Karl Puschmann talks to Ron Livingston about Loudermilk

Loudermilk is hilarious but doesn’t shy away from the impact of alcoholism on people’s lives, writes Karl Puschmann

“IS OUR

life something that we are in charge of or is it just something that happens to us and we get knocked around like pinballs?” muses Ron Livingston. “The truth — at least as our show presents it — is that it’s a whole lot of both.”

That show is Loudermilk, which has just begun its second season on Lightbox. In it, Livingston brings all his considerable likeability to Sam Loudermilk, a surly, cranky ex-rock journo and recovering alcoholic.

The character should be deeply unlikeable but he’s not. Livingston has a simple theory as to why.

“People have the idea of likeable all wrong. People take all their ideals of what a person should be — handsome, charming, successful, they should do a lot for charity — those are the people that we’re going to like,” he says.

“But if you think about those people, a lot of times we don’t like them. We maybe admire them or maybe are jealous of them or maybe wish we could be them. But we don’t like them.

“What draws us to people are two things: that they’re true to themselves and true to what they believe in. We all loved Tony Soprano even though most of us are against murder and extortion. But he was true to himself and he stood for something. There was a code that he honoured. And that’s the part that we respect.

“The second element is all it takes is a moment of people having good intentions and trying to do something helpful to someone else. That’s all it takes. When we see that in somebody it’s not so much that we like them, it’s that it reminds us of what an important part of the human condition that is. It makes us like ourselves a little more. We realise you don’t necessarily have to be successful or smart or goodlooking. You can be doing the best you can and meaning well and that’s enough. Those are the people that I like to celebrate.”

It’s as good a summation of his character as you’ll find. Because Loudermilk may be begrudging and rude, but he’s certainly trying.

“Yeah, at every single moment he’s doing the best he can. It just so happens that the best that he can isn’t very good,” says Livingston.

A comedy about a recovering alcoholic is a fraught subject matter, with many pitfalls and potholes to potentially fall into.

But the show deftly walks the line between being very funny and not shying away from the reality and impact of alcoholism on people’s lives.

“We try to push it as far as we can, push the comedy into places that are uncomfortable,” Livingston says. “We’re embracing the gallows humour that comes along with being a recovering alcoholic. There’s a real deep, dark strain of absurdity about it that if we didn’t go there we wouldn’t be respecting the truth. We wouldn’t be true to what the essence of it is all about. This guy is somebody who has not been at the reins of his life for such a long time and by his coming to grips with his addiction he’s been forced to take stock and do some deep work on himself.”

Livingston says it’s the personal conflict inherent in his character that he enjoys portraying.

“Getting to play the guy who’s the biggest sceptic in the world, who just doesn’t believe in anybody or anything, and also the guy who’s very romantic about the idea that people can take control of their lives and heal themselves and change. That’s a really fun paradox to bounce back and forth between.”

With Loudermilk being a former music writer and critic there’s a lot of references for music trainspotters to catch, especially from the grunge era the character covered. These, however, are wasted on Livingston, who says that era of music is not really his bag.

“I was not heavily into the music scene at that point,” he shrugs. “That happened in the 90s when I was just starting out as an actor. My focus was on acting and surviving. I felt I didn’t have any extra bandwidth to keep up with who had what new album or what band was out.

“But the part of it that I definitely do relate to is the guy who has a really strong opinion about something and feels the need to foist that on everybody.

“Because that’s definitely been a part of my personality for a long time,” he laughs. “Having strong opinions and feeling entitled to air them — but I’m trying to back off that a little bit.”

Seeing as we’ve been transported back in time to the 90s, I have to ask about Swingers, the little indie film that had a massive cultural impact and launched the careers of just about everybody in it, including Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn and Livingston.

“It’s beautiful,” Livingston smiles, “That was the second movie that I did and I made it with friends. I knew those guys. ”

The movie, which was written by, and stars Favreau, was semiautobiographical and was about a group of struggling young actors all chasing the Hollywood dream to varying degrees of no success. The emotional crux of the film comes from a heartfelt monologue, delivered by Livingston, that snaps his broken-hearted pal out of a deep, depressing funk. Turns out, that was one of the movie’s autobiographical parts . . .

“Jon wrote that based on something the two of us played out together.

“He had broken up from a girl and was down and I showed up at his place, opened his curtains and said, ‘buck up, you’ll be okay’. I think I bought him a loaf of bread and some cheese. And then he wrote it into a little gem of a scene. There’s something really special about Swingers because it captures what it was like to be in LA at that moment in 1996 trying to be an actor and it captures the essence of all the people in it. Because everybody is playing themselves.”

Which brings us to the most important question of all: with it now regarded as an indie classic, what’s the status on Swingers 2? The question’s greeted with warm laughter, a surprise revelation and then crushing disappointment . . .

“I feel like Jon might have actually written a Swingers 2 script somewhere along the way,” he chuckles. “But one of his agents was like, ‘nah… let it be’.”

‘‘ We’re embracing the gallows humour that comes along with being a recovering alcoholic.