Samberg credits luck for his success
Brooklyn Nine-Nine actor made a name for himself on SNL
An Internet sensation, he is cited for re-invigorating Saturday Night Live. His digital videos, co-created with his two Lonely Island partners, have had nearly 1.5 billion overall views on their YouTube channel.
He has won an Emmy Award for music and lyrics for the video Dick in a Box, in which he was paired with Justin Timberlake. He won the 2014 Golden Globe Award for best actor in a TV comedy for his work as an offbeat detective on the Brooklyn Nine-Nine sitcom — after its first year on the air and after leaving SNL a year earlier.
He is also the show’s producer.
One might say Andy Samberg has the Midas touch. And he’s only 35.
“I’ve just been very lucky,” says Samberg, during a break in shooting Brooklyn NineNine.
Luck may have played a part in the rise of many showbiz successes, but in Samberg’s case, talent has almost everything to do with it.
Samberg gives credit to his Lonely Island partners Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone for their contributions to the videos that many feel put YouTube on the map and helped spike SNL ratings a decade back. But it is Samberg making the hilarious moves on camera in such acclaimed shorts as Lazy Sunday et al, and it’s Samberg for whom stars such as Timberlake, Lady Gaga, Adam Levine and Pharrell Williams, among others, line up to appear alongside.
Though Samberg may seem to be the ultimate New Yorker, he was born and raised in the academic environs of Berkeley, Calif. — though both his parents hail from the Big Apple and he went to New York University for a spell and stayed in the city for eight years.
“I had my share of crappy jobs before,” he recalls.
“When we first moved to L.A., I did a lot of temp work, filing papers or tying ribbons on Christmas cards at six in the morning. Or working in a borderline sweatshop for 10 hours at a time. Or taking the graveyard shift ... stacking giant towers of film reels before digital took over.”
Life changed for Samberg and his partners in 2005 when their digital videos caught the attention of the masses and SNL. His rise has been meteoric.
“Frankly, I’ve been surprised at every turn my career has taken,” the subdued Samberg says. “We were shocked when we got hired on SNL (Samberg as a writer/performer; Schaffer and Taccone as writers/directors). And I was definitely shocked to see how well the videos did.
“We were just so excited to be working there. We were such big fans of the show for so long, since we were little kids. So, just to get something on the air that was such a huge coup for us — whether or not people thought it was anything more special than anything else.”
Some had their doubts about Samberg switching from the gonzo world of SNL to the decidedly more mainstream Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Needless to say, Samberg’s cop-shop part is a stretch from Dick in the Box, but he appears to have taken to the part rather easily.
Samberg concedes that writing and performing on SNL was intense. The first part of the week was spent in preparation, and often he would write a video short on Thursday, shoot it Friday, edit it Friday night and during the day on Saturday, and present it Saturday night.
“I was a slave to my own desire. I loved making those shorts and I was incredibly fortunate in that I had an outlet for them. But after seven years of that and doing well over 100 of them, it definitely wore me down.”