Breaking up is hard to do

‘More numb frustration than ice cream-eating melodrama’

Near the beginning of People Places Things, teacher and graphic novelist — and recently single father — Will Henry (Jemaine Clement), poses a deceptively metaphysical question towards his students: Why does anybody need to tell a story?

“I should have known this question would come up eventually,” Clement laughs over the phone, when asked the same. “For me, I just like hearing stories. I don’t know why other people do — I guess you’re relating, or you’re escaping. I don’t know why I have come to do this. I get excited about it.”

As far as People Places Things is concerned, however, Clement is at least clear on what attracted him to its particular story. The film, which focuses on Will in the aftermath of the dissolution of his relationship with Charlie, the mother of his twin girls, is devoid of most of the tropes that Clement says have come to define the traditional rom-com: the meet-cute, the dramatic split, the heartwarming reunion.

“What I’ve found from doing Q&As about this film is that a lot of people relate to it,” he says of Will’s reaction to the breakup with Charlie which, as Clement portrays it, is characterized more by numb frustration than ice cream- eating melodrama. “Going through the situation — breaking up and having children — inherently, there’s a loneliness, and it’s a universal feeling. I think (seeing it) can help the process.”

Though with that being said, Clement is not sure People Places Things qualifies as a rom- com. Frankly, he’s not sure how to characterize it. “I read ( the script) and at first I found it pretty funny,” he says. “And then I saw ( director James Strouse’s) movie Grace is Gone and that’s a very sad movie, and I had to look at it again, and then I read it as a drama, and it easily reads as a drama. I wasn’t quite sure — I think Jim kept it open as to what it was, which is just a story about life.”

Which is not to say it isn’t funny. Clement’s performance is understated, often characterized by the type of deadpan wit familiar to fans of his breakout HBO series Flight of the Conchords. But while the New Zealand- born actor gets most of the screen time in People Places Things — he occasionally shares scenes with Stephanie Alleyne, Regina Hall and Jessica Williams ( in her first cinematic starring role) — he’d prefer to not be characterized as its leading man. “That has connotations of the golden days of Hollywood, like Clark Gable or something,” he says. “I’m the protagonist.”

Clement says he’s not being modest in downplaying his role in the film. “In fact, when I started coming to America, I’d have meetings and sometimes people would say we want you to write a movie for yourself,” he says, “and I was just like, I don’t want the kind of life that that might bring. There’s different levels. That’s not what I’m looking for professionally, and it’s not what I’m looking for in my life.”

Regardless, the actor has a big year ahead of him. Clement will return to HBO in 2016 with a recurring part on the Sarah Jessica Parker- starring series Divorce and is a star player in next year’s big screen adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Big Friendly Giant. And on the topic of a Flight of the Conchords film — a matter long discussed, but never confirmed — Clement has good news for fans. Well, good- ish: he and co-creator Bret McKen- zie are “coming up with different premises,” which is to say, it’s in progress. “I don’t know how likely it is, but we’re working on it,” Clement says. “Before we could only say we’d like to. Now we can say we’re working on it.”