DJ Qualls

Published Oct 15, 2024, 10:00 AM

Meet DJ Qualls, actor known for his memorable roles in films like "Road Trip “ and "The New Guy,” as well as popular TV series including "Supernatural," "The Man in the High Castle,” and "Z Nation." With a career spanning over two decades, Qualls has established himself as a talented character actor with a unique presence on both big and small screens. He also co-hosts a new podcast called “Locked and Probably Loaded with DJ and Kelly”. EnJOY! 

The Craig Ferguson Pants on Fire Tour is on sale now. It's a new show, it's new material, but I'm afraid it's still only me, Craig Ferguson on my own, standing on a stage telling comedy words. Come and see me, buy tickets, bring your loved ones, or don't come and see me. Don't buy tickets and don't bring your loved ones. I'm not your dad. You come or don't come, but you should at least know what's happening, and it is. The tour kicks off late September and goes through the end of the year and beyond. Tickets are available at the Craig Ferguson Show dot Com slash tour. They're available at the Craig Ferguson Show dot com slash tour or at your local outlet in your region. My name is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast is joy. I talk to interest in people about what brings them happiness. When I was doing late night television, one of my favorite guests was a gentleman that he was a kid at the time. His name is DJ Qualls. His name is still DJ Qualls. He's not a kid anymore. He's growing up to be one of the most impressive, lovely men I've talked to in a while.

Please enjoy this. Hello, Hello, Hey dude, how are you? I am so happy to see you. I can't tell you I'm to see you.

This is great. It's very happy for me. I haven't talked you know. I was just trying to figure out I haven't talked to you properly. I think in about ten years.

It's been ten years since I saw you.

Oh my god, you were lovely when I came out in two twenty twenty. Messaged me and we chatted. But I haven't seen you in forever. Yeah, I remember that. It was funny.

I remember because you were like you were taking a little hate for becoming for coming out. This is like, I'm like, what is this nineteen six? Because these are something in this correct, That's the thing.

The thing is, it's not surprising though, because I you know, I'm from the South, I understand, I understand the world. But it also was a point in my life where nothing, none of that felt like anything. It just after a while you're like, it doesn't matter to me, none of this really matters, And and a lot of that spilled over into how I feel about my career, my relationship to Hollywood, Like it really was this time of my life, and I'm like, I think a lot of this is the source of my unhappiness, and I don't want to do this anymore.

I did the same thing, same for me. Yeah, dude, I.

Thought about you during this. You were like, what's the goal of this?

To come and be miserable like a lot of people in this industry are, And I'm like.

I don't.

But the thing is, I'm not good with transitions, like and change is hard for me, Like I still have a Hotmail account and so like I it's very hard for me, Like I now have I replaced my twenty two year old car this last week because it was dying. And but and now I have a car that I'm afraid of, Like it's there are no buttons on it, it's all computer screen.

But it's really it's not. It's the change of things.

Like I get really nostalgic and overly connected to things. And I think what I was really dragging behind me was this childhood idea of what Hollywood would be like and people loving me, And you get addicted to that until one day I realized I was like the people making these choices whether or not to validate me or fulfill my dreams or really provide me with. What I was attaching myself worth to was we're nbas from Harvard, like these people think they're creatives. And then I really started seeing things. And here's the thing. It's not that I'm never going to do this again. I'm still doing it, but I don't have the same emotional connection to it. I show up every day like it's my opus and I'm still doing it. But I don't care if you don't want me to do your project, and I'm not going to jump through a thousand hoops for you because I've proven myself.

Right, I go. I was talking to Tom Lennon about this really recently because I got asked to do a chemistry read on some kind of thing that Hulu were making, and I'm like, no, what do you mean? No? Is that it's not a chemistry read? You want to audition me? It's a purpley. I'm not doing that's right and uh And they said, well if you don't, if you don't do the chemistry read, they're not going to offer you the part, and I'm like, okay, that's okay, you don't have to offer me the part. I'll be all right, you'll be all right, you should be great. I'm just not I'm not going to do that for you. I'm not going to create a power dynamic which allows you to treat me like that. It's not it's not gonna happen. No, And I get that sometimes you have to do that. And there's a lot of people would do a chemistry read but Tom in facts and good for them. Yeah, fine, but you have to do was write for you? I really do.

I mean I I feel that as well.

I remember talking to you back in the day and we've talked backstage a little bit too, and we didn't talk anything about you coming out. I don't remember having any conversations about you worrying about coming out. We talked about unhappiness and about it squirming in Hollywood and not quite knowing how to make it because look, I don't come from show business people either. I don't come from that world. And I had an idea about it too, that when you see behind the curtain, it's a little different.

It is, and then you realize that their aspects. Here's the thing.

It's given me so much like my love home, but it's been over the world. And being famous is fucking awesome. I love it because people are happy that you're there. What a great gift to you, and so so many beautiful things. But the thing is, after you play it for a while, the person who doesn't get absorbed by it or into it. For me, knows when to get the hell out and not doing this anymore and getting myself worth caught up minute, and that was a big thing to me. And so by the time I worked around coming out like I'd worked so easily for twenty for almost twenty years, and then it got hard. All of a sudden, things that I would be offered I was asking to read for and I'm like, well, I'm not doing that because I've already done that. But then it it's And then I looked around and realized that I was not in a relationship. I don't know many people because I just moved back from Canada. I've been shooting. I was on a man in the high Castle there and la is so transient and this is where I lived. I was like, I don't know anybody, and I'm like, so I've given away all of that, and yes, I've gotten so much from it, but the fundamentals, like going to they're not going to be here. I'm clearly not going to be here when I need them. Or it's so easy for the system to turn its back on you. And so I was like, well, I want to build something for myself. And I started when I started thinking like that, it the shock of not being chosen were off pretty quick. Yeah, But then I started saying little insidious things like I was up for a job.

Girl.

Mordatorio did this Netflix thing, this cabinet of curiosities, and he told them to offer it to me and they asked me to read for it, and I said no, But they did it to get me cheaper, to make me think.

There was a bunch of other people in the mix. That is so gross. Yeah, but you know a lot of stuff now is difficult. Look, things change. I don't know if it's better or worse. But there was a time, I think in Hollywood where no, these executives have always been there. There's always been the soulless money people executive, but smattered amongst them were executives who really cared who really people that really gave a shit about it and really wanted to be involved and wanted to make good stuff and really gave They would never use the word product about what they were making. They would and and I think they probably still exist, but there's a lot less of them in the mix now, and I think it shows on what work is around and what and what is getting made as well. I mean even just as a consumer of entertainment, I'm like, we got I got five hundred channels of fuck you, you know.

I mean, people can feel it, People can really feel it because I am a fan first and foremost, Like I love the magic of this and I don't find a lot of magic anymore. And I don't think it's because I'm so jaded, because I worked very hard to still have clear eyes about things.

I think I was worked with a cinematographer called Join the Boorman. He's a great cinematographer, and we were taking a shot on a film that we were doing, and we got this show. It was like, it's a bit of a kind of like running into the ocean thing, and it was okay. It was an okay shot, and it was getting the late in the day and everyone was a bit worried about time. And I said, did we get it?

John?

And he said, yeah, we got it. It's okay. And I went, what are you saying? And he went, it's okay. I said, he said, but is okay? I said, well anybody notice? He said, well we don't. No, it's only we could have done better, and and he fail. And I feel this too that if you don't do your I mean, you can get away with it. You can make fucking Emily in Paris and everybody will be fine. But it's awful.

It's it's awful.

It's soulless, and you should make find a way to you don't have to make pride and prejudice again. But somebody can write something.

But what makes it worse is when you beat your brains out begging people for the right to make okay. And that's when I was like, what am I doing? Like I was in hustle, and followed I've gotten to do so many amazing things and they came easily because I was trusted and I was trusted by other artists, and so then I started, I mean, it was this took two years. It took two years of grieving sort of like not knowing I was grieving because my life was changing.

How I identified was not there anymore.

Did you ever think you were straight? No? No, no, no no, no, I know that right, so you weren't really, I mean you knew you were, right, I mean, it wasn't like you were.

No. Here's but here's I knew that I was gay since I was nineteen years old. And they're only related in the fact that when I realized that I'd been given my life to something that couldn't love me back, when I really realized that in the sort of tangible terms, that's when I realized, well, I've also sold this away, this part, this part of myself away or I mean, I don't think I necessarily misled anybody. But here's the thing. At my very first press junket, the executive producer who was a massive director from the eighties, told another actor he almost didn't hire him because he thought he was a faggot. And those and that taught me in the year two thousand, everything I needed to know about Hollywood and if I wanted this, shut my mouth. And that is the truth, and that that existed until a few years ago.

This is New Wow.

I mean I've fared. I've heared slurs like that used around as well. But it the idea that you would say I wouldn't hire someone because I mean, that's but it's the old school boys boys club, right, You're so used to being able to do whatever the hell you want, and he was such a huge guy entertainment.

But it really just taught me that if I want this, if this dream that I had since I was a child, I wanted to go after I had to. There's certain things that I just couldn't do, Like I couldn't take my boyfriend to the premiere the New Guy, Like it just wasn't going to happen.

And then you get used to that. And I don't think.

I don't think that I have any sort of damage from it, other than the fact that those were the choices that I made. I made them willingly. I stay behind every choice I've ever made because I made them. But the system was fucked. It was very odd. I made a movie in nineteen ninety nine. I love this movie.

It totally flopped, but it was a movie called The Big Teas and the Big Te's. It was about competitive hairdressing and it was about a hairdresser from Scotland that came to La seeking this fame and for it basically and hijinks and SIU And I'm very proud of the movie. It's a very affectionate movie. It's a very sweet movie. And it got rated R because the lead character I played a gay man. Now, there were no gay sex scenes in it. There were no sex scenes in it. There was no there was no there was no violence or there was no hard language, there was nothing. It was just that the main character was unequivocally a gay man who was in a relationship with another man and they talked to each other and they had a sweet relationship, and there was It wasn't really part of the story. It was just who he was and they it was an R. If you look at this thing, it wouldn't even make PG. Thirteen today. And that's what he That's twenty five years ago. And that is not that hung ago, I know.

And the thing is, I'm fully cognizant of like how things are so much easier now, but Craig after like in twenty twenty one, everything I was being offered was a who falls apart because he left his moisturizer at home and.

I'm like, I'm not doing that.

I'm not going to do that, and so that's so fucking lame.

That's great.

But here's the But also I completely like I also realized, like I knew something told me when I first got here, Like I was in young Hollywood. Young Hollywood was very small. It was you know, we got jobs from going out. It was one bar one night. My friend got a gap campaign with Joni Mitchell from going to hide one night. That's what you did. But I saw people blowing through money, and I was like, this cannot sustain itself.

This won't sustain itself.

So I started putting like during during note like after nine to eleven, I spent three months chainsmoking on Ebaye buying gold bullion between two fifty and three fifty an ounce. We are from a very similar place. I know I spoke anymore, but I still have the gold.

Oh my god.

I'm honestly, I'm a survivalist. I bought an airstream trailer on Facebook Marketplace. It's in my house and I'm like like, so it's at my house and I have it and I'm ready, and I'm like stalking it with things my wife's like, what are we stalking this form? Like you know, you never know, you never know.

I think part of it also is that I don't be caught out, you know what I mean. And also, once you've been poor and you've been in a situation where you're no longer poor, you would think that you would feel relief, but you feel fear this is going to go wait for me and be taken for me. And then I saw so many of my peers lose it all by doing crazy stuff because there's no governance, there's no mentoring.

Right well, when you get given you know, large sums of money and success and privilege when you're very young. Now that it honestly didn't really happen to me like that. It was kind of a slow burn. And but the but I saw it. I saw it a lot in Hollywood. I saw it with euro Peers. I saw it when there would be people that would come through when it's what I was doing late night, there'd be people coming through and you would go, oh, man, you've got to try and get better people around you. This is going to go bad fast, and yeah, you saw it all. Yeah, and some of them dead and some of them didn't you know. And some of them made it, some of them are dead. I mean, it's crazy. It's unsupervised in any way. There's no real structure to it. But at the same time I wonder because the you know, I look at the kind of freedom and the openness about certain areas of life now, and there are other parts of it where I kind of go, is this good? Like the amount of bit Middler said a thing years ago that I always kind of hung on to, which was she said, the saddest thing about success is finding out that not everyone is happy for you. And when that happens, and you find out when the and when social media came along, you find all of the people that are not happy for you are right the click. Yeah, they're there and they're there to let you know. And I kind of I understand that. I feel shot in freud. Sometimes. I sometimes see people that I don't like do well and I'm like, oh, come on, I feel that. Do you soon feel it?

Yeah?

Occasionally?

But I fight it though, because me too, Yeah, because the difference is now, like I understand where it comes from, and I really do fight it, but of course I feel it. I said something the other day on my podcast that after I said it, I was like, that's not who you are at all.

But I was caught up in this.

Thing and there was a little thing still in my memory from another time ago, and I was like, oh man, and is disappointing when I do it. But also the thing is I realize that I am I'm not who I'm going to be, but I'm better than who I was, and so I do give myself. But also I'm an easy apologie. It's really easy you apologize, Yeah.

I think. I think once you start doing it agains easier. I go into a bed during late night. I have to apologize for stuff every night, and then I was like, you know what, Okay, I find I'm sorry, And at first I meant it and then it didn't mean it at all.

And then I can't apologize for stuff I don't mean.

I apologize for stuff. I do mean stuff I don't mean. I could run for I could run for office. I could apologize for ending. I can say, I can say, no, it wasn't me I was I wasn't me at all. I wasn't there. But the truth is that when I it's kind of like that thing when I really apologize. I know, and you know, and you can tell what I mean it and it's it's uh. But saying something that is kind of awkward or weird, it's just a human thing. It's not like, of course, you know, to be judged on one thing you say is a little it's a pretty odd standard to hold anyone to.

Late night is a scary world because you can say something and like I remember early like you were the first ever late night hosts who didn't pre interview me. You did it once and we had such a good chat and we went so far off the scripted cards or whatever. You were like, we don't have to do this anymore. And then you go on and you feel safe and you feel like if you get into something, you'll be guided out of. As opposed to this thing you have to get back to these stories and you're like, oh my god, I'm so far away from IM supposed to be, so you're never truly yourself.

Yeah, and that's what I loved.

But I couldn't imagine if I was on every night, the kind of stuff that would just randomly come out of my mouth.

I'd probably be held responsible for.

Yeah, I mean I took a few hits, no doubt about it. But the truth is, though, I think the atmosphere of them was a little less frantic because it wasn't about filling the space. You know, you didn't have to fill every website. You didn't have to post every ten seconds about some kind of outrage. So you know, if I say the wrong thing about something in twenty ten, there wasn't enough of a social media appetite for someone to go looking for it. But if it's no I mean, look, we could say this the wrong thing. You can say the wrong thing on a podcast right now and it's like be tabloid bang and then. But it's also gone like that, but then it's always available to be found digitally. No one has to go through and find the microfiche from you know. All they have to do just put your name out and then put it by date and it all comes up.

But I do feel though, like on social media when people say things like I feel lucky that we came up in a time when somebody said something bad about us.

It was in the New York Times.

Yeah, that really hurt because that was official the New York Times.

One said about me human bookmark. DJ Quall shines.

I go, you know what, when I go on when I first start The New York Post said, when I first started Late Night, he said, he's awful and it.

Looks like he's wearing a wig.

And I'm like, there's one thing I know about me, the only thing I know about me. I've got great fucking hair. That's the only thing I know about me. It looks like he's read. It's funny the things you go. I that really got to be like, fuck you. Yeah. I think when The New York Times says something bad about you, it's like when your parents go, I'm not angry, I'm disappointed. That's why he's like, ah.

Yes, but really, I mean, can you after you've been dragged through the mainstream press when it was in print, can the Internet really hurt that that unless they're coming for your belongings or your family or your your reputation.

I always felt like Hollywood and the Internet were very could be treated in the same way. Then Late Night told me that, I said, demystified me for me the following way. It's only dangerous if you take it. See, if you don't take it seriously, it's not really there, and it's kind of like it's that Nietzschean thing. If you look into the void, fine, but remember the void looks into you. But if you don't look into the void, you can avoid it. And that's kind of how I feel about it. I refuse to participate in any interaction with media beyond what I think is acceptable for me. Like you were saying, like right at the beginning when you were talking about no, I still do it. I still love it. When I show up, I'll give you my best. But I'm not showing up unless I'm going to do that right. And I think it's it's funny now because I feel like that's part of the growing up process. And like even talking to you now, because when I met you, you're a young man. You were like in your in your mid twenties, you really were.

You were a kid, and and it's like to see someone it's appropriate for someone to go from their mid twenties to the mid forties and to change their mind, you know, and go No.

I feel differently about that now. I don't. I'm not a kid anymore. I'm not gonna And what I think happens is, especially if you get success when you're young, is that some people perhaps who are not as emotionally gifted as you, are emotionally diligent as you. They get stuck. You get stuck in what worked for you at that time, and you try and keep in that time, do you know, I mean, try and stay in the same place. But you can't. It's against the law of nature. You can't stay in the.

Same Change is coming, and it's coming for you.

Yeah, all the time changes the law of God's mind, and the resistance to it is the source of all pain. I love that.

That's awesome. I'm going to remember that.

Yeah, I like it too. So so let me ask you this, Was there any kind of because I've always thought of you as someone who has quite a kind of searching personality. You're quite a seeker. You're you look for reasons, you look for that you analyze both yourself and the situation around you. Right, I think that, I mean that's my impression of you. Was there some kind of spiritual or emotional switch that flipped when I'm not talking necessarily about coming out, but I'm talking about the change of attitude that you that you're talking about. I think.

I think something happened to me where my my grandfather always told me this, when you don't know what to do, don't do anything until that doesn't work for you anymore, and you will know. And all of a sudden, just my heart how I felt about things, how I felt about myself. Also during the same time, I have problems looking in the mirror, and like some days I would have to, you know, brush my teeth with the medicine cabinet open. Just I had some days where I just couldn't with myself, and then it stopped happening, and just there were these gradual changes and where you released the care. And I had this really pivotal moment in the shower where I know where I do all my thinking in there. And so I got asked to grand marshall the Christmas preade in my little town where I was horrifically bullied, and this was not that long ago, and I had this, I played this little drama out in my head where I was like, you know what, I'll tell them the fuck off and this, this and this, and then I was like, what are you doing. You're holding sixteen year olds responsible for their behavior. You are a grown up. You've been carrying this your whole life and I'm pretty sure it's dictated a lot of your choices and behavior and.

What that happened.

You know, every and every sort of every thought, every mistake has been made before you by other people who are older than you, are on a different path. But you can never really in turn anything until it applies directly to you. And in that moment, I was like, this is I don't want to do this. And I released it, and I'd never released anything before, and I remember exactly how I felt. I felt so light, I could float out of that shower. And I don't feel it anymore. It's so crazy.

It's great though, it's freedom. I always think the best revenge is no longer want revenge. That's the best revenge. You know, say revenge is a Dutch chef cold to know. The best revenge is no revenge at all. It's like, I don't want to revenge. I forgive you, you said up a bench, goodbye.

Yeah.

But it also makes it intellectually makes no sense because I know for a fact that when you get successful, the people in your past misremember your dynamic.

Yeah and so, and I know this, and I know.

This at the same time when I'm thinking all of these things about being put upon.

And that's very true. Then it just.

Changed for me and it was all these things just started occurring to me, like and the cool thing about it was one of it was angry. None of it was like I've been used and whatever. Like, No, all the decisions were mine. I've done all these things, and I've certainly profited and had a great life from it. But I don't want to do this anymore in this way. And that's the thing. I know that I can do what I want to do, but just in the way that I want to do it, and if I don't, if I can't, then I won't.

It's really that simple.

It's really funny, is I had a thing happened to be in a similar nature right before my mom died. She was in a care home. She's very ill for a while and she was in this care home in Scotland, and when I got there, I was talking to her. She was cognitively she was fine, but she was physically, you know, falling to pieces and needed round the cloud care. And I was in this went to visitor in the care home and she said, let's change her name. Actually I'll edit this out. See missus lady who was mean to me when I was a kid is in here. And the lady the teacher who had beat me horrifically when I was a child, and that I like a lot of you know, stuff i'd come out of. It was in the care home and she was and she was suffering from Alzheimer's and she had very bad Alzheimer's. And my mom said, you should go in and see her, like, I don't think so, man. I think I think whatever that was, it's gone, and I don't want to go in and lord it over this poor woman.

Who is you get it from that pushed it down the stairs?

Yea, the very definition of it, as well as Look, I don't I'm not a doctor. I don't know a law about Alzheimer's, but I know if I won't get there, she's going to have no fucking clue I have. So it's like, what the hell? But it's funny. My mom was like, no, you you you should go and give it a piece of your mind. I'm like, I don't think so, man, I think it's all right. It's an odd thing. It's the idea of holding on resentments. I used to think it was a kind of a Pollyanna thing to try and free yourself from that. But it's no, it's mental health, it really is. It's like, no, I'm not gonna hold on it to make you feel more comfortable, or because I was mad ten years ago. I'm not mad now. I mean, I can get to it, but I can release it, let it go.

But we also do it from behavioral modeling too, because it's what people that came before us do, and we're told to always get the last word in get your own back. We're taught that, and it takes I think maybe if I didn't leave my community, then maybe I'm from a small town and I feel like being exposed to the rest of the world without sort of the net that reinforced that kind of behavior. Yeah, I think that helped me sort of get to where I am or where I'm going.

Do we ever tempted to move back? Never?

What's so great about not belonging is that you leave and.

You don't have to go back because there was nothing there for me. My high school farms into the casket factory and the pajamas factory, and pajamas closed down.

In a fucking country song, crack so fucking bleak. It's fantastic. I love yeah, but it's great. It's such a gothic picture. It's fabulous.

I think that. I think also the freedom that comes from it's really it feels to me very therapeutic to laugh at at stuff like that as well. It kind of it doesn't I think. I'm sure that's why I ended up getting into working mostly in humor, because it's such a fabulous weapon to free yourself. Like you know, it's why I'm sure you know, whenever like the Hitler's or the Stalons or the demagogues come along, they always go after the humorists first. It's always you can't make jokes about that? And you go, well why not? You know, it's, uh, you can't. You can make jokes about that, and when when you But if you make jokes about things, you kind of emasculate it a little bit. You make it a figure of derision, do you know, a figure of fun. And you can do that. I think you can do it with your own history. When you laugh at your own history, it becomes less threatening somehow, do you know what I mean?

I mean, that was my I think that was my security blanket or my armor when I moved out here and started doing work.

He's an actor.

It's like, I'm going to say all the things before you say them. You don't think I know what the merchandise I'm trying to move looks like you don't think I don't know myself. And I did it, and I did it, but I did it at a defense and now I'm able to do it with it. We're like, Yep, this is exactly what happened. This is what's going on. Like it seems different. The motives are different, right, because it's not scorn of pain?

Do you do you feel that you know, like the movies that you were doing early in your career is hilarious movies, funny performances, and in these like kind of they're not slapstick movies, were quite broad humor movies, and people who people who love those movies sometimes, I think, not necessarily for you, but just for anyone. If you do a joke and somebody likes it and then they find out later that you're not like the joke you did, they feel a little betrayed by it.

It is so crazy that you're saying that, because that's what I got as I've gone forward in my life. People meet me in public way before coming out, and people meet me and find out that I'm not that, and I try to explain to them, no, no, no, no no. I made you think that on purpose because it's funny and it's for the movie. But I was I was the reason why you thought that was funny. But it's not who I am. And so many times people are like, after Hustle and Flow, everybody thought that I could make music. And it's kind of a little bit flattering that people think that I am the person that I play. But here's what I wanted to say to people. I played a virgin like twenty seven times. I've been famous like for like seven years at this point. You don't think I'm one person would have sex with me. I'm on television. Yeah, it's a.

Very It's a very odd thing, though, because I think that people do get attached to it in a way. With John, I always thought, Look, the example is fairly recently, was what happened to Ellen DeGeneres that you know it's like, oh, she's not very nice. I don't know Ellen DeGeneres at all. I was on a show once or twice, I think, But you don't know someone because that you're on their show, you know that you're going to show you league. And she was perfectly nice. And then it turns out apparently she wasn't as nice backstage as she was on the show. And I'm like, uh, yeah, it's because she's doing her job. Yeah, you know, she's pretended to be nice.

Yeah, like everybody else in the Hollywood, you have to be also her job.

You can't.

You can't go on a daytime talk show and bitch or talk about things that are going wrong.

People don't want to see that.

And and the thing is they also don't like I knew when I did Road Trip, my first movie, Todd Phillips, you know, he went on to direct The Hangover and The Joker.

It was his first movie too.

I realized that if I allowed myself to be the butt of the joke, my whole career was over. There's a kid from American Pie who was the butt of the joke and didn't work much beyond that. I knew, and also knew that we lost the movie. So I was like, there's a way to do this where I'm not being shot upon, that I'm being celebrated. And I still get to do all these things that you want me to do. I was really really aware of this, and as I as my career came along, I started to see, like, there's a role I could take that's enough, like that it's going to pay me this big amount of money so that I can go away and do something else. So I was a I think part of I think I've sort of benefited a lot from insecurity and from being sort of made fun of and all these things that were going on in my head because it allowed me to to first of all, insulate myself from my career, but also to be a good storyteller. I'm like, going for the joke and making fun of myself is first of all, not good for me in the long term, but also that's not what we're doing. We're telling we're telling hero stories and redemption stories, and it's.

Not that, and it's too easy to go for that.

And so I I think that I made some wise choices and knew one to take the money. The only time I didn't, I got offered Scary Movie two for two million dollars. I've never made that before or since, it's never been offered that. But my character had to suck his own dick. And my manager says, you're not the kind of guy that could do that and walk away from it. And he was right, I am not the vessel that can tell that story and recover from it, all right.

That look just as go to say can you can you do that?

Because nobody I tried, without try, every every man alive has tried.

Yeah.

It blew my mind the offer though, and and but then it was explained to me there are certain things that you have.

You haven't set that up for yourself.

You've not You've said you've gone the opposite route in like not being being the butt of it, and you're not the physical shell or the personality that you created that can endure that. And he was right, and so yeah, he yes, Brian Doggins, he's my manager. So when I first came out here, everybody tried to like Brad Gray. I met with him when he was at burl Stein Gray and they were like, we'll get you the young Hollywood cover of Vanity Fair and I'm like, how could you promise me that? And Brian he now runs artists. First, he had a handful of clients, him and Paul Young, and he was like I don't know.

I can't get you that, but I think you're going to work.

And I believed him because he wasn't lying to me, and he's been my only manager in my whole career. And so instead I did hustle and flow, which is a career highlight, and I'm.

So happy that I did that.

But I couldn't see around it because the money was my redneck mine was blown. I didn't realize that agent, manager, business manager, publicist, accountant, everybody. I didn't realize, you know, the half of it I didn't think about. That didn't occur to me because the number was so huge. And but and then something interesting happened as a result of that. My father found out and called me lazy, and we got into a massive fact.

My father was the welder.

It was a welder in that casket factory for forty years he was.

And so you found this out.

But look, if you're a welder in a casket factory, your kid gets off for two million dollars to suck on deck, and you know he's tried to do it anyway, kind of like, why what are you doing? Why would you do that?

You're crazy?

So given that you have I mean very clearly, you know, matured and and I'm very happy for you. You seem so much more inside your own skin as when we first met. Is that what what are you looking for? And I what what kind of like sails your boat? I love I love making things. I form a production company.

I've we've finished production on our first movie, and we've done it ethically. We've hired people that we had no business getting crew members, like our production designer did La La Land, and everybody worked for three hundred dollars a day. And because they like what we're doing and we are we are not we're doing first dollar splits like we want to be ethical and make things that we want to make the way that we want to make them, so that feels good. The podcast. I have a podcast that's getting a footing. We've never done a dollar of advertising, nobody, I mean, but the word of mouth.

We're going twenty percent month over month.

And it's just my space to say exactly how I feel and what I want. And it's not formatted. We don't have guests yet, it's just me and my friend Guess. Guess is a terrible idea, I.

Know, I fuck, it's their whole world right now, you know what to say, you'll be soon.

Well, the thing is about guests is that it's great when you get them. But everybody, and look, I remember this from Late Night and everybody I've talked to the do show is about guests. So it was like, you get a guest, and then you have to get another guest, and you have to get another guest, and it's always like people want to do the show, but you know, they got things to do. And I think if I was doing a podcast again and that might after this, I wouldn't have any guests.

It's freeing because first of all, it's well, it's on our own schedule and you can have the other things going on in the world and still find time to do this. But also just the therapy aspect of it, where you just get to talk about how you feel about stuff you know, and somebody will will bring up something that will reminds you of the story from twenty years ago.

So it's part in the nostalgia.

It's about my life path and where I'm going, and her life path and where she's gone. She was the Coast of Jim Jefferies' podcast for five years and her and I split off and do and it's amazing.

What is our name? Forgive me?

Her name is Kelly Blackheart right. Our podcast is called locked In probably loaded with DJ and Kelly and it's just fun.

It sounds great. So wait, Jeffries. I know Jim Jeffries, I've I've told him before a couple of times. News. Yeah, he's good news that guy.

I was a show with him called The Jit for two years and it was the best job I've ever had as an actor. I just loved it.

Yeah, he's a he's a great guy. He he uh. He's a pretty uh, pretty impressive standout comedian as well. He's amazing.

Yeah, he's great. Did you ever think about doing that? I did, I really did, and I have since.

But I gotta tell you a part of it, I a part of me doesn't want to make dramatic me really, I'm not joking for me, and I know he wouldn't. But it's his realm and I'm the actor, and I just wait a minute, fuck him, mister has realm.

I working that of guys that work in that realm, well, Jim Jefferies is a nice guy and a good stand I can own it. That's like saying, oh, yeah, Eric Clapton, I don't want to play the guitar because Eric craft and plays the guitars. Again, a lot of other people could play the guitar. Thank you. I love it. I think you would love doing stand up. I've been thinking about it.

It's funny that you bring that up because I've mentioned it to several people recently that I've been thinking about it for a couple of years now.

It's relating. It's time. I think what you should do is you should do stand up and in the background you should have these two ladies that you've got behind you right now, standing right there cracking. Yeah. I know they're great. Somebody did okay are you? Are you a big Tamy art collector? I love it.

So that is so on days when I have had on like not good times on sets, so things aren't going right in my career, I have at I have divided my salary by the second and every minute I'm like, I just made this much toward a painting. So it's become my my It's the it's the love of my life.

A creation kind of painting. Do you collect?

So I started out collecting French paintings from like eighteen seventy to like nineteen forty. Okay, so, and because before the eighteen seventies pigments were not able to be synthetically produced, so like red was ground up corondam ruby and blue was ground up you know lapis I mean vice versa and so, and all of a sudden they made these lead based paints. And that's why people like the early the Impressionists and the post Impressionists they painted like a purple tree and you know, it's all these things because before that pigments were so expensive. You had to paint for the church or wealthy people because you couldn't afford to do otherwise you could just paint whatever the hell you wanted.

So it was really the birth of you could do it.

Are you familiar with Are you familiar with the paint called Joe michell Raphaeli the Italian and he was he was in the first Impressionist exhibition and then he had a big fight with money. And I didn't like him because he would he would draw or he would paint in things that weren't at adyllic, you know, like he'd you know, the painting in the Loure of the absentthe drinkers.

You know that sounds familiar to me.

It's a beautiful paint.

I'll look it up.

Well, RAPHAELI painted that. He painted imperfect images during the Impressionist fashion, and he got he got in a little trouble, but he patented a new form of paint as well. They made all the Impressionists angry. You got in a real trouble. The guy liked him, and money didn't like him at all. He's a fascinating character, an Italian Jewish painter who was in the first exhibition of the French Impressionists. And I think he probably ran into a bit of anti Semitism as well. He's a fascinating character. I urge you to check him out. He's very well and I've got a couple of his paintings. He's he's very interesting. I like very I like very painterly paintings. I like Barbizon and Eli Impressionists. But then so I just am learning about Barbizon right now.

That's great stuff. Yeah, yeah, so that's what I do. So I use an object that I see at auction. That's so I started learning. I would get some of these Christie's Bottoms auction catalogs and then just start looking at and then I could identify painters by brushstroke, and then I started you know, so I got interested there. But then I realized that you pay a huge premium for buying through them, and you can find things on there are web there auction healsies all over the world, and let me tell you, I mean, I can get fooled, but I think it's harder art Net I love.

I love Artnett.

I also invaluable dot com and Live auctioneers dot com.

But you know what you're looking.

At Facebook marketplace for rich people. I get it.

It's really that's great, but I love it and I really I feel like I haven't released a painting yet, like I've I've never bought anything for sale, and I feel like now when I when I go to like I went to a little auction, I mean to an art gallery in Dunedin, New Zealand, and they have this beautiful, beautifully curated collection, but they don't have a Louis VLTA and they're gonna get mine when I die.

So it's it's it's cool because this will go on after me.

And I'm the guardian of these things, and it just but also it's a sickness a little bit.

I understand that I have more paintings than I care to admit. I I go into it. I don't know if you ever met Megan, my wife, but she was an art dealer before we met, still as an art dealer, and and so she can get deals on stuff.

Oh god, but I'll be bankrupt.

Well you know, but here's the thing. You get these amazing paintings, like amazing, there's amazing things that I'd heard of. I come from a very similar background to you economically. I come from very blue collar, kind of poor background. And I'd heard about some of the paintings, paintings that I own. I heard of, I'd heard of the artist, I'd heard of the I read about it in school, and I was like, oh, that's, you know, a world that's beyond imagining.

And now I own a couple of these paints and I kind of love cool and all my favorites.

But I like the kind of I guess it's kind of the avoristic nature of having it.

It's amazing, it's a great feeling.

I fully I think my collection is I have names, But like you said, my favorite things are definitely not names. There's an artist named Bernard U Tavia Monvaal. He had when he dialt like it wasn't I think when his heir died and like twenty sixteen, Sethby's had this big auction, and like he was a massively famous painter, like around the turn of the century into the forties, like portraits, but his early work were post Impressionist works and nobody really wanted them. But I didn't know a lot about him. And a painting went I think for like ten thousand pounds and I didn't buy it, but then I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I chased it. I looked for I said an alert. I looked for this painting for years. Last year it came up at Dorotheam in Vienna. I was willing to pay whatever the hell it costs. I would have sold things. I had to have it. And it's two guys dragging a boat of the Seine like at sundown.

But it's so mind blowingly beautiful. I had to have.

It, and so I stayed up all night. I was ready to go. I was calling everybody bitches and hoes. In my mind, I'm not going to take this painting for me.

I was in it.

I got it for eight thousand euros.

It was one of the best days of my life.

I never part with it. Yeah, I have, I have.

There's one paint and I have in my life that I love above all others. And it was actually my wife and kids got it for me as a present and they knew I loved it, and they kind of, well, you know, we used family money to get it, but they But it's a painting. It's not by a very famous wit as a gentleman by the name of Empire, and it's called at the End of the Day, and it's just a guy standing in the side of a canal bank waving to his friend on a boat who's just sailing up the route, like it's the end of the day's work. But it's a fucking masterpiece. And when I look at it, I go into a world that I don't know where else in the world in the universe that that world is, but it's in there and I can fall into it and then it's hard to explain and it sounds fanciful, but it's so riveting. Is a thing to sit next to. I fucking love it.

And that's how I feel.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, and I'm I'm delighted. First of all, I'm delighted to find this out about you because I really knew I liked you, but now I really really like you because because of your appreciation of great art, and it's kind of my secret thing that I loved. I don't really talk about that much, but I spend money on it and I love it.

Same people's eyes get dupe when I try to tell them too much. I'm cognizitive that. Yeah, and here's the thing. It's okay that it's just for me. Yeah, yeah, it's fine. It's fine. You can sit by the paint. You don't need to talk to anyone about it. It's like, oh, amazing, it's great.

Listen, my friend, I'm very I really think we should try and talk to each other before another ten years ago past.

I would love that.

And in fact, the next time in la Or if you're going to a if you're going to an art auction in Vienna, I'm in. I'll definitely come with you. It's just a world which fascinates me. You're such a lovely mind. I'm so happy for you that you're growing up really cool, even cooler than you were when you were a kid, and you were a pretty cool kid. I know you were tough on yourself, but you were pretty cool and you're even cooler now, so that's great.

Thanks Craig, I love you.

I love you too, man. I am so happy to see you well and yourself. It's great.

Thanks buddy, Thank you for having me.

Oh, thanks for being on. It's great to see you. Thanks Pam,

Joy, a Podcast. Hosted by Craig Ferguson

Storied late-night talk host Craig Ferguson brings his interview talents and singular world view to  
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