THE BUZZ ON TIM ALLEN
The Toy Story star on his famous space-ranger character, cars, comedy, celebrating sobriety and looking for answers to life’s big questions.
Tim Allen wishes he were more like Buzz Lightyear, the animated space-ranger character he’s voiced in Toy Story movies for the past two and a half decades.
The quality in Buzz he most admires? “He stays in the moment,” says Allen, 66.
This moment happens to be a good one for Allen. He’ll be reprising his role as Buzz in the new, long-awaited Toy
Story 4 (in theaters June 21), which is just the most recent in his string of accomplishments. He’s also headlined in the
Santa Clause movie trilogy, Galaxy Quest and Christmas With the Kranks, and he’s a TV star from his popular roles on Home Improvement (1991–99) and Last Man Standing, which just finished its seventh season.
Allen will never forget seeing the very first Toy Story on the big screen in 1995 with co-star Tom Hanks, who voices Woody. He remembers telling the movie’s creators, “It resonates deeper than a child’s story. It’s an adult story about friendship and acceptance.”
And now, he says the new Toy Story 4 “expands everything” in the Woody and Buzz universe. Originally a tale of beloved
toys and their owner, Andy—who grew up and gave away the toys in a bittersweet finale and farewell in Toy Story 3—number four introduces more toys, like the character Forky, fashioned from a plastic spork, and inexpensive carnival toy prizes that still all mean something to somebody, says Allen. Listen for additional voices by Christina Hendricks, Patricia Arquette, Keanu Reeves, Jordan Peele, KeeganMichael Key, Joan Cusack, Timothy Dalton, Laurie Metcalf and Tony Hale.
“It’s really a big story about unwanted things and unwanted people, and everything belongs to somebody,” he says. “You know, nothing is worthless.”
A WISECRACKING KID
If that sounds deep, it goes with Allen minoring in philosophy in college. “I’m always looking for a big theme,” he says. Despite his decades of success, he assures fans on his Twitter profile, “I’m still that wisecracking kid from the Midwest looking for answers to life’s big questions.”
Allen was raised first in Denver by his mother, Martha, and his father, Gerald, an insurance salesman. He was the third of six siblings; he later gained two step
brothers and a stepsister. As a middle child, he learned “how to manipulate the system,” he says, laughing. “I’d see what my older two brothers would screw up, and I learned how to circumvent that.”
He remembers days full of adventure playing at a creek with neighborhood kids and sneaking into a sewer pipe. “We were constantly building forts and secret places.” He also remembers favorite toys: Legos, a moon base toy and a chemistry set that was taken away from him after he started a fire in the basement. (As he later jokes, “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican—I’m more of an anarchist.”)
Allen loved playing with military action figures and Army tanks his father gave him. His dad gave him other gifts too, like his sense of humor and a love of cars. Those carefree days came to a tragic end when Allen was 11 and his father was killed in a car crash, which forever altered his life and how he saw the world. “When my dad was killed,” remembers Allen, “we had a priest that said, ‘He’s in a better place,’ and I kind of snapped, like, ‘What are we doing here, then?!’ ” He’s been seeking answers to “big questions” about life and death ever since. His mom moved the family and remarried. “Of all the kids, I was the most trouble, he says. “I sort of put her through hell. I’ve had a lot of trouble in my life.”
THE FUNNY ART OF HEALING
After college at Western Michigan University, Tim served nearly two and a half years in prison for cocaine possession; two decades later, after he was arrested for a DUI, he did a stint in rehab. After his time in prison, he turned to stand-up comedy.
“Comedy is my coping mechanism. It always has been. I don’t really like people that much,” he says with a smirk. “To keep them at bay, you make jokes, and they laugh and walk away. I’m not comfortable with what I think and feel half the time, so I don’t wanna share that. I love families, I love women, I love gay people, I don’t have any opinion about that—me, personally— I love religion. So I’m gonna throw all this in. I’m trying to make people laugh. It’s a magic trick: ta-daaa! ”
And every project he’s done since—in TV and in movies—is based on his experiences, literally “an extension of things I’ve done in my life,” he says. His breakout “Men Are Pigs” comedy tour, before his movie and television stardom, was humorheavy with his love of tools and construction. It led to the development of his role as Tim “The Tool Man”Taylor on Home
Improvement. And the idea for his current character, Mike Baxter in Last Man
Standing, was inspired by a stint working at a sporting goods store that sold guns and fishing gear.
Today Allen lives in Los Angeles with his wife of 13 years, actress Jane Hajduk (they married in 2006 after five years of dating), and their daughter, Elizabeth, 10; he has another daughter, Katherine, 29 (from his previous marriage to Laura Deibel, from 1984 to 1999).
Offscreen, he and Hajduk love to golf and go to live theater. “I can’t believe I say these kinds of things.” He laughs. “Because when I was a kid, I’m doing everything I said I’d never do! But theater and golf, that’s what we like to do.” He shares his ardor for cars with daughter Katherine, whose production company films hot-rod builds around Los Angeles. He’s promised to build a car with her for so long, they began developing a show called Make Good, based on “when you promise your kid or your wife or your spouse or your friend, ‘I’m gonna do this.’ How many promises we make, we don’t keep?” he says. He and younger daughter Elizabeth enjoy going to films. “I just love being in a movie theater with her,” he says. “The only place you can throw sh-t on the floor! I don’t know what that’s about. You
can’t pollute anywhere, but at the movie theater, you’re done with anything, you just…” He makes a tossing motion.
Allen also travels a lot with his family, both abroad and to their cottage in Michigan to get away from Hollywood now and then. Just being in the same space with his family makes him happy. But he’s still striving to find just the right balance between work and family, because as of right now, “I don’t have it,” he says. “I constantly feel like I’m underachieving both. I think I work too much—I love my work—and I’m not 100 percent sure I engage with my family enough. My wife will disagree, because I’m really a lot different now than I’ve ever been. I’m still a work in progress.”
While he says he can see the day he might stop working, it doesn’t seem to be coming soon. Because in addition to his current movies and TV projects, he continues to perform on his latest national comedy tour, and he has two scripts in the works in which he plays a villain, like he once did in the 2008 martial arts film Redbelt. “I find that fascinating to [play bad guys],” he says. “I’ve dreamt about it since I was a kid.”
One area of his life he’s on top of is his health and well-being. “To be perfectly frank, I’m going on 21 years sober. That’s the biggest blessing in my life,” he says. He eats healthy food, hydrates (“It’s so L.A.”) and does cardio and weights at the gym. And he’s really into stretching—which he hates, he says, but “I don’t wanna be a wrinkled old man. I wanna walk out of here standing straight up. I don’t wanna be scared of falling.” He’s also learned how to meditate. “I can get myself so wound up in worrying or stress,” he says. He’ll sit and meditate for 30 minutes at a time, “and it just goes like this”—he snaps fingers—the stresses falling away one by one, going from “I’m worried about my health! I’m worried about my family!” to feeling less stressed and more present with every breath.
Which sounds, for what it’s worth, a lot like how Buzz Lightyear feels too, focused purely on the present moment.
“It’s all right here,” says Allen, explaining the peace he finds when he sits still and soaks in the moment. “It’s all gonna be all right. Everything’s all right, right here.”