Recently, I fell in love with Nick Offerman’s Scotch. The raw product, a Scotch whiskey with a distinctly American bourbon presence, aged 11 years in shaved-burnt red oak casks, is certainly drinkable — but the pro moves are on the rocks. Putting two fingers in the glass, then adding it. A splash of filtered room temperature water. This perfume exudes a floral romance, a sweetness hidden beneath its wild, musky undertones. I open with this because Offerman’s taste of scotch is also an apt metaphor for the work, public persona, and personality of Offerman himself, a writer, comedian, comedian, and actor who is somewhere between journeyman character actor and Blurs the lines. A fully fledged folk hero
Offerman — who is in Alex Garland’s new movie. Civil War, playing the president of the United States in the near future—often seems transported from a bygone era. she is has been described As an embodiment of “camp masculinity,” but surveying his entire body of work, you never get the sense that his hobbies and interests are in any way exaggerated or performative. He wrote a book. About hiking the American countryside with his friends, the musician Jeff Tweedy and the god of postmodern literature, George Saunders, and dedicated it to his idol, the agrarian poet Wendell Berry. He famously Owns and operates a “small collective” wood shop. East LA’s aforementioned scotch is the latest product of an ongoing collaboration between Offerman and Laguline, the most dead-coded, smoky, peat-y, aged ribeye-friendly scotch on the market. He might just be the least annoying unapologetic wife man on earth.
Offerman’s path to stardom was an improbable one. He emerged from an Ingalls-Wilderesque bucolic Midwest family, composed mostly of people devoted to service. “Librarians and school teachers and paramedics and nurses and a crafter,” he says. “Two craft brewers now, actually.” He got his break relatively late at age 39, when he landed what became Mike Shore and Greg Daniels. Parks and Recreation– seven seasons, all survived more cynical sitcoms full of hugs and learning. Before that, he spent several years in relative obscurity, working on stage and screen. The experience instilled in him gratitude for his later success, and from that gratitude, seriousness of purpose. This has made him a rare commodity in his industry: a humble movie star. Now he can boast an impressive resume of co-stars and top-line authors he’s worked with, and rarely works with them just once.
In conversation, he is respectful, almost to the point of absurdity. At one point I asked Offerman if there was anything. Civil War’s audience can learn from one of their political heroes and influences, the 26th US President, Teddy Roosevelt. He hesitates at first—”I wish I had a historian,” he says—and then suggests that he is not qualified to speak on Roosevelt with any authority, then moments later, in 1912. Refers to Roosevelt’s assassination attempt, and specific items in his shirt pocket (speech papers, eyeglass case) that slowed the bullet and saved his life.
Civil War This is Offerman’s second collaboration with Garland. In the film, he is the commander-in-chief of a country torn along partisan lines. By the end of the film, his White House is surrounded by Republican forces secession from Texas and California. We get a real glimpse into the character at the beginning of the film, when he rehearses a national address. The first take is full of thoughtful pauses, pauses, and a distinctive, rambunctious rumble that might remind you of a former liberal US president. As the rehearsals continue, the speech moves into an emphatic, declarative roar that reminds you of a former (and perhaps future) conservative US president, but Garland never seems to identify with the character’s political party, or his does not specify the name of Which Offerman was fine with: “I get my job in this movie, and it’s all in the script. I don’t even have to ask who this guy is, who he voted for. It doesn’t matter. No. I’m an allegory. I’m a trope in a work of fiction that serves a purpose in this novelist’s creation.
Credit : www.gq.com
