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Steve Carell returns to TV comedy with “Space Force.”
As an actor, Steve Carell has shown remarkable elasticity.
He can be an outright dope, like the barely articulate Brick Tamland of “Anchorman,” or a lovable, misapprehended loser, like Michael Scott, his breakthrough role on “The Office.” Occasionally, he has been a sheer terror, like John E. du Pont, the murderous scion he played in “Foxcatcher.” They are characters that don’t share much more than the actor behind themand reveal almost nothing about him.
So the choices Carell made when he was helping to design his lead character in “Space Force,” his new Netflix comedy series, would seem to be telling. Given the opportunity to build a role from the ground up, he cast himself as the fictional General Mark Naird, a tightly wound but highly capable military leader charged with creating a new branch of the U.S. armed forces.
For all his time as a film and TV star, Carell, 57, remains a bit of an enigma. Almost anyone who knows him will tell you that he’s a nice guy — dedicated husband and father; generous, friendly collaborator.
But it turns out he does sometimes get the slightest bit disgruntled, at least with himself. Listen closely and you may hear it, in the course of a conversation about the making of “Space Force,” when you ask him how he decided who he wanted Naird to be.
“I wanted to find a certain humanity,” Carell said, his gentle tone giving way to strident selfflagellation as he heard his own words. “God, it is so overused to say things like that when you’re talking about comedy. Ugh, shut up. ‘Rooted in humanity.’ Give me a break.”
It was only a phone interview, but you could practically hear him rolling his eyes. Then a calm returned to his voice as he assured himself: “But I think things resonate more if there’s an underlying earnestness to them,” he said.
“Space Force,” which Netflix will release May 29, is highly anticipated: It is a series that Carell created with Greg Daniels, the showrunner of “The Office,” and it features Carell in his first ongoing TV comedy role since he left that NBC series in 2011.
But “Space Force” might not be the show viewers expect. It’s not a mockumentary and, despite its real-life inspiration, it’s not really a political satire. Carell, whose father fought in World War II and served afterward in the Army, wants the show to have respect for the military and to find its humor in the competing demands of its protagonist’s home life and workplace.
“We didn’t want to make the space version of ‘The Office,’” he said with a chuckle, “which is funny, because as soon as it was announced, that’s what everybody started calling it. But that was a conscious decision. We didn’t want to retrace our steps in any way.”
“Space Force” is also a window into Carell as a performer and creator — one who sees his successes somewhat differently than viewers do, who finds contentment in blank slates and who seems comfortable remaining elusive to his audience as long as his choices make sense to him.
He just doesn’t find it easy to talk about himself or to talk about why he can’t quite talk about himself. “It’s so weird to break down a show like this and talk about the components and preparation,” he said. “That doesn’t really matter to anybody except the actor. I just hope it plays.”
Though Carell might not want to acknowledge it, he possesses some industry clout. Almost a decade after his exit from the Scranton branch of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Co., Carell, an Academy Award nominee for his turn in “Foxcatcher” (2014), had been on a run of starkly dramatic and darkly comic roles: a father grappling with a son in the throes of drug addiction in “Beautiful Boy”; a disgraced television host on “The Morning Show”; Donald Rumsfeld in the Dick Cheney biopic “Vice.”
As he planned his next round of work, Carell said, “I just wanted to do something funny and silly and lighthearted. A straight-ahead comedy.”