‘You learn from your risk’
Your favourite fool on Parks and Recreation is ready for spotlight
Before Ben Schwartz and Thomas Middleditch stride onstage to do long-form improv, the comedy duo always share a hug. “I love you,” Schwartz utters every time. “OK,” Middleditch often responds, sheepishly acknowledging his affection.
“What’s nice — though he had to drag me there, because I’m a man, you understand — is it just implies this sense of trust,” Middleditch says of the ritual. “That’s very Ben. He’s a real sap, but he’s a lovely sap.”
“You feel safe with him, and you like him,” says Billy Crystal, who starred with Schwartz in the film Standing Up, Falling Down. Greg Daniels, the co-creator of Schwartz’s next project, Netflix’s Space Force, says the actor “just generates comedy at you like a hurricane — but he’s also very vulnerable, and he just wears his heart on his sleeve.”
Raised in the Bronx by a music teacher mother and social worker father, Schwartz, who played the endearingly inept entrepreneur Jean-Ralphio Saperstein in NBC’s Parks and Recreation, had the virtues of honest work ingrained in him early. Before he was booking roles, selling scripts and packing theatres, he interned for the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe and worked as a page for the Late Show With David Letterman, pitching jokes for the monologue on the side.
Schwartz, 38, is still hustling. Standing Up, Falling Down and Sonic the Hedgehog, in which he voices the central speedster, hit theatres in February to favourable reviews. Last month, Netflix released a trio of acclaimed Middleditch and Schwartz improv specials. And the first season of Space Force, which he appears in alongside Steve Carell and John Malkovich, launches Friday.
A farcical imagining of the Trump administration’s new military branch, the series orbits around stubborn but sympathetic Space Force chief Mark Naird (Carell). Cast as F. Tony Scarapiducci, the Machiavellian media consultant who needles Naird, Schwartz relished the comparative simplicity of his place in the Space Force hierarchy.
“You show up as an actor, and you get to say Greg Daniels’s words and you get to act with John Malkovich and Steve Carell,” Schwartz says. “It was exactly what I wanted coming off of three years of developing and it not working out.”
If Schwartz felt handcuffed because of his commitment to a failed pilot called The Wrong Mans, one wouldn’t know it from his prolific and eclectic run of recent projects.
Schwartz also spent the past few years honing his long-form improv shows with Middleditch, which they regularly perform on tour. Setting out to bring exposure to the form — in which the improvisers use a conversation with an audience member to create a spontaneous 50-minute sketch — they filmed four shows last year.
Netflix released three of those performances in April, showcasing the duo’s knack for threading together freshly spun characters and narratives.
“It’s such terrific work,” Crystal adds. “When it hits, it’s great, and even when it misses, it’s fun because it’s dangerous.”
Even when he’s not onstage, Schwartz remains an improviser at heart.
“A lot of this art form is living and breathing and making mistakes. The biggest thing I’ve learned for myself from all of this, starting with improv, is you get out there, you take a risk, you fail, you learn from your risk, and you repeat. The more you do that, the more likely you are to find your voice.”