Two or three days ago it’s the end of Christmas. I’m dragging my Christmas tree down. It’s like ten in the fucking morning. Legally I can start building a house at 7:00 A.M. I’m bringing a tree down. He comes out and sarcastic as hell to the point I didn’t even get it, but he just had this bizarre look on his face and yells, “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” Yelled that. I was looking at him like, “What the fuck? Is this guy out of his mind?” I realized he’s being sarcastic. He heard the tree coming down. I’m like, “Whatever.”
I go in the house. My girl’s like, “He was yelling again. Go down there and talk to him.” I’m like, “Fine. You want me to talk to him.” I go down there to talk to the guy. As I start walking up his walk he’s sitting there. I see this little kind of look of fear on his face. I didn’t go down there to have an argument. I was just like, “Listen, man, you’re always yelling up there. What is the problem?” He goes, “It sounds like she dropped a brick!” He just starts screaming at me. I say, “Look, we have hardwood floors. I came down here to work it out.” He says, “What does that mean? What is that, some sort of hip, new saying?” I swear to God.
I kept my cool. I kept saying, “Dude, I’m just coming down here to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” He just kept yelling at me. At one point he made a reference to my bad guitar playing. As sarcastic as hell, he says, “How’s your band? Ha, ha, ha.” Laughs.
I swear to God, if there is an afterlife I want kudos on this because I immediately wanted to be like, “How’s your fucking life? Really. Is this what you dreamed of? Huh? Who’s your last roommate, fucking Larry Fine? You fucking asshole.” But I have a line. I don’t yell at old people. I don’t.
“How’s your guitar?”
It really hurt my feelings because that was outside the realm of comedy. I don’t have musician walls built up. He got in. He fucking gave me an uppercut right to my feelings.
TOM SCHARPLING
There was a point where the toilet was leaking, and I’m just like, “I can fix that. I’m not going to call a guy at $150. I’m just gonna learn about this, do it,” and I did it, and I was way too proud of myself.
Then another toilet started doing it, like a year later. I tried to fix it. It was something different, and I’m just like, “Oh, boy. I’ve hit the ceiling.” The bar was very low on my ability to fix a toilet. I couldn’t. “I can’t get this chain. It’s still running. Oh, come on. I thought I had this aced. Fine. What’s the guy’s number?”
STEPHEN TOBOLOWSKY
I think a thing that helped me a lot, and it’s a weird thing to say, was sports. I loved sports a lot. The thing that helped me as a character actor is that I was a very poor basketball player and a very poor football player, but I knew from sports what it meant to be on a team. That sometimes you score, sometimes you play defense, sometimes you throw the ball out of bounds, but you have different roles to do.
Marc
Also, in sports sometimes you lose. My biggest regret in life is I was not taught some sort of reasonable sense of competition. For me, losing or being rejected is life threatening. If you like sports or you played sports, even if you weren’t good at it, I think the most important lesson is that losing is not the end.
Stephen
I think it was, and I believe it was Eugene O’Neill who said, “I hope always to have the courage to push on to greater failures.” I think it is important to understand that failure is not part of the bad stuff. Failure is actually a building block of the good stuff, if you have the courage to keep going.
But it can break you.
JOHN OLIVER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, TELEVISION HOST
There are moments in sports, especially when you’re a kid, that really hurt. I remember missing a penalty when I was twelve years old in a local competition and it probably took me three years to get over it. I just felt like at that point it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, even though it wasn’t.
A penalty shot is all built around individual failure. You are the person who has lost it in that single moment, that single kick of the ball. It absolutely broke me.
My only redemption for that was that years and years later, at the Edinburgh Festival, there was this charity football match that I played in, and I had to take a penalty, and I scored it, and I nearly burst into tears. There was an internal closure. No one knew, and they were probably concerned as to why in this equally meaningless game there was a guy who doesn’t cry, visibly on the edge of tears.
I scored another goal in that game and we won, and my dad was watching. My dad always wanted me to be a footballer more than he wanted me to be anything else. And as a joke I took my shirt off. Sometimes footballers do that celebration, so I took my shirt off and I ran up into the crowd and gave it to my dad as kind of a joke, and he was actually moved. I’ve never really seen him moved much in his life, and I think he realized, this is as close as I could give him to the son that he wanted.
I went as hard into sport as I could, but I wasn’t good enough. I can’t even believe I’m saying that out loud now, but I wasn’t good enough. I was never going to make my career as a professional footballer.
Marc
Exactly what year did you realize that?
John
Probably about three years ago.
TOM SCHARPLING
I mean the fear of success is not the thing for me. I think the fear of failure is almost all of it for me. I feel that looming. I’ve always thought it’s like, the amount of geniuses that are out there, there’s like five of them, maybe. Like Paul Thomas Anderson, that guy is on a different plane than all of us.
Then there’s the bottom 20 percent that’s like the Rupert Pupkins of the world that are just completely talentless and they have to learn that when the cards get dealt, that, “Okay, it wasn’t for me.”
That middle stretch, all that separates the people is just how hard you work and if you kind of keep your head in the game.
I was just like, “I can do okay in that mix. I know I’m not a genius, but I’m pretty sure I’m not like Rupert Pupkin, like I know I’m not a fraud.” It’s like if I do the best that I can do, then that takes care of a certain amount of it. I’ve always kind of operated with that in mind.
BOB ODENKIRK—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, COMEDIAN
The things that I’ve focused on and tried to do, even some of the ones that failed, I feel proud of them. I feel proud of the work I put into them, and the fact that I brought a certain personal vision to that.
The pride that I take in that, and the amount that I let that define me, is a little cockeyed, because it just doesn’t really matter what you do. It’s just what you do. You can only get a certain amount of appreciation from the public, or from the industry or your peers, and that’s wonderful, but it doesn’t sort of really satisfy anybody. You should pursue your goals, you should want people’s respect, you should want to respect your own work, but that isn’t who you are. Who you are is not what you do, and it’s not the accolades you get, it’s not the pride you take in your work, it is not your work.
The hardest part is realizing like, “Wow! Just so much of me is wrapped up in who I am.”
Marc
What do you feel when you’re actually able to detach from all of that?