
  I remember those days.
• 1:24
  You know, I remember how hard it was to keep it together.
• 1:27
  I'm sorry.
• 1:31
  we have a small favour to ask all of you.
• 1:33
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• 1:37
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• 1:43
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• 1:46
  Thank you so much.
• 1:48
  Did you see the Oasis tour, the recent one?
• 1:50
  I didn't catch it.
• 1:51
  Yeah, I saw it.
• 1:52
  Did you go and see them live?
• 1:53
  Yeah, I saw it in New Jersey.
• 1:56
  Oh, wow.
• 1:58
  Yeah, I mean, I'm not like an Oasis head.
• 2:01
  Like there was one guy in front of us who we almost watched as much as we watched the stage because he was so...
• 2:07
  It was really cool because he didn't bring his phone out once.
• 2:10
  Just every lyric, just singing, just so in the pocket.
• 2:15
  I mean, it's funny like...
• 2:18
  Liam is such like the magnetic star and Noel is clearly the brains of the operation.
• 2:24
  Like, like Liam can't write a song, but he can sell a song.
• 2:28
  Yeah.
• 2:28
  And Noel is like, not that charismatic, but can write these bangers for the, for the stadiums.
• 2:35
  I like some of his songs a lot, but.
• 2:38
  Liam's just a weirdo.
• 2:40
  Like, he's a total weirdo.
• 2:42
  He's a character, yeah.
• 2:43
  Just, like, shaking that thing.
• 2:46
  He just looks like he's angry at the audience the whole time.
• 2:48
  And it's wildly captivating.
• 2:50
  Yeah, people love it, don't they?
• 2:52
  Yeah.
• 2:52
  Yeah.
• 2:53
  Are Oasis as big?
• 2:54
  I mean, they're pretty global, aren't they?
• 2:56
  But in this country, they are, like, just household names.
• 2:58
  They're in the DNA.
• 2:59
  In America, are they as popular as people love them?
• 3:01
  I think they are now in a weird way.
• 3:02
  Like, I think they...
• 3:04
  I think they got lumped in with a lot of 90s bands, but they have more staying power than a lot of those bands did.
• 3:10
  Like, I think young people now discovered them.
• 3:13
  It wasn't just, like, older people in that audience.
• 3:17
  Like, there were a lot of young people there.
• 3:19
  Were you on the Oasis train early?
• 3:21
  Not really.
• 3:22
  I just remember, like, in the 90s, like, there were certain tunes that were inescapable.
• 3:26
  But I never was, like...
• 3:29
  Ben Lee, who I made a lot of music with, an Aussie musician, he was really influenced, I think, by Oasis.
• 3:35
  So, yeah.
• 3:37
  Well, I was listening back to some of the music you guys made together on, you know, Ranner and Lee.
• 3:41
  Yeah.
• 3:42
  And it holds up, you know, it's really, really good stuff.
• 3:44
  Oh, thanks, man.
• 3:44
  Yeah, I'm proud of that stuff.
• 3:45
  Yeah, you feel like you're really, you've had your fingers in so many different pies in terms of like, you know, obviously acting, but then music and directing.
• 3:52
  Like you've jumped around so much and you've made so much.
• 3:56
  Especially, I think, the last, I'd say about 15, 16 years.
• 4:00
  Yeah.
• 4:00
  You've done a lot of that experimentation.
• 4:01
  Yeah.
• 4:02
  Lots of different mediums.
• 4:03
  Yeah.
• 4:04
  What is it kind of about, what fuels you to sort of jump around and like experiment and try things out?
• 4:09
  Well, I think that...
• 4:12
  You know, I was so all about acting.
• 4:14
  Like I was just like, I'm going to be an actor and I'm going to do this thing.
• 4:18
  And then I started having success in it and it almost like weirdly like didn't feel like enough.
• 4:23
  I don't mean enough in terms of like acclaim or visibility.
• 4:28
  I mean literally like I had more tools in my toolbox that I wanted to.
• 4:32
  I'd always been a writer.
• 4:33
  I was in an improv group in college.
• 4:36
  We did half improv, half sketch.
• 4:37
  And I wrote – me and my friend Kip wrote like most of those sketches.
• 4:40
  So I kind of learned how to be a writer by writing –
• 4:43
  like three to five page comedy sketches where you had to have a full story, a full story arc, you know?
• 4:50
  And I just, I don't know.
• 4:52
  I, I, I, there are days when I don't want to be looked at.
• 4:56
  I was just talking to my friend about this.
• 4:57
  Like, you know,
• 4:58
  To be an actor, you really have to...
• 4:59
  I'm in a phase because I'm doing a play where I'm like, look at me.
• 5:02
  I can withstand your gaze.
• 5:05
  But then there are other days where I'm like, yeah.
• 5:07
  Like, I want to be creative, but I want to be private.
• 5:09
  I want to be either behind the camera or behind the keyboard or with a guitar.
• 5:14
  I really like... And I get a little restless.
• 5:16
  Like, if I'm doing one thing too long, I kind of want to switch into a different lane.
• 5:22
  Pam Fryman, who directed all the...
• 5:24
  episodes almost all the episodes of how i met your mother still a dear friend she pulled me aside like early in the first season maybe like fifth or sixth episode maybe even earlier and i don't know that she said this to every cast member i suspect she didn't but she said you're not going to get everything you want from this show creatively like you're going to have to do other stuff so um i i think i just always had it in my head that
• 5:48
  I can't rely on acting, especially because, you know, it's feast or famine a little bit, like you're working, then you're not working.
• 5:55
  And I, I always made enough money to not have a day job, which was like very fortunate.
• 6:01
  You know, I got out of school and I, I would just make enough to like pay rent and have a little, little cash in my pocket.
• 6:07
  And until I started making money, money, I mean, not money, money, but enough to like call it a career.
• 6:14
  There was the downside of that was I wouldn't work for three or four months.
• 6:18
  So I started writing short stories in my spare time when I was like waiting for the next thing.
• 6:23
  And I just developed this daily writing habit, which has served me pretty well.
• 6:26
  And would you say that's where the movies like Liberal Arts kind of came out of those stories that you were writing?
• 6:32
  I was writing my first film, Happy Thank You More, Please.
• 6:34
  I wrote it the first two seasons of How I Met Your Mother, then spent about two years looking for money to get the movie made.
• 6:40
  And I made it between the fourth and fifth season, I think.
• 6:44
  And then the second movie, the producers of that, my agent at the time represented Elizabeth Olsen, who had just done Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene.
• 6:56
  and one other movie.
• 6:57
  And this one other movie was produced by a production company that really liked Happy Thank You More Please and really liked Lizzie.
• 7:04
  So I attached Lizzie and they like loved the combo.
• 7:07
  So the day I think Happy Thank You More Please came out in theaters was the day I got financing for liberal arts.
• 7:14
  So that movie came out pretty quickly after.
• 7:18
  And I haven't made a movie since.
• 7:19
  So like,
• 7:21
  things are crazy like you know what i mean like you i made two movies in quick succession and then i've had a hard time putting other movies together but i'm about to start doing that again oh great yeah you're number one in the pipeline have you written i have um i'm attached to direct something i actually didn't write a script that i really adore i can't say much about it but hopefully that'll happen next year it looks like it's going to happen and then i have a bunch of other stuff that's like close ish nice yeah nice are you excited by the idea of directing something that you haven't written yeah
• 7:49
  Yeah, really excited because I think that I can – you know, your ego is just a touch more out of it.
• 7:55
  You know, not that I'm like – like if it's not good, it's like I didn't write this.
• 8:01
  But I think in some ways this guy, this writer who I adore –
• 8:06
  After our first meeting, he told me, he said, I told my wife, I think this guy understands this script better than I do.
• 8:12
  You know, and he wrote it.
• 8:13
  Because I think sometimes when you're coming at things, I don't know if friends hand you drafts of things.
• 8:18
  Sometimes you have insight that they can't see or they're doing something that you point out.
• 8:22
  And they're like, I didn't even know I was doing that.
• 8:24
  And I like being a fresh set of eyes on this thing.
• 8:28
  And I think it's like a really wild – it's a pretty broad comedy that's also like pretty touching, heartbreaking.
• 8:36
  So I'm excited about it.
• 8:37
  Nice.
• 8:38
  Yeah, you can be a bit more objective because maybe the writer is a bit too close to it because they've written it.
• 8:42
  Sometimes, yeah.
• 8:42
  Yeah.
• 8:43
  I always wonder – you know, sometimes I have certain scripts where I think –
• 8:48
  It would be the hardest thing in the world to hand this to someone, but it could also be revelatory.
• 8:52
  You know, like, you know, you think about like Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze.
• 8:57
  Like, what would those movies have looked like if Charlie Kaufman had directed them and not Spike Jonze?
• 9:01
  Like, there was clearly for me, there was something that Spike Jonze was doing to those movies that was like fascinating.
• 9:07
  Yeah.
• 9:08
  Same with Michel Gondry, I think, with Eternal Sunshine.
• 9:10
  Exactly, yeah.
• 9:11
  It's like that melding of those two visions is really special.
• 9:15
  Yeah.
• 9:16
  When you get a great director and a great writer, they can really bring the best out of each other.
• 9:20
  But then there's other things where I write things that the tone is so specific and if someone misses it.
• 9:25
  Like I think that one thing I'm good at as a director, I think I'm very good at casting.
• 9:29
  Yeah.
• 9:30
  And I think I'm very good at keeping everyone in the same movie.
• 9:33
  And sometimes when people lose, if they don't have a real intuitive feel for the, the tone of it, it can get really off course.
• 9:42
  And that would be heartbreaking to watch, you know?
• 9:45
  Yeah.
• 9:45
  You've got to be the keeper of the flames.
• 9:46
  Yeah.
• 9:47
  Yeah.
• 9:47
  Yeah.
• 9:47
  Yeah.
• 9:47
  Yeah.
• 9:48
  Yeah.
• 9:48
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• 9:54
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• 10:04
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• 10:07
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• 10:09
  You were putting a film together whilst you were in between seasons of How I Met Your Mother.
• 10:13
  Is that right?
• 10:14
  In 20, like around 2010, do you say?
• 10:17
  Yeah, I mean, I was working on them during, you know, we were shooting.
• 10:22
  But our schedule was, you know, we would have three weeks on, one week off.
• 10:26
  So I would have one week a month where I wasn't working.
• 10:30
  and then we only shot three days of those weeks, so we were shooting nine days out of a month.
• 10:35
  Mondays we would do a table read.
• 10:37
  Tuesdays we would rehearse for about three or four hours and go home.
• 10:40
  So as far as, like, TV shooting schedules go, it was pretty cushy.
• 10:45
  Nice.
• 10:45
  Yeah.
• 10:46
  Because normally that kind of multicam sitcom, you know, you do an episode in, like, five days or something.
• 10:49
  Yeah, yeah, but then you have the live taping, which we never did because it was a hybrid episode.
• 10:53
  kind of uh single cam multi-cam but we still had like the multi-cam shooting schedule and it allowed for a lot of time for outside projects you know great yeah great i mean but i love i love to dive into how i met your mother sure a little bit just because you know that would that was the first thing i saw you in and uh and it's obviously such a great show and uh you know still has so many fans but touching on the i guess the play that you're what you're doing at the moment the hit machine which i saw last night i mentioned before we started but like you know i really enjoyed it
• 11:21
  And, I mean, that show is kind of a, you know, I guess to give people an idea of it, it's a show about like familial trauma and brotherhood and grief and music.
• 11:32
  Of course, you play this character, Wes, this kind of music producer exec who's like brilliant at what he does, but he's also maybe he's lost a bit of the soul of why he does it.
• 11:42
  I mean, so you've been doing that show, I want to say, for like the last five weeks?
• 11:46
  About, yeah.
• 11:46
  Yeah.
• 11:46
  yeah and you've got another week to go we have two more weeks essentially two more weeks less than that yeah yeah how does it feel now to be quite close to getting to the wrap-up point
• 11:55
  Uh, it feels good.
• 11:56
  I mean, it's funny that I was telling my wife that you rehearse a play and then you preview the play and then you open the play and there's all this kind of momentum and energy going into that.
• 12:07
  And then you open and then you're like, oh my God, I have to keep doing this like every night.
• 12:11
  Like, like it's, um, a friend described to me, he said, it's not a film where you lock it and move on and the film exists.
• 12:17
  It's like a restaurant.
• 12:19
  You have to keep making the meal every night, you know?
• 12:21
  Yeah.
• 12:21
  So, um, yeah.
• 12:23
  But the upshot of that, I think, is that you get to keep refining and tinkering and discovering things.
• 12:30
  Like, we're still discovering and playing around and learning new things.
• 12:35
  Noah discovered like a huge laugh that we did not have opening night.
• 12:40
  He found it in week two, you know?
• 12:44
  So, so it's fun, you know, I'll be ready for it to be over, but I'm not, I don't think I'll be sick of it.
• 12:49
  You know, I'm still enjoying it.
• 12:51
  Yeah.
• 12:51
  And is this your first time working in London?
• 12:54
  Uh, it's my first time doing a play in London.
• 12:55
  Yeah.
• 12:56
  I came here for Sundance London when liberal arts, um, premiered at Sundance in 2012.
• 13:02
  They had the, I don't know if they still do it.
• 13:04
  Sundance London.
• 13:05
  They still do it.
• 13:06
  Yeah.
• 13:06
  Yeah.
• 13:06
  Yeah.
• 13:06
  The little, the festival in the city.
• 13:08
  Yeah.
• 13:08
  Yeah.
• 13:08
  Yeah.
• 13:09
  So it was at the O2, I think when we were there, but, um,
• 13:12
  that was the first year they had done it and they invited liberal arts.
• 13:16
  So I spent a week or two here.
• 13:19
  Um, it's where I met Glenn Hansard actually, who, who just passed.
• 13:22
  Oh.
• 13:23
  Um, and I posted a video about that on my Instagram, but, um, it was a great, it was a great time here, but I, this is the first play I've done.
• 13:31
  Yeah.
• 13:31
  Yeah.
• 13:31
  And how are you finding like living in the city?
• 13:33
  I'm really enjoying it.
• 13:35
  Uh, you know, I have a nine month old baby and,
• 13:37
  And, um, I was nervous to, uh, you know, I didn't, I didn't know my wife was actually surprisingly amenable to coming here and they helped us make it easy for us.
• 13:49
  And, um, so we've just had a great time.
• 13:53
  I mean, I think it was actually a great summer to be out of New York.
• 13:56
  New York was like, had a hard summer with the air from the fires and, um,
• 14:00
  lettuce was poisoned all summer and like it was just like a hard time to be in new york so we were like we picked a good summer to leave um but we're having a terrific time and our baby's thriving and um you know you if you're here somewhere six or seven weeks you kind of figure out your spots and where the where it's good to bring the kid for an early breakfast and yeah we're having a nice time
• 14:23
  Yeah.
• 14:23
  Do you have a favorite thing about London that you've found or happened upon?
• 14:29
  You know, I don't drink alcohol anymore, but I really love pub culture.
• 14:32
  Like, I love just the people outside with their pints.
• 14:35
  Like, there's something really sweet and kind of...
• 14:40
  I don't know.
• 14:40
  It feels like a city that is not at odds with itself, if that makes sense.
• 14:46
  It feels like London has figured out how to be London.
• 14:50
  You know what I mean?
• 14:51
  Some cities, I think, have an identity crisis.
• 14:53
  They're like, this city doesn't know what it is.
• 14:55
  I feel like London knows what it is.
• 14:57
  And I like that it's, you know, the theater culture is great, the arts culture...
• 15:03
  very good shopping here you know i'm yeah i'm just enjoying um just any street you stroll down you're kind of like oh this is like a charming little corner of this city so yeah it's been great it's quite unapologetic isn't it i hear what you say about like it's figured out who what it is yeah because it's been it's so old it's been around for so long is it true i heard that there's some city ordinance that there has to be a pub every couple blocks or something does anyone know if that's true do you guys not much
• 15:30
  Maybe that's an urban myth.
• 15:31
  I don't know.
• 15:31
  But I love the idea of it, that it's like the pub is so central to the idea of the city that we need as many as we can get.
• 15:40
  Well, that's particularly true of London, but I think you go to any major city in the UK and it's basically the same, even if that isn't a rule.
• 15:46
  It was also fun during the World Cup.
• 15:48
  I mean, that didn't end well.
• 15:49
  But it was fun, you know, I'd be walking home from the theatre and...
• 15:54
  on nights where there were games and there was just people pouring out.
• 15:57
  And then you'd be walking, you'd hear like an enormous cheer that would, you'd hear it through the whole city.
• 16:02
  Yeah.
• 16:02
  Or cries of despair.
• 16:03
  Or cries of despair.
• 16:04
  Yeah.
• 16:05
  Yeah.
• 16:05
  Are you a footy fan?
• 16:06
  Do you watch it?
• 16:07
  No, only contagiously.
• 16:09
  Like when I'm here,
• 16:10
  I was in, it was funny, I was in New York when the Knicks won and that was like the most exciting thing.
• 16:17
  Like the night that the Knicks won in New York was one of the greatest nights to be in New York City.
• 16:22
  Like the whole city erupted in a spontaneous party.
• 16:25
  Everyone poured out onto the streets.
• 16:27
  It was like, yeah, it was like nothing I'd ever seen.
• 16:31
  Touching back on the hit machine, because as I say, I watched it last night and I really enjoyed it.
• 16:36
  It's quite tight.
• 16:37
  It's a 75 minute.
• 16:38
  Yeah, no intermission.
• 16:39
  No intermission.
• 16:40
  It's intense.
• 16:41
  And I was watching your performance and it's a very physical role, it seems to me.
• 16:46
  You have these scenes where there are things that your character's doing, like he's skipping at one point and he's delivering dialogue and...
• 16:53
  My jump rope was good last night.
• 16:55
  It was good.
• 16:55
  Yeah.
• 16:56
  Sometimes I, I don't get in the like jump roping is like you have to get in the pocket.
• 17:01
  Yeah.
• 17:02
  And for some reason it was very good last night.
• 17:03
  Like I sometimes mess it up and it gets a laugh cause he's, he's kind of like, we're going to work out.
• 17:08
  And then if I'm not good at jump roping, it looks like ridiculous, but it was, you caught a good jump rope night.
• 17:14
  I guess either way it's a win win.
• 17:15
  Cause if he's good at, if in the, yeah, no, it works either way.
• 17:17
  But, uh, yeah, I was, I'm happier when I can do the full thing.
• 17:22
  The,
• 17:22
  Full gown, yeah.
• 17:23
  And it's, you know, so there's a lot going on in that character, in that role.
• 17:26
  It's physical, it's emotional.
• 17:28
  You know, because as I say, the play's about kind of familial trauma and brotherhood, and it's your character and your brother kind of reckoning with their past and the trauma that's gone on in their family, as well as obviously both being musicians and in the music business.
• 17:40
  Yeah.
• 17:41
  And so there's a lot going on in that play and in that character.
• 17:43
  I mean, what kind of prep did you do out of interest for that role?
• 17:48
  Well...
• 17:50
  The playwright's older brother happens to be a big music mogul.
• 17:55
  And he's not...
• 17:56
  The character's different.
• 17:57
  It's not a straight biographical lift of his brother.
• 18:01
  But I watched some of these interviews with his brother.
• 18:03
  I talked to John...
• 18:04
  a lot about it.
• 18:05
  I also, um, I, I was into some hip hop when I was a kid, but it's never been my like go-to music, but I listened to a lot of hip hop.
• 18:13
  I had John make me a lot of mixes.
• 18:15
  I had my friend Jesse, who's like an old hip hop head who just made me classic, you know, tribe called quests, you know, roots kind of, um, uh, mixes.
• 18:27
  So I, I just walked around Brooklyn listening to a lot of hip hop and tried to kind of,
• 18:32
  have it enter my bloodstream a little bit more because I think that, um, Wes and Alex were like, you know, they were like outcast was their, you know, early outcast was like their band.
• 18:44
  So I tried to do that, but a lot of, a lot of it was more about, um,
• 18:52
  like getting in touch with a guy who had never been to therapy.
• 18:57
  Like I've done a lot of like therapy and like healing emotional, you know, things, whether it's an acting context or not.
• 19:04
  But this was a guy who has not done much inner work on himself.
• 19:08
  Like he, he came from this traumatic background and he put on this armor of success, money.
• 19:16
  He's a kind of high roller.
• 19:18
  Um,
• 19:20
  Even though I think he's bought this enormous house, I think the trappings of success are less important to him than the status.
• 19:26
  He's very concerned with status.
• 19:28
  And I think the way he thinks, largely unconsciously, although Alex, his brother, knows this about him, that if he has enough money and has enough success, he's safe.
• 19:37
  You know, it's a primal fear in him that someone can hurt him again.
• 19:42
  But if he has...
• 19:44
  a gate and a security system and people around the house and high walls and success, no one can touch him.
• 19:54
  So I had to, I had to get in touch with maybe that fear in me.
• 19:59
  I don't, I don't have, that's not where my fears live, but I, I had to get in touch with a kind of stoicism, like a guy who,
• 20:08
  I also, I talked a lot about this, my wife, who's a psychologist, who's just really brilliant about people, you know, and characters.
• 20:16
  And she said, you know, you're going to have to be brave about being the bad object in this.
• 20:24
  Because I think that Alex is, you know, the struggling musician, but he's also incredibly charming and funny.
• 20:29
  And he gets to write all these funny songs.
• 20:31
  And I just have to kind of, you know...
• 20:33
  roll my eyes at him or yell at him.
• 20:36
  So I was worried about the part of you that wants to be loved by an audience.
• 20:41
  I had to really work with that because I was like, he certainly gets redeemed by the end, but I really had to...
• 20:49
  kind of toughen up around I'm not going to be beloved in every moment in this play.
• 20:54
  In fact, I'm going to be somewhat villainous.
• 20:59
  And not a fun, like, he's not like Captain Hook villain where you love to hate him.
• 21:06
  It's more like he really, especially towards the end, he really does some moves that are just like...
• 21:14
  really tough vicious vicious really vicious and um so i had to be brave about that i had to say like yeah i'm gonna uh i'm playing a role and that kind of carapace that wes has around him like he's built it up like you say you know he has a house he has security he has his front gate but it's actually all just it's protection but it's actually just restricting yeah and it's also like he's protecting a child within him you know and you get the feeling he's a good dad he really cares about his kids he
• 21:42
  you know, no villains think they're bad people.
• 21:46
  that's a bad villain.
• 21:47
  It's like, I'm bad.
• 21:48
  Villains think they're doing the right thing.
• 21:50
  You know, road to hell is paid with good.
• 21:52
  Yeah.
• 21:52
  As they say.
• 21:53
  Yeah.
• 21:53
  Yeah.
• 21:54
  Going from then from the hit machine to then some of your other work, I guess, as an actor specifically, I mean, the first thing I would have seen you in, I mentioned earlier was how I met your mother.
• 22:03
  Yeah.
• 22:03
  Which of course, you know, it was a phenomenal show and was a phenomenon.
• 22:06
  You know, it was huge in America was huge over here.
• 22:08
  Yeah.
• 22:08
  I mean, in many ways, I mean, Britain's kind of the 51st state when it comes to media.
• 22:12
  Yeah.
• 22:12
  We get everything that you guys kind of,
• 22:14
  There's still a lot of How I Met Your Mother fans on the streets of London.
• 22:16
  I'll tell you that.
• 22:17
  Because I'm, you know, meeting a lot of them.
• 22:20
  I was going to say, are you getting like recognized?
• 22:22
  Yeah, yeah, tons.
• 22:23
  The fan base.
• 22:25
  It's so weird because the show went off the air like 12 years ago.
• 22:28
  Yeah.
• 22:29
  And I think what's happening is, one is I think parents grew up watching the show and they're now showing it to their kids.
• 22:36
  So I think there's this kind of like generational, you know, here, this is an artifact I loved as a kid.
• 22:41
  And I think it actually holds up well.
• 22:43
  Mm-hmm.
• 22:44
  So, and it's on streaming.
• 22:46
  So I think there's, it's minting new fans.
• 22:50
  And I, and I also think that How I Met Your Mother was a bit ahead of its time.
• 22:53
  Like, um, the TV landscape, like we were coming out of like Seinfeld era and the Seinfeld ethos was no hugging, no learning.
• 23:02
  I don't know if you ever heard of that.
• 23:03
  Like in the writer's room, they said no hugging, no learning.
• 23:05
  They didn't want it to be sentimental in any way.
• 23:07
  Um, yeah.
• 23:09
  How I Made Your Mother was a lot of hugging and a lot of learning, right?
• 23:12
  It was very not that.
• 23:13
  I mean, we had some Seinfeldian, like, obsessions with, like, catchphrases and words and little things.
• 23:20
  But it also had this enormous beating heart that it wore on its sleeve.
• 23:24
  And I think that, like, the younger kind of Gen Zers are much more sincere than Gen X, certainly my generation, which was, like, kind of aloof and ironic.
• 23:34
  And I think the show lands on them because it's just, it's heart forward, you know?
• 23:42
  And how does it feel to be a part of a show like that, which is connecting with new generations and is being passed down to new people?
• 23:49
  Well, I've been doing this podcast with Craig Thomas, who's the co-creator called How We Made Your Mother.
• 23:54
  And it's a rewatch podcast where we just finished the third season.
• 23:58
  And my wife, Jordana, had never seen the show, which was great for us, like falling in love, because I knew she was meeting me and not a character she had seen on TV.
• 24:07
  Yeah.
• 24:08
  But she also at some point said to me, I'd really actually like to watch this show because it's a huge chapter of your life that I missed and I want to kind of see what this was and.
• 24:19
  So then I called Craig and we started doing this rewatch podcast and it's been the most healing, delightful journey to revisit a show because, you know, the whole show is framed as this older man looking back on his younger years.
• 24:34
  And now we're like almost the age of the narrator and looking back on this show we made in our younger years.
• 24:39
  So it's got this kind of meta quality to it, which is fascinating.
• 24:43
  Yeah.
• 24:43
  But also I was so, it was my first big thing, you know, on screen.
• 24:48
  It was my first time getting beamed all over the world.
• 24:50
  I had done theater.
• 24:51
  I had done pilots.
• 24:52
  I had done episodics.
• 24:53
  You know, you might have caught me on six feet under ER.
• 24:56
  But it was my first time where I really invaded living rooms, you know.
• 25:01
  And...
• 25:02
  It was destabilizing to my sense of self to lose anonymity, to be so visible, to have people both love you and not like you, frankly.
• 25:12
  I think some people at the time kind of were allergic to Ted's sincerity and his soaring romanticism and all this stuff.
• 25:22
  And I felt that.
• 25:23
  I felt the sting of criticism.
• 25:28
  And I was just very hard on myself when the show was on the air.
• 25:33
  and now I watch the show, and I'm so much kinder to myself, and I say, oh, you were doing a great job.
• 25:38
  Like, you were doing a great, great job in a very hard role.
• 25:42
  in a great show that I now have deep appreciation for.
• 25:45
  And now when, when fans come up to me and they say, how I met your mother taught me about life, you know, how I met your mother got me through my divorce, how I met your mother got me through my mom's death and illness, how I met your mother is why I met my partner.
• 25:57
  You know, all these things, you hear all these stories.
• 25:59
  I understand.
• 26:01
  I don't, and I've said this before, but this has to be qualified.
• 26:04
  I,
• 26:05
  There's an article I read about Paul McCartney, and I'm not comparing myself to Sir Paul, but he said that he had to make peace with the Beatles in a certain way because that was all anyone wants to talk about.
• 26:16
  He wanted them to take his other work just as seriously, but the Beatles were the thing most people want to talk about.
• 26:22
  And then he just softened around it and he got to appreciate what they had done.
• 26:28
  And he said now when people come up to him and say, I'm such a fan of the Beatles, he says, me too.
• 26:33
  I am too.
• 26:34
  And I feel that way now about How I Met Your Mother.
• 26:35
  Like, oh, I'm a fan.
• 26:36
  I'm a fan of that show.
• 26:38
  I know why you like it.
• 26:39
  And I don't, I don't.
• 26:41
  My wife even pointed out, she said, when How I Met Your Mother fans come up to you now, after you've been doing the podcast, you're warmer.
• 26:49
  because I'm not as suspicious of them.
• 26:51
  Because for a while I was like, why do you like this show so much?
• 26:54
  And now I've gone back to it and I go, oh, this is why they like that show.
• 26:57
  This is a really good, funny, smart, moving show.
• 27:00
  Yeah.
• 27:00
  And why do you think you were suspicious initially for maybe for a time of that?
• 27:05
  You know, why do you like that question of why do you like this show?
• 27:07
  Because is it fair to say that maybe for a little while after the show ended, you wanted to put a bit of distance between them?
• 27:12
  Yeah, yeah, a lot.
• 27:13
  Yeah, a lot.
• 27:14
  I was doing everything I could.
• 27:17
  Well, one is I didn't want to be overly associated with it because I thought it was the end of my acting life.
• 27:21
  Like I – so I, you know, I did a play one summer.
• 27:24
  Then I went to Broadway.
• 27:25
  I did this play, Disgraced.
• 27:26
  I did – I played a morphine-addicted civil war surgeon in a PBS show called Mercy Street for two years.
• 27:31
  Like I was doing things that were like any hint of a single guy in the big city looking for love.
• 27:37
  I was like, no, thank you.
• 27:38
  And I was offered those roles, but I was like, I can't do them.
• 27:40
  Mm-hmm.
• 27:42
  I think I just wanted to, I didn't want to retire.
• 27:45
  I didn't want people, you know, certain people are like, I'll never see you as any other character.
• 27:51
  And you're like, all right, man, well, don't watch anything else I do because what am I supposed to do?
• 27:56
  So I had this like hostility towards people who wouldn't let me out of what felt like a kind of identity prison.
• 28:03
  Yeah.
• 28:05
  Now I just have enough time away from it that I can...
• 28:08
  It now just feels like a big part of my biography, but not the whole thing.
• 28:13
  And I've been able to do enough stuff and create enough of a body of work that I now feel like I have just a bigger aspect to my career.
• 28:21
  It looms large.
• 28:22
  I'm not going to say it doesn't.
• 28:24
  But at the same time, I don't feel the need to run so fast away from it.
• 28:29
  And also, it was hard.
• 28:30
  It wasn't always...
• 28:32
  You know, you see the blooper reel and it looks like, oh my God, did you just laugh for 10 straight years?
• 28:36
  And it's like, no, it was a job.
• 28:38
  Some days you're your best self at work and some days you're your worst.
• 28:42
  And it's the truth for everyone.
• 28:43
  You know, you have, it was everything.
• 28:49
  I just had a feeling like that experience was more complicated for me than it was for the viewers.
• 28:57
  And I needed some distance from it.
• 28:59
  I hear that.
• 28:59
  And I think you're not, you probably, I, I think for what I've read, you're not alone in that feeling.
• 29:03
  I think even, I think Jason Siegel was saying like towards the end, it was, I remember reading an interview of him.
• 29:08
  I'm, I'm, obviously I'm not speaking for him, but just what I read paraphrasing.
• 29:12
  He said it was, it was a hard last few years.
• 29:15
  And he had a, maybe a similar sense of like, he wanted to maybe go off and experiment doing other things.
• 29:19
  And, and he found it was restricting.
• 29:21
  Yeah.
• 29:22
  Being on a behemoth like that, that was, that had run for nine years, it was restricting.
• 29:25
  Yeah.
• 29:26
  So it sounds like you went alone and maybe in some of that mixed.
• 29:29
  Yeah, I think I think actors naturally have a kind of mercurial wanting to you get into it because you want to play this role and then this role and then this role.
• 29:39
  And then you get cast in a show that goes nine years and it's like.
• 29:42
  your psyche was not programmed for that.
• 29:44
  Like you didn't think you'd be playing one guy for 208 episodes, you know, nine years.
• 29:49
  And, you know, he changed over the years as I changed and the writers allowed the characters to grow and all that stuff.
• 29:55
  But it's still, there was still a feeling of like slight claustrophobia, like, and especially the show becomes more and more famous and more and more people think of you as that guy.
• 30:06
  Yeah.
• 30:06
  That was the hardest thing for me was people thought I was that guy.
• 30:09
  You go on Twitter and you recommend a book you loved and people are like, oh, you're just like Ted.
• 30:15
  Ted reads books.
• 30:16
  And I was like, wait, I couldn't get out of it.
• 30:18
  It was just like everything I – and I lent a lot of myself to the character.
• 30:23
  And then when I wanted him back –
• 30:26
  it was like people mistook me for the character rather than me creating a character.
• 30:30
  It was very strange.
• 30:31
  I don't know.
• 30:33
  It just led to a lot of like identity confusion, you know.
• 30:37
  Not for me.
• 30:38
  I knew who I was.
• 30:39
  My friends knew who I was.
• 30:40
  I just mean that what was coming back at me was kind of ferocious and almost felt tinged with like a slight hostility.
• 30:48
  Yeah.
• 30:49
  I don't know.
• 30:50
  Yeah, I mean, focusing in for a moment on the character of Ted, Ted Mosby, I mean, you know, essentially the protagonist, really, of the show, and he's the narrator, you know, who's this very sort of warm, you know, charming guy looking for love in the big city, as you say, and he has ideas about what love looks like and what it should be.
• 31:06
  And I know that, like, you were saying there a bit about how some people were a bit allergic to that, and how there's maybe some of the viewers of the show, the fans of the show, think, oh, is Ted actually, is he as sort of...
• 31:17
  I guess, like not likable per se, but like, you know, those ideas about, it reminds me when I was looking back at it, like a 500 days of summer and how that movie and how Joseph Gordon-Levitt kind of maybe has similar ideas.
• 31:27
  Yeah.
• 31:28
  And people have a mixed relationship with that character.
• 31:31
  Yeah.
• 31:31
  I was wondering, do you, as the guy who played him, do you like Ted?
• 31:34
  Did you like that character?
• 31:35
  And I kind of, I've said this before.
• 31:37
  I think of him as like my younger, slightly annoying brother where, where I, I, I love him.
• 31:46
  And I respect, I want the best for him.
• 31:49
  And I also go, why would you do that?
• 31:52
  Like, why would you behave that way?
• 31:54
  I think that, you know, a lot of the, what I thought was like the people who were allergic to him, I never hear from those people anymore.
• 32:03
  Like I only hear love for him.
• 32:05
  And again, that could be generational or it could be like the haters have moved on.
• 32:09
  But I just don't, for whatever reason, I'm not getting that energy back.
• 32:16
  like a lot of love around him.
• 32:18
  But I do, there were times where
• 32:22
  you know, it's kind of the thing of like, is this romantic or is this illegal?
• 32:26
  Like, is this like stalking?
• 32:27
  Is this like, and sometimes, you know, one thing Craig and I are talking about is like, we do a bit of like apologizing for things that were maybe ill-considered, jokes that we thought played well in 2006 and do not play well at all anymore.
• 32:43
  And that's the risk with a comedy because comedy, the mores and standards of comedy, it changes as, you know, we age and,
• 32:51
  Things change.
• 32:52
  I do think that Ted as a character has aged pretty well because I think that he was ultimately like a very well-intentioned, sweet, kind, loyal person.
• 33:04
  I often think that his best qualities were not as a boyfriend, but as a friend.
• 33:09
  I think he would drop anything for his friends.
• 33:11
  He really, that was a part I really loved playing of him was this kind of loyal friend.
• 33:17
  Yeah.
• 33:18
  And you really get that in the relationships between like yourself and like Ted and like Marshall and the other characters.
• 33:22
  There is such a sort of camaraderie and close knit that you believe that they're all friends, they're all genuine.
• 33:27
  And it seemed like, you know, when you look back at like the behind the scenes, like the bloopers,
• 33:31
  and the making of the show, it seemed like you guys were also really close.
• 33:33
  I mean, what is your relationship now like with the rest of the cast?
• 33:36
  Are you guys still as close as you were?
• 33:38
  No, no, no, not, not even a little bit.
• 33:41
  Yeah.
• 33:41
  Yeah.
• 33:41
  Yeah.
• 33:42
  No, I mean, I don't mean that in any like dramatic way.
• 33:46
  It's just, uh, we had Neil on the podcast and he and I had a really interesting conversation about some of the tension we had on set.
• 33:55
  That was like fascinating and kind of healing and, and,
• 34:00
  Jason and I send each other texts every once in a while when something like that reminds us of something funny on set, but I haven't seen him in a really long time.
• 34:08
  Kobe we had on the show twice, so I've seen her mostly on Zoom.
• 34:13
  And I, you know, I have love for all these people, but...
• 34:18
  Uh, and Allie was at my wedding, but I haven't seen her, I don't think since, you know?
• 34:21
  So, um, it's like, it's like college where you have this very intense time together and you think you're going to be, you can't imagine not seeing each other every day cause you've seen each other every day for so long.
• 34:35
  Yeah.
• 34:36
  And then you just, it just disperses and you just go out and live your life and, um,
• 34:40
  And, you know, Neil lives in New York, but I think the other three live in California mostly.
• 34:45
  So I just, yeah, I'm living my life.
• 34:49
  Yeah.
• 34:49
  Life just comes in and moves around and people go.
• 34:51
  Yeah.
• 34:52
  Yeah.
• 34:52
  Yeah.
• 34:52
  It reminds me of what, going back to the Beatles actually reminds me of what George said.
• 34:56
  I think he was asked after John died.
• 35:00
  Someone asked him, you know, you said that John dying hasn't really changed your life much.
• 35:04
  And he said, well, it hasn't because we, we weren't in a working relationship.
• 35:08
  Obviously we were still friends, but like, you know, he could still be there now, you know, in New York, you know, for all I know.
• 35:13
  Right.
• 35:14
  I hadn't seen him for years before he, you know, he passed.
• 35:17
  So yeah, people just go their separate ways and have their own lives.
• 35:20
  Yeah, and I think that there's a yearning, especially when a show is so centered around friendship.
• 35:27
  People really want to believe that me and Neil and Jason are hitting bars in New York City together.
• 35:32
  They really want to believe that.
• 35:36
  And I think it's...
• 35:40
  It's a little more like family than friends in that you don't get to choose your family.
• 35:45
  We were cast.
• 35:46
  We didn't choose each other.
• 35:48
  And family dynamics come out to play when you're in an environment like that for so long.
• 35:57
  But you also have love that is quite deep and rich and probably everlasting.
• 36:03
  But it's not an active love.
• 36:04
  It's not like a...
• 36:06
  you know, like I love Noah, my co-star and we've only been working together for a couple of months, but I, I feel so close to him cause we're in college together.
• 36:14
  We're in the experience together and, and I'm used to seeing him every day and I'm used to talking to him.
• 36:20
  And, um, so, uh,
• 36:24
  You know, acting is a lot of like little love affairs that you have and then you move on, you know.
• 36:30
  Yeah, it's almost like a slightly sort of tribal nomadic aspect.
• 36:32
  Yeah.
• 36:33
  Like, you know, you have those really intense experiences and then you go on to the next.
• 36:36
  Yeah, or like an acting troupe or a troubadour is going from town to town.
• 36:39
  You know, there's an itinerant quality to it.
• 36:42
  Yeah.
• 36:43
  Yeah.
• 36:43
  But when you go back and look at the show, I mean, as I say, you know, that chemistry is so alive and lived in, you know, between the, you know, the group of you.
• 36:49
  And like, I mean, you mentioned the bloopers, like, yeah, you go back and you and you see stuff like the laughs that were on set.
• 36:56
  Yeah, yeah.
• 36:57
  Just as an outsider, as a viewer.
• 36:58
  And there are so many great recurring gags in the show, stuff like, you know, the slap bet and then like the doppelgangers.
• 37:03
  I mean, were there moments where you just it was so hard just to get through a scene together?
• 37:07
  Because it was just like,
• 37:12
  If those bloopers come up, like, on Instagram or whatever, like, I will watch them because I start laughing.
• 37:18
  And, like, I find them really delightful.
• 37:20
  And it's funny to watch people break.
• 37:23
  And I remember those days.
• 37:26
  You know, I remember how hard it was to keep it together.
• 37:30
  But I think that there were moments when I...
• 37:35
  was so stunned and startled by how smart the show was.
• 37:39
  Like, I just remember loving the intervention banner.
• 37:42
  Like whenever we hung that intervention banner and everyone had to, like there, there were just these moments that in the slap bet was so funny and smart and, and just rewarded, uh, fidelity towards watching it.
• 37:53
  You know, there's an episode, I think it's in second season where, uh,
• 37:59
  Oh, yeah, Lily is in a play, and she makes us all come, and it's terrible.
• 38:04
  And Barney tells her it's terrible, and she's like, you're not allowed to say that.
• 38:07
  And he's like, okay, and he stages his own one-man show, and he makes them sit there for like four hours just to prove that this is unreasonable.
• 38:17
  And it's really like just about that.
• 38:20
  And then at the way end, Marshall walks up and slaps the shit out of him and says like, that's two or whatever.
• 38:27
  But it never talked about the slap bet in that episode.
• 38:29
  Like you had to have been watching.
• 38:31
  Yeah.
• 38:31
  So it's like it rewards longtime viewers with these runners, you know.
• 38:36
  Yeah.
• 38:38
  The network, and I only know this from talking to Craig so deeply about this, but the network was always trying to get them.
• 38:45
  to create episodes that were self-contained, that were not so episodic, that didn't depend on knowing what happened, you know, 12 episodes before.
• 38:54
  And they always rebelled because they're like, no, we're making like a serialized story.
• 38:59
  Like we want this to be, you're following the twists and turns of these characters.
• 39:04
  So it was always kind of a central tension in them creating it.
• 39:07
  Yeah.
• 39:08
  And it's creating something that, cause I agree like so many shows, I mean, even something like Friends, I mean, Friends does have a through line, but also you can reasonably sit down and watch any episode of Friends.
• 39:17
  Yeah.
• 39:17
  Yeah.
• 39:17
  And it will be self-contained.
• 39:18
  Exactly.
• 39:19
  But like, no, we're going to go one step further and we're going to put stuff in there implicitly.
• 39:22
  Yeah.
• 39:24
  But I think even How I Met Your Mother, even though it is so serialized, like, they do stand on their own.
• 39:28
  Like, you can pop in not knowing that much, and you'll still enjoy it.
• 39:31
  Oh, totally.
• 39:32
  Yeah.
• 39:33
  And actually, like, you know, you're mentioning specific episodes.
• 39:35
  I mean, episodes like the Pineapple episode.
• 39:36
  Yeah.
• 39:37
  You know, which is such a brilliantly constructed – I mean, it's quite an early one, but such a brilliantly constructed exercise in comedy.
• 39:42
  But, like, the mystery of, like, you know, who Ted, you know, brought home and who's the woman in his bed.
• 39:47
  And then, so there was real out and out comedy in that show.
• 39:50
  But also you had that tonal balance of like real sort of poignancy.
• 39:53
  There's that moment in, I think series eight where Ted, he runs, he really like, he has an epiphany where Barney says, you're alone, Ted.
• 40:00
  He's sitting in the bar by his own.
• 40:01
  And then you run off and you go to the mother before we actually meet her.
• 40:05
  And you give that incredible speech.
• 40:07
  And you just say in 45 days, we're going to meet and we're going to fall in love and we're going to have children.
• 40:11
  It's going to be amazing.
• 40:12
  Like, which was more challenging for you?
• 40:13
  Like the comedy or the drama?
• 40:15
  Like balancing that, that kind of constant.
• 40:17
  Well, I've always felt...
• 40:20
  I never knew if I was like a dramatic actor who did comedy really well or comedic actor who did drama well.
• 40:25
  Like I don't even separate them in my mind because I think a good actor should be able to like nail a punchline and hit the emotional beats.
• 40:34
  That's just how I think of what my job is.
• 40:38
  But I certainly had to honor, okay, this is a joke.
• 40:43
  This is how you stick the landing of this joke.
• 40:44
  Mm-hmm.
• 40:46
  But then I always really liked, I thought that what I was asked to do, you know, any of the five of us could sell a joke.
• 40:52
  Like those were some like high, you know, heavy hitters in comedy.
• 40:57
  But what I felt like I was asked to do, me specifically, in like the Ted Mosby land was to really have those moments like the speech at the door and –
• 41:07
  Even the speech in the pilot, you know, I'm a terrible boy.
• 41:10
  You know, I'm not good at being single, but I'd be a great husband.
• 41:13
  Like that was what I auditioned with.
• 41:15
  So I think whenever I was given one of those kind of soaring monologues to end the show with, I thought, well, this is what I was really hired for.
• 41:22
  Like this is what I think I can do.
• 41:25
  I know why I got this role.
• 41:26
  I know what the assignment is.
• 41:28
  And I really liked that.
• 41:29
  I really liked, I described, you know, it was almost like Ted was like an indie film character that was dropped into a sitcom, you know?
• 41:37
  So I got to have these moments that you don't actually see on a lot of sitcoms, these really sincere moments, which I actually really loved playing.
• 41:47
  I always look forward to those.
• 41:49
  And they're 100% committed.
• 41:51
  Like we were saying about happiness.
• 41:53
  I mean, a weird comparison, but there's no winking at the audience there.
• 41:56
  Right.
• 41:56
  It's completely sincere.
• 41:57
  There's no concession to... Yeah, and I always thought, you know, watching Neil play Barney, watching back at the show, what I think was brilliant about what he did was like, he was both the character and he was fully committed, but there was ever so slight, like a twinkle in his eye.
• 42:13
  Like I'm playing...
• 42:14
  this crazy character because barney himself was a creation you know he was not that guy he created him so there was always this sense of like artifice and he was a magician and he always had something up his sleeve whereas ted didn't have that armor which i think made him for me harder to play because there wasn't a lot to hide behind i didn't have a costume i i was just a very sincere guy
• 42:39
  You know, and I had to play him as a very sincere guy to make that work.
• 42:44
  But then, of course, everyone thinks you must be that guy.
• 42:46
  Sure.
• 42:47
  That's the double edged sword.
• 42:48
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 42:49
  Yeah.
• 42:49
  And I hear what you say about like Neil's performance as Barney like that.
• 42:52
  That twinkle is almost it.
• 42:55
  The reason I think that character is so eye catching and funny is partly because of that twinkle.
• 42:59
  Because even though he's doing kind of reprehensible stuff.
• 43:02
  Yeah, if someone played it without that twinkle, it would actually be like pretty odious and hard to take.
• 43:07
  But there was something about the way he did it that felt like it was always a put on, you know?
• 43:12
  Yeah.
• 43:13
  Yeah.
• 43:13
  And there are moments when it goes too far.
• 43:15
  And we've talked about that on the podcast where we're like, the other thing they do is like, Barney, if he goes too far, he always gets a comeuppance.
• 43:22
  Like the thing about How I Met Your Mother is like, it's a benevolent universe.
• 43:25
  And there's karma in that universe.
• 43:27
  Like, yeah.
• 43:28
  virtue is rewarded, you know, uh, uh, bad behavior is kind of punished.
• 43:32
  Yeah.
• 43:33
  And I think that's also very satisfying for people.
• 43:36
  Do you have a favorite memory of working with Neil?
• 43:37
  Like, you know, I mean, as Ted and Barney, like those two characters together, do you have a favorite memory of, I guess what we're talking about here, that twinkle, that kind of, you know, that camaraderie?
• 43:45
  Um, um,
• 43:47
  I mean, there were certain, you probably see them on the bloopers, but like I remember in season, it was like the third episode when, you know, we were held at the airport, and he kept going, we're international businessmen on a business trip, you know, and there were just certain things he would do that he would always push.
• 44:06
  I remember in that episode of Rivadere Fierro, I'm sure this is on the blooper reel, but he had to say he hated the Fierro, and he did this thing where he went like,
• 44:16
  Love it.
• 44:17
  And then he turned to the wall and he just whipped his head around.
• 44:19
  He goes, I hate it.
• 44:21
  You know?
• 44:22
  And the way he did it just killed me.
• 44:25
  I think Neil is like a profoundly good comedic actor.
• 44:30
  Like he's...
• 44:32
  He could do each joke three different interesting ways.
• 44:36
  His timing is impeccable.
• 44:38
  He's a bit of a machine around comedy, like the way his brain works around it, but it's fascinating.
• 44:45
  It's not the way my brain works.
• 44:46
  So I honor how he is as a comedian.
• 44:49
  Is it kind of focused on the minutiae of like this beat, this time?
• 44:52
  It's just, he just knows how to squeeze a laugh and how to...
• 44:57
  give variations on it and he and he pushes it in ways that i might not be brave enough to put i mean my character wasn't that unless he was super drunk you know which he was a few times but um yeah i just admired his boldness yeah
• 45:12
  And speaking of season three, because you mentioned that season, I mean, zoning in on that specifically, I want to say that was the season where, did Britney Spears come in on that season for that cameo?
• 45:19
  Yeah.
• 45:19
  Which was kind of quite a huge deal at the time, wasn't it?
• 45:22
  We re-watched those two episodes she was on, and she's fantastic on them.
• 45:26
  Yeah.
• 45:26
  Like, she's really funny.
• 45:27
  Like, they created a whole way of her...
• 45:30
  talking that she just like kind of nailed.
• 45:32
  Yeah.
• 45:33
  It's totally adapted to.
• 45:34
  Yeah.
• 45:34
  Yeah.
• 45:35
  Cause, cause her character, she plays Abby, doesn't she?
• 45:37
  The receptionist has kind of got a crush on Ted.
• 45:38
  Yeah.
• 45:39
  Yeah.
• 45:39
  She's obsessed.
• 45:39
  She loves him.
• 45:40
  Yeah.
• 45:41
  Yeah.
• 45:41
  She's obsessed.
• 45:42
  I mean, what was she like to work with?
• 45:44
  I mean, it was very strange.
• 45:45
  It was, um, there was a lot of security on set.
• 45:49
  Uh, there were helicopters above this, the soundstage, you know, like trying it like, it was almost like a, uh, a kind of, um,
• 45:58
  paparazzi-esque fame that she was under the microscope of at the time in the most intense way possible was kind of brought on to stage 22.
• 46:08
  And she was very sweet and very...
• 46:10
  But, you know, in between takes, you know, Sarah Chalk was on that.
• 46:15
  That was her first episode.
• 46:16
  So I remember...
• 46:17
  Sarah and I got very close very quickly and ended up working together a lot with, you know, her as Stella.
• 46:22
  And Brittany was more just like very sweet and very quiet and very – it was almost like she was in a very tender place in her life.
• 46:34
  And I think we recognized that this was a really good opportunity for her and it was clear she was like doing it well.
• 46:40
  But I don't – she did do something very sweet, which I spoke about on the podcast earlier.
• 46:45
  TV Guide was there to do a photo shoot and they wanted to put her on the cover.
• 46:50
  And she said, I don't want to be on the cover alone.
• 46:52
  I'll only do it if Josh is on with me.
• 46:55
  So, you know, we were on the cover of TV Guide together.
• 46:58
  Yeah.
• 46:59
  You know.
• 47:00
  And, and, um.
• 47:02
  And I thought it was very sweet.
• 47:04
  Like she said, like, I'm...
• 47:06
  This is how I interpret it.
• 47:07
  She's like, I'm a guest on their show.
• 47:10
  This is not all about me.
• 47:11
  I want to have some representative of the show with me.
• 47:14
  Yeah.
• 47:14
  And I always thought that was very kind.
• 47:16
  Yeah.
• 47:17
  Well, she seemed like a big fan.
• 47:18
  I mean, she wanted it because she was a fan, I want to say.
• 47:19
  Is that...
• 47:20
  I don't know if that's... Yeah, I know her people had reached out to Craig and Carter.
• 47:24
  But she...
• 47:25
  This was almost like her first public appearance after...
• 47:28
  a whole whirlwind of of kind of uh stuff and um and it was it was it was a bit of a you know where she started kind of finding her footing again i think yeah because i guess her life at that time in her career really was a whirlwind of you know i mean unimaginable and imagine yeah we're talking about the fame aspect we were watching my wife and i watched a documentary about her and we're watching it in bed and then
• 47:51
  this how i met your mother comes up and my wife is like there you are you're in this you know they showed a clip yeah yeah i mean i mean there was lots because because it wasn't just britney i mean there were so many great sort of guest stars yeah yeah like brian cranston came on and played your boss yeah yeah we had him on the podcast we had a great interview with him yeah yeah he's great i mean he seems like he's such a i mean the best the best guy yeah i've stayed in touch with him he's fantastic
• 48:13
  Who would you say your favorite guest appearance was?
• 48:16
  I loved Brian.
• 48:17
  I loved Franny Conroy, John Lithgow.
• 48:20
  Ed Herman.
• 48:21
  I always loved the older...
• 48:23
  Actors who were like theater actors who had Tony Awards who would, you know, come on.
• 48:31
  Chris Elliott was really fun.
• 48:35
  Peter Gallagher.
• 48:36
  Like, I liked the older actors who would come on.
• 48:39
  Come on and sort of like, oh, what's this?
• 48:41
  This kind of setup.
• 48:42
  Or just like, you know, you could talk to Francis Conroy about Six Feet Under.
• 48:46
  You could talk to John Lithgow about whatever.
• 48:49
  World According to Garp, you know?
• 48:51
  Like, there was so many...
• 48:53
  uh, iconic actors that came on.
• 48:54
  We also had a lot of like pop stars that were on.
• 48:57
  That was like, Katy Perry was one.
• 48:59
  Katy Perry, Carrie Underwood, who was really sweet.
• 49:02
  And, um, and, uh, yeah.
• 49:05
  And then you remember like,
• 49:07
  I had a long conversation with Katy Perry about meditation because she had just started doing transcendental meditation and that was what I did.
• 49:13
  So, um, you know, you just grab Jennifer Lopez.
• 49:15
  I remember I, um, was doing, I do the crossword puzzle and there was like three down was like a JLo album that I did not know.
• 49:26
  And we're walking to the dressing rooms at the same time.
• 49:29
  And I, and I saw her, we didn't have any scenes together.
• 49:32
  I didn't,
• 49:33
  But I just said, can I ask you, do you know three down?
• 49:36
  And she just gave me the answer to what her album was called.
• 49:41
  And I thought, what a weird life that I get to ask Jennifer Lopez what her album is to do the crossword puzzle.
• 49:48
  I will say Karl McLaughlin was in there as well.
• 49:50
  Oh, yeah.
• 49:51
  I love Kyle.
• 49:51
  Yeah, he's great.
• 49:52
  He's fantastic.
• 49:53
  I'm a huge Karl McLaughlin fan.
• 49:54
  Yeah, he's so funny and charming and just delightful to be around.
• 49:58
  Yeah.
• 49:58
  Were you asking him, like, if I... We had a lot of David Lynch talk.
• 50:01
  Yeah.
• 50:01
  Yeah, because he's big.
• 50:02
  And he was, of course, a huge proponent of TM as well.
• 50:05
  So, you know, David Lynch.
• 50:05
  Oh, yeah.
• 50:06
  David Lynch, yeah.
• 50:07
  So, yeah.
• 50:07
  I mean, imagine the conversations he could have about Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, what have you.
• 50:11
  I mean, that's what I would be asking him.
• 50:12
  But, like, do you remember what you chatted to him about?
• 50:14
  I think Kyle...
• 50:17
  You'll have to have him on to talk about this, but I think he was...
• 50:20
  He knew he was in the hands of genius, and I think he just handed himself over.
• 50:25
  Because I think a lot of the actors on those movies didn't even understand exactly what the movie was.
• 50:32
  And they just trusted David that he had the vision and he was going to bring the ship into the harbor.
• 50:38
  And I think they just...
• 50:40
  I think Kyle told me a story about like he asked him what something meant and he got a really like sharp rebuke back from David Lynch.
• 50:48
  Like you'll have to check that with him.
• 50:49
  But I think he was like he never asked him again because he was like this is not what he wants us to do.
• 50:55
  He wants us to play our roles the way – yeah.
• 50:58
  And it says a lot that like, you don't necessarily have to consciously understand the meaning of say, if you're making Twin Peaks, you don't necessarily have to consciously understand what this is about to play it and play it well.
• 51:06
  Yeah.
• 51:06
  And that's one of the reasons like I love being a filmmaker, because just to put it in a music metaphor, like when you're a lead actor, let's say your first violin in the orchestra, you've got a solo, you got the, you carry the melody and it's, but you have a whole orchestra.
• 51:20
  And when you're writing and directing a movie, you're the composer, you're the conductor, you know, you get a fuller sound and you're in charge of the sound, you're in charge of the highs and the lows and...
• 51:30
  There's something about, I love playing the violin and I also love being the conductor.
• 51:34
  I remember just on David Lynch again, like the, I remember I saw recently an anecdote that I think Jeremy Irons told when he was on Inland Empire.
• 51:43
  David Lynch, the three hour epic that he shot on like a, basically on a potato, on a video camera, on like a camcorder.
• 51:48
  And he comes in for like halfway through the shoot and he asks Laura Dern, who's the lead, he's like, you know, do you know what this is about?
• 51:54
  Laura and Laura's like I've been making this for like god knows how long and I don't know what it's about yeah so yeah it's well what it what an incredible thing to uh have that much faith in a director like if he wasn't David Lynch and you didn't know what it was about like I gotta get out of here yeah yeah but David you just you just trust in the yeah what do the cars trust in the hands of genius and just like let it let it play yeah
• 52:15
  yeah yeah i mean so going back to how i met your mother the um because as you say the show's been off the air for about 12 years i want to say and that ending has kind of i guess become one of the parts of the show that fans talk about a lot you know it's kind of i think at the time maybe some of the fans thought it was a little bit controversial how it ended like i'll say yeah yeah yeah it was kind of maybe it was the ending that they didn't expect yeah
• 52:39
  And I was wondering what your thoughts were on it now.
• 52:41
  It's been 12 years.
• 52:42
  Well, I will say every time I talk about this, it turns into like a news clip where they'll clip this and they'll say, Josh Ryder defends him in finale and fans go crazy.
• 52:54
  So I will just say for people who were upset about the finale or wanted it to go another way, we did an episode...
• 53:05
  of um how we made your mother the podcast and i think it's called how we met a fan and a woman wrote into us um that she didn't like the finale and then uh this is just spoiler alert for people who spoiler like if you haven't seen the finale of how you made your mother and you're going to stop watching this right now
• 53:29
  Um, but, uh, she was in her late thirties or 40 and, um, and her husband passed away.
• 53:37
  He had a heart issue and they had a young baby.
• 53:41
  And, um, the day after or the day of her husband's death was the premiere of our podcast and she
• 53:49
  loved the show she watched it when it was on and she was like oh this will this will be a nice thing for me to just sink into and she she left us this gorgeous voice note which we play on the show which i could never do justice to because it's so beautiful but she said um it just hit her like oh ted ted's wife died
• 54:11
  My husband just died.
• 54:12
  And she said she understood the ending in a completely different way when she experienced this.
• 54:19
  And it's just the whole show made a different sense to her.
• 54:23
  My wife is a clinical psychologist and her PhD thesis was on the connection between love and death.
• 54:29
  And how an increased awareness of death helps us become more intimate with our loved ones.
• 54:38
  If you know that it's impermanent and people are going away.
• 54:42
  And I think that...
• 54:44
  when you look back at the show and it's the full arc of it, it's a show about love and death.
• 54:49
  And I think all great works of art are about love and death.
• 54:52
  I think those, they're the essential ingredients in like a great, great work of art.
• 54:59
  So I think that,
• 55:00
  You know, Alec Lev, who's our producer, but he used to do the podcast that we did when the show was on the air.
• 55:06
  We did a final podcast once the show had ended.
• 55:11
  And he said, I think people were angry about the fact of death.
• 55:15
  They're angry that death invaded their happy world, you know.
• 55:20
  That benevolent universe.
• 55:21
  Yeah.
• 55:22
  But I think that...
• 55:25
  I think that I will say, and I hope this doesn't turn into a new story, I think the finale is aging well.
• 55:33
  I think the older we get and the older the people who love the show get and the older when people have more heartbreak, more loss, more just life dings them around a bit more as it does to everyone.
• 55:48
  I think the finale is going to look different as we get older.
• 55:52
  I'd agree.
• 55:53
  And I think if you like you were saying about the serialization aspect of the series, like if you go back and we mentioned the 45 days that Ted has, but if you go back and watch that after the finale, you realize that it's devastating.
• 56:05
  It's like the impermanence of that.
• 56:06
  You're so hyper aware of the impermanence of that relationship.
• 56:10
  And again, spoiler alert, but like, you know, and, and what,
• 56:14
  that means yeah it invested it was so much more pay for us yeah you know and wait so i would agree i think you know it would it is aging well in that context of just infusing what came before with but when you were doing it i guess when you were guys were putting that finale together like did you have a sense of that like oh this is infusing like so much i don't know it's hard when you're inside of the thing to have i mean i probably did the most writing an english paper on the show of anyone in the show but i was also really good friends with the writers and
• 56:44
  And, and so I, I, they told me first season that they had this idea that that was where they thought the show was going.
• 56:53
  And then I didn't talk to them about it for seven years.
• 56:56
  And then I think it was that episode you're talking about.
• 57:01
  And they said, yeah, we're still planning to do that.
• 57:03
  That's what this is.
• 57:04
  So I'd kind of put it out of my head because my character didn't know any of that.
• 57:09
  So I didn't want to know any of that.
• 57:10
  Yeah.
• 57:10
  You know what I mean?
• 57:11
  Yeah, yeah.
• 57:12
  So they had an idea from way earlier, like from seven years before.
• 57:15
  They knew where they were going.
• 57:16
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 57:17
  But I thought they had...
• 57:19
  an opportunity to reroute and do something different.
• 57:21
  And they, they, they were like, this is what we want to do.
• 57:24
  Yeah.
• 57:24
  Cause that's, I guess the nature of the beast when it comes to that kind of comedy and that, and just like, you know, television is that, you know, it's constantly evolving.
• 57:30
  It's the, it's the cuts both ways, cuts both ways, doesn't it?
• 57:32
  Because it can evolve into something great, but, but it's all about, you know, rerouting it.
• 57:36
  Okay.
• 57:36
  Does this work here?
• 57:37
  Like, you know, cause it's a long form thing.
• 57:39
  It's complex, complex by the sounds of it to write something like that.
• 57:42
  Oh my God.
• 57:43
  I, yeah.
• 57:43
  I
• 57:48
  yeah yeah it's wild i mean were you when you signed up for that gig knowing that it would be i guess quite a long term did you sign up you sign seven year contracts like every you know tv pilot is like you have to you don't read it closely but it's seven years yeah yeah um i don't know if it's still like i think it is um
• 58:07
  But in success, you know, you kind of like renegotiate.
• 58:09
  Like they're like, we'll give you a raise, but you got to do eight years.
• 58:13
  We'll give you a raise, but you got to do nine years.
• 58:14
  So it all changes as it goes.
• 58:16
  Yeah.
• 58:17
  Yeah.
• 58:17
  Were you nervous about committing to a gig that long?
• 58:19
  Was it?
• 58:20
  No, it was my fourth or fifth pilot.
• 58:23
  You know, I got fired from my first pilot.
• 58:25
  The second one.
• 58:27
  we shot six and they aired three.
• 58:29
  The third one didn't get picked up by NBC.
• 58:31
  And the fourth one was How I Met Your Mother.
• 58:32
  So you don't know.
• 58:35
  That was the only one that ran all those years.
• 58:37
  The other ones you're just like, I'd like to get my health insurance.
• 58:39
  Sure, you know.
• 58:40
  Yeah, for sure.
• 58:41
  And I've heard you talk about how, yeah, nine years is a long time in any job, particularly in a gig like that.
• 58:48
  And you'd mentioned TM, Transcendental Meditation.
• 58:51
  Yeah.
• 58:51
  And that's something that you do.
• 58:52
  I mean, and actually, yeah, I do TM as well.
• 58:55
  I've been doing it for, on Saturday it will be a year.
• 58:57
  Oh, nice.
• 58:57
  I've been doing it.
• 58:58
  But you've been doing it for a long time.
• 59:00
  I learned when I was 27.
• 59:01
  Yeah.
• 59:02
  Yeah.
• 59:04
  So I had been doing it for about two or three years by the time I got on How I May Your Mother.
• 59:09
  And how do you think TM is, I guess, impacted your life as an actor, creative artist?
• 59:14
  How do you think it's affected you?
• 59:17
  I mean, I think any meditation practice is beneficial.
• 59:21
  I like TM.
• 59:22
  Like I did a 10-day Vipassana silent retreat, which is more of a Buddhist form of meditation.
• 59:30
  It's like involves body scanning and all this stuff.
• 59:31
  There's no mantra.
• 59:33
  And I found it to be misery.
• 59:36
  You know, the silence more than the meditation.
• 59:38
  The meditation I kind of liked, but I had a really hard time with it.
• 59:41
  And then I went, I tried to kind of keep that form of meditation and I would just have these little almost like panic attacks.
• 59:48
  And I went back to TM and I just found like, ah, 22 minutes mantra.
• 59:53
  Like the whole thing was like, ah, this is the water where I feel really comfortable.
• 59:58
  Mm-hmm.
• 59:58
  And, um, I was a very diligent twice daily meditator for many years, you know, on the set of how I met your mother, you know, in my dressing room, you know, I would take the 20 minutes before getting food and all this stuff.
• 1:00:10
  Um, I'm, I'm less diligent.
• 1:00:12
  I did it yesterday, but, um, I, I, I find when I'm meditating, I'm much more, um, I'm
• 1:00:21
  Like, you know when thoughts come into your head and you just believe them?
• 1:00:24
  Even though they're nonsense.
• 1:00:25
  You just believe them.
• 1:00:27
  When I'm meditating, I have a little bit of distance between my thought where I can go, I don't think that's right.
• 1:00:34
  Or I don't think that's a helpful thought.
• 1:00:36
  And so that, to me, is the best part of meditation.
• 1:00:38
  And also just...
• 1:00:40
  being able to close your eyes, be off screens, just have an internal experience of contemplation and peace.
• 1:00:47
  Like it's, I'm a fan.
• 1:00:50
  Yeah, me too.
• 1:00:51
  Big fan.
• 1:00:52
  I mean, I find that I need it sometimes.
• 1:00:53
  Oh yeah.
• 1:00:54
  Once you start doing it, you're like, how did I not?
• 1:00:56
  have this before yeah it's madness yeah yeah because Jerry Seinfeld is a big um who we mentioned is a big uh TM advocate and he said it was that was what got him through doing Seinfeld was doing the meditation and he was actually only doing the morning one okay because for anyone who doesn't know it's um it's a practice where you do it for 20 minutes twice a day uh once in the morning once in the afternoon or evening and
• 1:01:16
  And yeah, you said that that was what got him through Seinfeld.
• 1:01:18
  Yeah.
• 1:01:19
  Would you say that that was something that helped get you through that?
• 1:01:21
  It certainly did.
• 1:01:22
  Yeah.
• 1:01:22
  And in a weird way, I think it got me the job because I had learned how to manage certain like audition room anxieties.
• 1:01:31
  And I learned how to almost like regulate my nervous system through it so I could go in and give a real performance, like performance quality without my nerves hijacking me.
• 1:01:44
  Yeah.
• 1:01:45
  Yeah.
• 1:01:45
  Yeah.
• 1:01:45
  But I agree about how it's hard to like, the meditation I always find hardest to build into my day is the second one.
• 1:01:50
  The second one's the one.
• 1:01:51
  Yeah.
• 1:01:52
  That's the one.
• 1:01:52
  If you can strategize your day to get the second one in, you're, you're good.
• 1:01:55
  Yeah.
• 1:01:56
  Yeah.
• 1:01:56
  The morning is much easier.
• 1:01:58
  It's easy.
• 1:01:58
  You just roll out of bed and you just do it.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah.
• 1:02:00
  It's great.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah.
• 1:02:00
  And then like, I mean, cause I always find like you gotta be careful because I thought, cause you can be so relaxed that you can fall asleep.
• 1:02:05
  Totally.
• 1:02:06
  Well, my teacher always said it's that that's fine.
• 1:02:08
  Yeah.
• 1:02:09
  Like he never, he thought the, the, the sleep wake, that, that little liminal space is fine.
• 1:02:14
  I remember you saying once that like the best advice you could give an upcoming actor was to get a meditation practice.
• 1:02:18
  Yeah, I think so.
• 1:02:19
  Do you still stand by that?
• 1:02:20
  I think so.
• 1:02:21
  I mean, you have to do all the, you know, training, train your voice, train your body, read lots, be curious, live in the world.
• 1:02:29
  I mean, there's so many things that go into being an actor.
• 1:02:32
  But I think to negotiate the kind of high C's of the professional industry, a meditation practice is pretty essential.
• 1:02:45
  spiritual practice or something psychologically centering.
• 1:02:51
  Yeah.
• 1:02:51
  Yeah.
• 1:02:51
  That helps you, I guess, like we were saying before, be objective about those.
• 1:02:54
  Like when thoughts come into your head and you believe them, that can be quite a dangerous thing sometimes.
• 1:02:58
  Yeah.
• 1:02:59
  And also, you know, I had a good audition.
• 1:03:01
  I'm great.
• 1:03:02
  I had a terrible audition.
• 1:03:03
  I'm terrible.
• 1:03:05
  Like all the, you know, the ways we can bully ourselves with our, our self image.
• 1:03:11
  and also gathering who you are based on how the world or the business is responding to you.
• 1:03:17
  It's all very treacherous.
• 1:03:18
  Yeah.
• 1:03:19
  For sure.
• 1:03:20
  Um, something that we ask our guests, uh, on the podcast is cause we know we have a lot of actors, directors, writers, creatives on is like what they've been enjoying, uh, recently in terms of like stuff they've seen, stuff they've read, stuff they've listened to, maybe music, film.
• 1:03:32
  Have you been, um, have you seen or read anything good lately that you'd recommend, like a recommendation to our listeners that you've been checking out?
• 1:03:39
  Yeah.
• 1:03:40
  I'm friendly with Amanda Petrusich, who's the music critic for The New Yorker.
• 1:03:43
  She's a fantastic music writer.
• 1:03:47
  And she lost her husband a couple years ago very suddenly.
• 1:03:50
  And she wrote an article that I think appeared in June in The New Yorker called The Science of Grief.
• 1:03:55
  And it's partly about...
• 1:03:57
  what it was like for her right after her husband died.
• 1:03:59
  She had a young baby.
• 1:04:01
  And then it's also about different ways of kind of almost like treating grief, like EMDR and different healing modalities.
• 1:04:10
  But it's a really terrific, very beautiful article.
• 1:04:12
  Um,
• 1:04:13
  um my wife and i have been re-watching girls the lena dunham series hbo series which i watched maybe like a third of when it was on and really enjoyed but i never watched the whole thing because we both recently read her memoir fame sick which i mentioned to you which is um a great read kind of a harrowing read and uh
• 1:04:35
  But I'm really stunned by how good Girls is.
• 1:04:39
  Like, it's just...
• 1:04:41
  I think when it was on, there was so much discourse around it and so much arguing and nonsense that...
• 1:04:48
  You know, when a TV show is on, it's really the first draft of the TV show.
• 1:04:52
  You almost can't see a TV show until it's off the air and people have stopped obsessing over it.
• 1:04:57
  But it's very good.
• 1:04:58
  It's very good.
• 1:05:00
  I've seen two plays in London that I loved.
• 1:05:02
  I saw this play 1536.
• 1:05:04
  Do you know that play?
• 1:05:04
  It was at the Ambassadors.
• 1:05:06
  Unbelievable.
• 1:05:07
  It closed, I think, last week.
• 1:05:08
  But it was like an unbelievable play.
• 1:05:11
  Sorry.
• 1:05:12
  Yeah.
• 1:05:13
  And Ben Platt, who's married to my co-star Noah Galvin, is in a play at the Chocolate Factory called Midnight at the Never Get.
• 1:05:20
  That was just gorgeous.
• 1:05:21
  It's a musical.
• 1:05:22
  It's fantastic.
• 1:05:24
  I'm trying to think.
• 1:05:25
  What else?
• 1:05:26
  That's enough, right?
• 1:05:27
  Well, I mean, any albums?
• 1:05:29
  Oh, oh, any albums?
• 1:05:30
  Are you filming this as well?
• 1:05:31
  Yeah.
• 1:05:35
  I would have to look at my phone.
• 1:05:38
  Well, I will say that my brother-in-law started an app called Chorus, C-O-U-R-S. And it's Instagram, but just for film and music recommendations.
• 1:05:51
  So it's like you're not posting selfies, right?
• 1:05:53
  You're just posting what music you are loving.
• 1:05:57
  wow I mean are you are you into the kind of that whole subset of like apps like Letterboxd and like I guess no I'm not I'm not online in that particular way like I don't but I know about Letterboxd I read a really interesting article but I've never gone there or posted my brother-in-law would know all about that and he's yeah yeah do you prefer to sort of I guess that kind of culture of kind of like logging things and rating things and kind of posting it online and sharing it do you do you find that a little bit
• 1:06:23
  I think I have a different relationship to like the online world just because I have, you know, because I'm a visible person.
• 1:06:33
  So I don't feel like I have a lot of like anonymity.
• 1:06:36
  I really like chorus because I'm just like, these are songs I like, you know, I'm just posting songs.
• 1:06:41
  And that's really fun.
• 1:06:43
  But I've never been like a Reddit poster.
• 1:06:48
  You know what I mean?
• 1:06:49
  Like that's just not my world.
• 1:06:51
  And I'm also trying to stay offline and stay engaged with the world.
• 1:06:56
  And it's so seductive and it's just endless, this green world.
• 1:07:00
  And I'm worried about it hijacking more of my psyche.
• 1:07:05
  Yeah, as am I. I mean, it's weird how ever since I've sort of started hosting a podcast and sort of being more online with the podcast, my tolerance for how much I can be online has shrunk rather than grown.
• 1:07:16
  That's good, I think.
• 1:07:17
  Yeah, I hope so because, you know, there are times when my girlfriend always complains about how I'm on my phone.
• 1:07:21
  It kind of like Wes actually gave me all this.
• 1:07:23
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:24
  Your character Wes is always on his phone and Alex is like, why are you always on your fucking phone?
• 1:07:27
  Yeah.
• 1:07:27
  But like, you know, you've got to learn to put it in the other room, I find.
• 1:07:29
  Yeah.
• 1:07:30
  Yeah.
• 1:07:30
  So going back to your recommendations, and so the album that you were recommending, the Australian band.
• 1:07:34
  My new band Believe.
• 1:07:35
  And Believe.
• 1:07:35
  And then was the stage show, well, the stage show, I can't catch that, but what was it called again?
• 1:07:41
  Ben's show.
• 1:07:42
  It's called Midnight at the Never Get, the chocolate factory.
• 1:07:46
  Oh yeah, but that's still running, isn't it?
• 1:07:48
  That's still running.
• 1:07:48
  That's still running.
• 1:07:49
  It was the other one.
• 1:07:50
  It was 1536.
• 1:07:50
  Yeah.
• 1:07:51
  Yeah.
• 1:07:51
  What kind of show was that kind of?
• 1:07:53
  It takes place in Essex in like the,
• 1:07:56
  I don't know, the time of Henry VIII.
• 1:07:58
  And he's just imprisoned Anne Boleyn in the tower before beheading her.
• 1:08:03
  And it kind of news trickles to the countryside.
• 1:08:05
  But it's really about patriarchy and misogyny and how it infects everything and everyone.
• 1:08:11
  It's a brilliant, brilliant show.
• 1:08:13
  But not a comedy played for... Really funny, but also pretty dark.
• 1:08:16
  Okay.
• 1:08:17
  Yeah, like we were saying.
• 1:08:18
  So quite different from Six, then, the music.
• 1:08:19
  Do you know Six?
• 1:08:20
  Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:21
  I think it's different than that.
• 1:08:22
  I don't know it that well, but yeah.
• 1:08:24
  Are you going to try and catch any more West End shows?
• 1:08:27
  I don't know that I can just because I have so little time.
• 1:08:31
  But, you know, I got to see a couple of good things.
• 1:08:34
  Nice.
• 1:08:35
  You know, I only have one day off.
• 1:08:37
  Wow.
• 1:08:37
  I mean, and then I guess as a rapid question, after the show ends, like what have you got coming out next?
• 1:08:42
  What's next?
• 1:08:43
  I'm going to the Canary Islands, as I mentioned to you before, to film this movie for a couple of weeks.
• 1:08:48
  I can't say that much about it, but it's kind of a comedy horror movie.
• 1:08:52
  blood splattered kind of uh wild ride of a movie um and then i'll go back to new york and i have a new album coming out i'm releasing a new single in about uh two weeks uh maybe less i'll have to check with my manager um i have a show at the bitter end in new york city on september 13th and then i'm gonna roll out these singles and release the album next year um but i'm proud of the record great yeah
• 1:09:18
  Are you going to be doing any touring for that?
• 1:09:20
  Probably.
• 1:09:21
  But with a baby, it's just the negotiation around that is just hard.
• 1:09:26
  Yeah.
• 1:09:27
  Yeah.
• 1:09:27
  So I'll figure something out.
• 1:09:29
  But I have, I'd really like to come back to Europe and do some shows here.
• 1:09:33
  So I haven't been able to, you know, I, Gibson loaned me a guitar for my time when I was here.
• 1:09:38
  So I've been noodling at home and writing a new song and.
• 1:09:40
  My son loves me playing guitar to him, so I just like having a guitar around.
• 1:09:44
  But hopefully I can come back and do some shows here.
• 1:09:46
  That would be awesome.
• 1:09:47
  Yeah, man.
• 1:09:47
  Wonderful.
• 1:09:48
  Cool.
• 1:09:48
  Well, this has been such a blast, Josh.
• 1:09:49
  Oh, thanks for having me.
• 1:09:50
  I really enjoyed talking to you.
• 1:09:51
  Likewise.
• 1:09:52
  Thanks for coming on Half the Picture.
• 1:09:53
  Absolutely.