Nick Offerman offers his perspective with THR on the discourse about Alex Garland's 'Civil War' potentially causing real-world violence. Plus, he reveals if there were any discussions about Donald Trump during the making of the film.
00:00What did you think when Alex first came to you with this role of playing the president?
00:04I mean, I am very enamored of Alex, and I always hope that he'll have something for me to do.
00:12I was pretty surprised, to be honest.
00:15I was surprised the first time he called me to be in his show, Devs.
00:20But he has an incredible imagination, and he's able to take, you know, a potato face like myself
00:27and use his alchemy and his skills as a novelist to say,
00:34like, I'm going to take what the audience might expect from Nick Offerman,
00:39and then I'm going to turn that on its head in a way, or I'm going to use that against the narrative.
00:45So that perhaps you're like, oh, it's that guy.
00:48Oh, shit.
00:50And I think he does that with other actors in the cast as well.
00:54But I was just over the moon.
00:55And if he's making something, I hope he invites me to be in it.
01:00There's obvious comparisons to Trump here and obviously our political climate.
01:04How closely did you kind of want to play that?
01:07It honestly didn't even come up.
01:10It's so unrelated to any actual factions or politicians.
01:16Everybody, that's what I think is so brilliant about this film,
01:23is that everybody on any side of the aisle or any faction has a lot to say,
01:31and we're all immediately divisive and partisan in our conversations.
01:37Everybody's mad about those other jerks.
01:42And this movie transcends that and has none of it.
01:47It's about all of us, and I'm so grateful for that.
01:50I think it's so brilliant.
01:52It's so thoughtful of Alex.
01:53It would be so easy to make this movie and lay in some Easter eggs and, like, you know, some of this or that.
02:02But you would lose half your audience one way or the other.
02:05And instead, this is like a great novel.
02:07It's for everybody to say, oh, maybe heading towards war in our country is not the best route.
02:16Maybe we should reconsider the direction we're heading.
02:19And you have California and Texas teaming up together.
02:21So that seems to naturally kind of break down some of the logical kind of separation.
02:26I think so.
02:27I mean, I think that serves a few purposes.
02:30But one of them is to immediately say this is clearly not where we are.
02:35Like, this is not supposed to represent the world as it is.
02:39But I think it also serves to say the way the world is working these days, anything is possible and so quickly.
02:49I mean, things move and change so quickly.
02:52But, yes, I'm glad that California and Texas are not teaming up in any way anytime soon.
03:00And you guys shot this two years ago, and it's obviously now coming out six months before the election.
03:04What do you kind of think about the timing of that?
03:07I mean, there's an election every couple of years, from what I can tell from my mailbox.
03:17And so Alex wrote this in 2020.
03:22And so, you know, I think that any material like this, if he wrote it last year and it came out in two years,
03:32it's still going to be on the cusp of a midterm election.
03:34And so, again, I think that's what's brilliant about it, is that it transcends the ongoing politics, not just in our country.
03:45There are so many countries where fascism is knocking at the door or ruling the roost.
03:51And this film sort of addresses that tendency in all of human civilization, where it's like, if we keep up with our misinformation and, like, these people do bad things and their voters don't hear about it,
04:07then we're going to end up killing each other.
04:09Is that what we want?
04:10And some of the commentary around this film has kind of been, like, is this going to incite violence?
04:15Is this going to kind of rev people up?
04:17Do you have any concerns about that, that that'll start anything?
04:21No.
04:21Okay.
04:21I mean, no, I think that's part of our modern discourse.
04:26One of the problems with our modern discourse is people want that chewy, they're like, ooh, a movie called Civil War, let's sell a bunch of media hits on this.
04:37When you see the movie, you're like, oh, shit, it's actually just super intelligent and a kick-ass movie that none of us can legitimately get mad about because it's just a beautiful piece of art.
04:51You're like, oh, shit, it's just a beautiful piece of art.
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