UNLIKELY PAIR, YES, BUT HARDLY AN ODD COUPLE
Hollywood’s newest funny duo talk about their long friendship, comedy and typecasting
If you made a Venn diagram of Mad
Men and The Hangover, it’s safe to say you wouldn’t expect much overlap (well, except for maybe the booze). But the fact is, Jon Hamm and Zach Galifianakis have known each other for nearly two decades, since well before either of them hit on the roles that made them famous.
Now, in one of this fall’s unlikeliest comic pairings, the two are costarring in Keeping Up With the Joneses, in theatres Friday. In director Greg Mottola’s action-comedy, a straitlaced suburban couple (Galifianakis and Isla Fisher) suspect that their glamorous new next-door neighbours (Hamm and Gal Gadot) may be spies.
On a recent afternoon in Santa Monica, Hamm and Galifianakis showed off the easy rapport and back-and-forth razzing of friends as they talked comedy, typecasting and trying to steer away from the middle of the road.
You guys go way back. When and where did you first meet?
Hamm: It’s been a while. I think it was in the late ‘90s at some point, most likely at (L.A. music-and-comedy club) Largo or at somebody’s house. Galifianakis: I had so many foggy days in the late ‘90s.
Hamm: We all did. But I do remember seeing Zach for the first time at Largo. It was a great era back then for a comedy fan. You’d go on Monday nights and for five bucks it was a murderer’s row of people who are now wildly successful but who were then just starting out: Zach, Sarah Silverman, Paul F. Tompkins, Patton Oswalt, Maria Bamford, Doug Benson. You hang around long enough and you meet people.
Galifianakis: I will say this: Some of us comedians would admit that we only like to talk to other comedians — and maybe even don’t like to talk to actors. Jon is not of that ilk to me. He’s a great actor, but he speaks like a comedian. He certainly doesn’t speak like an actor. He’s really funny, and he has a comedian’s mind.
That to me is the attraction: He is a comedian just as much as my comic friends are. (To Hamm) That’s what you texted me, right? Hamm: Yeah. Really good acting, by the way.
Jon, in 2008, you were one of the first guests on Zach’s Funny or Die talk show Between Two Ferns. What was that like?
Hamm: It was a very weird choice to have me come on that show. I think the only people who’d been on before me were Jimmy Kimmel and Michael Cera. At that point, Mad Men was not widely known at all.
We shot 90 minutes of footage to get three minutes of material in a garage in Hollywood. It was amazing. It made people not only look at Mad
Men a little differently but also look at me a little differently. I think from that came the opportunity to host
Saturday Night Live and do 30 Rock and all that stuff.
Galifianakis: So you’re basically saying that I launched your comedy career. Because I haven’t gotten a formal thank you.
Hamm: Hmm. You haven’t? Pairing you two onscreen, you’d expect that Jon would play the straight man and Zach would act insane.
But in this movie, you get to sort of take turns being the straight man and the one scoring laughs.
Hamm: The last thing I wanted to do was just be the guy who’s totally exasperated by Zach’s character. It’s boring, and what it really does is highlight the fact that you don’t necessarily have a character. What I think we both went into the movie hoping for was to just take it out of the middle of the road, to jerk it toward the curb a little bit every now and again.
Whether it was a joke or casting or pausing a scene to take in what’s actually happening because it’s so weird, throughout the process we were working with Greg and the writers and producers to say, “Maybe there’s a different way to get from A to B.” Galifianakis: Look, I’ve played obnoxious a lot, and there’s not a lot for Jon to do if I’m just obnoxious. I think what’s helpful is to try to find this other layer of people relating, instead of just jokes back and forth.
Comedians paint ourselves into corners all the time, and tastes in comedy change. The guy in The
Hangover was a really fun character to do, and it was easy to do.
But you have to find other things because audiences will let you do that for a little bit and then they’re like, “What else do you have for us, monkey?”