DIRECT TO THE POINT
With Ozark now in the past, Jason Bateman looks forward to life behind the camera
Jason Bateman reads the reviews. Even the negative ones. As he pulls his dark grey Tesla into a parking space at Dodger Stadium, he mentions a particularly savage write-up. There's no bitterness, more a respectful appreciation.
The review ran in The New York Times upon the 2017 première of Ozark, the dark Netflix drama in which Bateman stars as financial adviser-turned-money launderer Marty Byrde.
“There were good, there were bad, but what I did not anticipate was the creativity of criticism Mike Hale put together when he described me,” says Bateman, 53, his hair tucked under a Vin Scully baseball cap. “He basically said, this guy Jason Bateman is so boring in this character, he is like the guy who works the counter at the airport when you go to buy a ticket.”
(Hale's actual words: “... played by Bateman with the aggressive blandness of an airline gate agent.”)
He laughs, and it's not the gloaty, told-you-so snicker that would be acceptable considering what followed Hale's review: 44 episodes of Ozark, a loyal audience and several Emmys, including one for Bateman for directing. What matters is that the airline agent line was a joyous slice of writing. “He just shaped that sentence in such a beautiful way,” he says.
One thing the review didn't make Bateman do is question or change his performance. In the early days of Ozark, Marty couldn't be screaming or throwing his drink across the room. The magic would be in the build, the methodical nature of his reflexive calm even as he watched his business partner get shot in the head and his wife have sex on camera with another man.
“There's a reason Marty is not hysterical,” says Bateman. “Because he's the centre of all the madness. I knew why I was playing it like that and where I was going with it and how that, hopefully, is going to be satisfying by the time we get to the end of the season and end of the series.”
This approach to character-building has defined Ozark over five years of plot twists and as the series concludes — the final seven episodes arrived Friday — it's hard to imagine anyone snoozing during a screening.
Ozark tells the story of the Byrde family as it relocates from Chicago to Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks so Marty can get to work laundering millions for a Mexican drug cartel. The series is packed with violence, dark humour and the not-so-passive aggression between Bateman's Marty and Laura Linney's Wendy Byrde. Early on, the couple seems to almost believe that everything they do is meant to keep their family safe. By this fourth and final season, Marty's teetering master plan has begun to collapse and his impulses finally overtake his tranquilized id.
Again, there's no blurb-worthy self-praise from Bateman. He downplays his performance, describing his decision to step in front of the camera as merely practical. Overseeing Ozark with showrunner Chris Mundy demanded so much focus, he found playing Marty a “time saver.”
“I wouldn't have to direct that actor or get into his head,” says Bateman.”
On a crisp April morning, Bateman walked from his house, across Mulholland Drive and into a conservation area with hiking trails. He had already driven his girls to school and, later, he'd run his usual six miles on the treadmill above the garage. His other plans for the week would be done from a box seat behind the visitors' dugout. The Dodgers were playing the Reds in their home opener, and he would be there, consuming a couple of veggie dogs and scattering peanut shells. There was a time when Bateman got to all 81 home games, but that ended when he and his wife, producer and actress Amanda Anka, started a family. They have two daughters, Franny, 15, and Maple, 10.
Lately, Bateman has been rewatching Ozark with Franny, but that's mainly because he wants to catch her up before the finale.
Bateman started acting as a child. He made his debut on Little House on the Prairie at 11, playing the orphaned James Cooper Ingalls, before landing on Silver Spoons in 1982 to play Ricky Schroder's pal Derek. Bateman tried to keep up with his schoolwork but eventually gave up, skipping finals to film Teen Wolf Too and a hit sitcom, The Hogan Family, which ran from 1986 to 1991. During its run, Bateman got a chance to direct three episodes. He was just 18, making him at the time the youngest member of the Directors Guild of America.
But The Hogan Family didn't lead to more work. By his early 20s, Bateman found himself living alone — he no longer had his father, Kent, a director and producer, managing him — and trying to reinvent himself as much personally as professionally.
Bateman remembers sitting in a hotel room in New York in the early 1990s. The Hogan Family was done, and he was on the phone, grumbling to his lawyer about a lowball offer to make a pilot.
“And I said, `How come they're not coming up on this?'” Bateman remembers. “And he said, `You know, Jason, I just have to tell you — it might be tough to hear, but I've been your attorney since you were 12: You're just not as hot as you used to be.'”
A decade later, Mitchell Hurwitz was casting for Arrested Development. Bateman killed in the audition, and his portrayal of Michael Bluth would prove the rudder of the show. It also led to the creation of the “Jason Bateman character,” somebody with the “uncanny knack of playing the Everyman who lets others be wackier around him,” says Seth Gordon, who directed Bateman in Horrible Bosses and Identify Thief.
It wasn't Ozark's role that excited Bateman when he saw the first script from writer Bill Dubuque, best known for The Accountant. It was the opportunity to direct Ozark; that's why he agreed to star. (In the end, Bateman directed only nine episodes, including the first two and the series finale, because the shooting schedule didn't allow him to both act and direct more.)
Now that Ozark is done, Bateman doesn't want to talk about acting. His next job is Project Artemis, a $100-million-plus space movie he's directing for Apple that stars Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans. But Anka says she already sees a small, onscreen role for her husband.
“I don't want to not see him for five years acting, because he's special and I think what he does is hard to do well.”
There's a reason Marty is not hysterical. Because he's the centre of all the madness.