Chris O'Dowd's breakthrough role was playing uber geek Roy Tenneman in the Emmy Award winning British sitcom The IT Crowd. His character is well endowed in the information technology department but not so blessed when it comes to social skills. It's safe to say, however, that in real life the exact opposite is true.
The highly personable Irish actor, who's starring in three upcoming films -- The Boat That Rocked (written by Richard "Bridget Jones" Curtis), Hippie Hippie Shake (with Sienna Miller and Derek Jacobi), and Gulliver's Travels (with Jack Black and Emily Blunt) -- displayed a distinct lack of prowess when it came to dealing with digital phone technology during SuicideGirls protracted attempt to interview him.
The first time Chris called in, he'd just embarked on a hike in the cell phone black hole that is Hollywood's Runyon Canyon park. Thus our conversation was unintentionally aborted just as it had begun. It would take a total of five phone calls, including two more entirely aborted ones, before our interview was complete.
Nicole Powers: So where are you now?
Chris O'Dowd: I just driven my friend home and I'm parked in her street. What a lovely hike that is.
NP: It certainly is. The view's amazing from the top. How long are you in Los Angeles for?
COD: I'm going back to London tomorrow. I just came over to go for a couple of jobs and I got one of them but it's shooting in London. We start in a few weeks.
NP: Congratulations. What film?
COD: It's called Gulliver's Travels.
NP: Ah. I heard about that. It's got a really cool cast hasn't it?
COD: Yeah, we've got some great people. It's Jack Black as Gulliver, and then Emily Blunt, as the Princess -- myself and Jason Segel are fighting over her.
NP: So with Jack Black in the lead it's going to be a very funny version of the classic tale?
COD: Yeah, I can't imagine there's going to be a lot of tears.
NP: Who's directing?
COD: A guy called Rob Letterman who's recently done this Monsters vs Aliens 3D thing that's big in the box office at the moment.
NP: So that's quite a leap for him, going from science fiction to a classic tale.
COD: I know, but I guess there's a lot of green screen in this as well because everyone's supposed to be tiny in Lilliput [one of Gulliver's many fantastic destinations]. It's shooting in Pinewood [England's leading film production facility] from the end of April. It should be fun. I'm just going back to England to learn how to ride a horse...I'm a general in the army, so there's going to be a little bit of horse riding. I think it's going to be really fun though, we're all kind of learning together -- Jason and Jack have to learn as well,.
NP: Your breakthrough role was in the British TV series The IT Crowd. Has that finished shooting now?
COD: No. They're very short series, six episodes each. We'll do another one, I think, towards the end of this year or the start of next year. It's kind of in and out in two months so it's kind of ongoing.
NP: How many seasons have you done so far?
COD: We have done three. Hopefully what's going to happen is we'll do a Christmas special this summer, and then another series later on.
NP: Are you actually a nerd like your character?
COD: No. I'm too cool for school. No, there are similarities but I'm probably not as socially inept.
NP: Which is probably a good thing!
COD: Thank god! I just don't know how people like that would survive in the world.
NP: I love the T-Shirt your character wears in one of the first episodes, that RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual) shirt.
COD: Oh I love that. I think that was Graham's thing, the writer. We put a lot of thought into the T-shirts. With a lot of these nerdy guys it's the only kind of fashion choice that they make, you know, what slogans are on their T-shirts, so they put a lot of thought into it. I like the idea that you never see him in the same T-shirt twice, so we've gone for that.
NP: What were some of your other favorite Ts?
COD: I've got a great one of a pixilated Kermit the Frog, which I think is quite fun, and a lot of Asian anime.
NP: How does your dress style differ from your character's?
COD: I'd like to say that I haven't stolen some of the T-shits that he wears, but I'm afraid that would be untrue. I've taken a few of them. I guess I probably have more then one pair of trainers. There are less spillages on my own clothes than on Roy's clothes.
NP: So you try to avoid saving food for later on the front of your own shirts.
COD: I'm a distinguished gentleman.
NP: I hear you wash too.
COD: Occasionally. We always had an idea for Roy that he'd spill something on his T-shirt and he'd just open up his wardrobe and he's got a thousand different T-shirts in it -- just on hand.
NP: I think with a certain class of geek though, they wouldn't be hung up, they'd just live in a pile in the corner of his bedroom -- they probably would never make it to the wardrobe.
COD: I quite like the idea of it being a big thing for him. Rather than just being completely slobby, he has this one element of his life where he's really tricked out, in the same way that he would be able to rewire a motherboard -- he puts that much dedication into it.
NP: Has there been any area of geek culture or geek speak that's leaked from the show into your own life?
COD: We have a geek consultant on the show who is the finest example of that kind of person I've ever met. You get the impression that the only time he leaves his bedroom is to come and work on the show. He has kind of infiltrated our minds with different websites, stuff like BoingBoing. I haven't become a geek by doing the show.
NP: Are you a Mac or PC person?
COD: I'm a Mac man.
NP: Another distinguishing mark from your character.
COD: I was a PC guys for years but now I'd never be able to go back.
NP: Once you go Mac you never go back.
COD: That's what I've heard.
NP: So the next project that's already been released in the UK that we're getting in America in the fall, is this film The Boat That Rocked.
COD: It's a really amazing movie.
NP: Can you tell us a bit about it?
COD: It's essentially a look at offshore pirate radio between 1966 and '68. At the time there was only about an hour of popular music a week on the radio in Britain, and it was illegal to transmit, so boats, they were going to international waters, which is maybe ten miles off the coast of England, and transmitting across the nation, to 25 million people towards the end. So a group of DJs, we all go out on this boat. The DJs are myself, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Rhys Darby and Nick Frost, and a couple of others, and the film documents our time and the crazy time for music -- amazing time for music.
NP: Obviously it's based on the story of Radio Caroline, and you play DJ Simon Stafford. Who was your character based on?
COD: I guess he was an amalgamation of different people. I play the breakfast jock -- and the breakfast jock on Radio Caroline at the time was Tony Blackburn, so there's definitely an element of him in it. He's very kind of positive, a bit of a romantic, he uses gimmicks and a lot of jokes. A very transatlantic kind of a voice. And then I called in different Irish DJs that would have been contemporaries of Tony Blackburn at the time, a guy called Larry Gogan and a couple of other people. There's a bit of Kenny Everett in there as well, who was a DJ on Caroline at the time. So there's a few different people, but Tony Blackburn was definitely a huge draw.
NP: His equivalent in America would be Casey Kasem -- Tony Blackburn had that kind of cheeseball element.
COD: I kind of think of him as a very sweet guy though. It's an affectionate love, you know.
NP: There's another incredible cast on this film, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans,
COD: Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh
NP: Who was the biggest surprise to work with?
COD: I was surprised that Phil Hoffman was so down to earth and lovely. He was just so giving and generous with his time. I was just amazed that he was doing it, because he came on board quite late. I remember we had all been cast and I guess Phil was still negotiating or whatever, so they were talking about different people, and then somebody threw that name into the mix. I was like, "No way." And then they were like, "No! We've got him." I was like, "Oh! My god!"
NP: Did you actually shoot it on board a ship?
COD: We did. We shot it half and half. We shot five weeks on a ship off the coast of Dorset and then five weeks in Pinewood for the interiors. But we shot on a hydraulic platform on a thing called a gimbal, so it's always rocking, the whole sets rocks throughout to give the impression of being afloat.
NP: When you were doing the location stuff off the coast of England were you freezing your ass off?
COD: No. It was amazing. It was during the summer. Obviously it was in England, so at night it got very, very cold. But during the day sometimes, when the sun is out, and [they] played the music of the time over the Tannoy between scenes or between takes, it was petty amazing -- such a lovely experience.
NP: Global warming's done well for England. It's much milder there these days. I'm all for it.
COD: Oh, you are? I'm drinking some petrol now.
NP: Glad to hear it. So you've gone from one movie about 1960's revolutionary pop culture to another, because you've also done Hippie Hippie Shake which is about Oz magazine, which was the precursor to the lad-mag generation of publications. I understand you play Felix Dennis, who went from Oz to being Maxim's publisher, and the chap that defended him in the indecency court case, which the film focuses on, was John Mortimer who went on to write Rumpole of the Bailey.
COD: That's right. He's played brilliantly by Hugh Bonneville in the film. He was a civil rights lawyer for years and years and years before he started writing for TV. He did a lot of very high profile cases. And that whole Oz trial was a very seminal case. It made British legal history and it did kind of end up changing the rules about censorship and freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, so I think it was an important film to be made.
NP: Were you aware of the story of Oz before the script came in.
COD: Yeah. I had heard about it through a friend whose father used to do some of the design for the covers and things like that. He was a graphic designer on the Kings Road in the '60s, and I met him a few times and we talked about it. Then I ended up getting the film, which was incredible. It's a different time. It's interesting doing those two films that were both kind of '60s films, one of them is '66 to '68 and the other one picks up where that left off, '68 to '72. Things changed very quickly. The whole kind of hippie thing came in at the end of the '60s in Britain, and so it's a very different feeling.
NP: The Boat That Rocked being the earlier film, and Hippie Hippie Shake being the later one. They both deal with censorship, the difference being that Hippie Hippie Shake has a happier resolution where freedom of expression is concerned.
[Chris' cell phone battery runs out of power and the line suddenly goes dead.]
[Four days and several attempted phone calls later...Chris is now back in London and communication has been restored.]
NP: With all these technical difficulties with your phone, I just want to check, have you tried turning it off and on again?
COD: [laughs] I could feel that coming.
NP: So we'd moved on to and Hippie Hippie Shake and how the Oz case was an important milestone in British legal history.
COD: What happened in real-life and in the film, you know, we end up going to prison for a little while, and then the case is overturned. It did make a huge, huge difference, and John Mortimer had a lot to do with that, our defending lawyer. I think that the judge's name was Argyle [played by Derek Jacobi in the film]. He was just this horrible old curmudgeon of a man that was just part of the real old establishment.
NP: Your character went on to found Maxim and the publishing empire that created the whole lad-mag phenomenon. Are you a reader of lad-mags?
COD: I can't say I am. I tell you what though, I met up with him, you know, and he was an incredibly charismatic man. And he also runs a publication called The Week, which is terrific. It essentially condenses all the world's news into a weekly magazine, and he sent me a subscription, so I get it every week.
NP: Did you meet any of the other people portrayed in the film?
COD: I didn't. I actually have met Germaine Greer on different occasions, but nothing to do with the film. I think they're in Australia, so it's kind of difficult. They are pretty much all Australian except for Felix Dennis.
NP: This was another amazing ensemble cast movie.
COD: Yeah, Max Minghella, Cillian Murphy and Sienna [Miller]
NP: What was Sienna like to work with?
COD: She's a very bright girl you know. She puts a lot of thought into what she's doing. She's great. She was really fun, as you can probably imagine.
NP: And this is another British film.
COD: Yes. I'm all about the British film industry.
NP: It amuses me that you come over to Los Angeles, you've got a Hollywood agent, and all they do is send you straight back to England.
COD: It's incredibly frustrating. I'm back in London now to shoot Gulliver's Travels. That was the first time I'd spent any time in LA, but I really enjoyed myself, so I'll probably go back. And I do kind of think that there's some really quality writers over there. I'm eager to get over there and do some good work.
The first Season of The IT Crowd is available now on DVD from MPI Home Entertainment (we particularly enjoyed the l33t subtitles in the DVD extras). Season 2 will be available on DVD on June 30. The Boat That Rocked will be released in the US on Aug 28, 2009. A release date for Hippie Hippie Shake has yet to be confirmed.
The highly personable Irish actor, who's starring in three upcoming films -- The Boat That Rocked (written by Richard "Bridget Jones" Curtis), Hippie Hippie Shake (with Sienna Miller and Derek Jacobi), and Gulliver's Travels (with Jack Black and Emily Blunt) -- displayed a distinct lack of prowess when it came to dealing with digital phone technology during SuicideGirls protracted attempt to interview him.
The first time Chris called in, he'd just embarked on a hike in the cell phone black hole that is Hollywood's Runyon Canyon park. Thus our conversation was unintentionally aborted just as it had begun. It would take a total of five phone calls, including two more entirely aborted ones, before our interview was complete.
Nicole Powers: So where are you now?
Chris O'Dowd: I just driven my friend home and I'm parked in her street. What a lovely hike that is.
NP: It certainly is. The view's amazing from the top. How long are you in Los Angeles for?
COD: I'm going back to London tomorrow. I just came over to go for a couple of jobs and I got one of them but it's shooting in London. We start in a few weeks.
NP: Congratulations. What film?
COD: It's called Gulliver's Travels.
NP: Ah. I heard about that. It's got a really cool cast hasn't it?
COD: Yeah, we've got some great people. It's Jack Black as Gulliver, and then Emily Blunt, as the Princess -- myself and Jason Segel are fighting over her.
NP: So with Jack Black in the lead it's going to be a very funny version of the classic tale?
COD: Yeah, I can't imagine there's going to be a lot of tears.
NP: Who's directing?
COD: A guy called Rob Letterman who's recently done this Monsters vs Aliens 3D thing that's big in the box office at the moment.
NP: So that's quite a leap for him, going from science fiction to a classic tale.
COD: I know, but I guess there's a lot of green screen in this as well because everyone's supposed to be tiny in Lilliput [one of Gulliver's many fantastic destinations]. It's shooting in Pinewood [England's leading film production facility] from the end of April. It should be fun. I'm just going back to England to learn how to ride a horse...I'm a general in the army, so there's going to be a little bit of horse riding. I think it's going to be really fun though, we're all kind of learning together -- Jason and Jack have to learn as well,.
NP: Your breakthrough role was in the British TV series The IT Crowd. Has that finished shooting now?
COD: No. They're very short series, six episodes each. We'll do another one, I think, towards the end of this year or the start of next year. It's kind of in and out in two months so it's kind of ongoing.
NP: How many seasons have you done so far?
COD: We have done three. Hopefully what's going to happen is we'll do a Christmas special this summer, and then another series later on.
NP: Are you actually a nerd like your character?
COD: No. I'm too cool for school. No, there are similarities but I'm probably not as socially inept.
NP: Which is probably a good thing!
COD: Thank god! I just don't know how people like that would survive in the world.
NP: I love the T-Shirt your character wears in one of the first episodes, that RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual) shirt.
COD: Oh I love that. I think that was Graham's thing, the writer. We put a lot of thought into the T-shirts. With a lot of these nerdy guys it's the only kind of fashion choice that they make, you know, what slogans are on their T-shirts, so they put a lot of thought into it. I like the idea that you never see him in the same T-shirt twice, so we've gone for that.
NP: What were some of your other favorite Ts?
COD: I've got a great one of a pixilated Kermit the Frog, which I think is quite fun, and a lot of Asian anime.
NP: How does your dress style differ from your character's?
COD: I'd like to say that I haven't stolen some of the T-shits that he wears, but I'm afraid that would be untrue. I've taken a few of them. I guess I probably have more then one pair of trainers. There are less spillages on my own clothes than on Roy's clothes.
NP: So you try to avoid saving food for later on the front of your own shirts.
COD: I'm a distinguished gentleman.
NP: I hear you wash too.
COD: Occasionally. We always had an idea for Roy that he'd spill something on his T-shirt and he'd just open up his wardrobe and he's got a thousand different T-shirts in it -- just on hand.
NP: I think with a certain class of geek though, they wouldn't be hung up, they'd just live in a pile in the corner of his bedroom -- they probably would never make it to the wardrobe.
COD: I quite like the idea of it being a big thing for him. Rather than just being completely slobby, he has this one element of his life where he's really tricked out, in the same way that he would be able to rewire a motherboard -- he puts that much dedication into it.
NP: Has there been any area of geek culture or geek speak that's leaked from the show into your own life?
COD: We have a geek consultant on the show who is the finest example of that kind of person I've ever met. You get the impression that the only time he leaves his bedroom is to come and work on the show. He has kind of infiltrated our minds with different websites, stuff like BoingBoing. I haven't become a geek by doing the show.
NP: Are you a Mac or PC person?
COD: I'm a Mac man.
NP: Another distinguishing mark from your character.
COD: I was a PC guys for years but now I'd never be able to go back.
NP: Once you go Mac you never go back.
COD: That's what I've heard.
NP: So the next project that's already been released in the UK that we're getting in America in the fall, is this film The Boat That Rocked.
COD: It's a really amazing movie.
NP: Can you tell us a bit about it?
COD: It's essentially a look at offshore pirate radio between 1966 and '68. At the time there was only about an hour of popular music a week on the radio in Britain, and it was illegal to transmit, so boats, they were going to international waters, which is maybe ten miles off the coast of England, and transmitting across the nation, to 25 million people towards the end. So a group of DJs, we all go out on this boat. The DJs are myself, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Rhys Darby and Nick Frost, and a couple of others, and the film documents our time and the crazy time for music -- amazing time for music.
NP: Obviously it's based on the story of Radio Caroline, and you play DJ Simon Stafford. Who was your character based on?
COD: I guess he was an amalgamation of different people. I play the breakfast jock -- and the breakfast jock on Radio Caroline at the time was Tony Blackburn, so there's definitely an element of him in it. He's very kind of positive, a bit of a romantic, he uses gimmicks and a lot of jokes. A very transatlantic kind of a voice. And then I called in different Irish DJs that would have been contemporaries of Tony Blackburn at the time, a guy called Larry Gogan and a couple of other people. There's a bit of Kenny Everett in there as well, who was a DJ on Caroline at the time. So there's a few different people, but Tony Blackburn was definitely a huge draw.
NP: His equivalent in America would be Casey Kasem -- Tony Blackburn had that kind of cheeseball element.
COD: I kind of think of him as a very sweet guy though. It's an affectionate love, you know.
NP: There's another incredible cast on this film, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans,
COD: Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh
NP: Who was the biggest surprise to work with?
COD: I was surprised that Phil Hoffman was so down to earth and lovely. He was just so giving and generous with his time. I was just amazed that he was doing it, because he came on board quite late. I remember we had all been cast and I guess Phil was still negotiating or whatever, so they were talking about different people, and then somebody threw that name into the mix. I was like, "No way." And then they were like, "No! We've got him." I was like, "Oh! My god!"
NP: Did you actually shoot it on board a ship?
COD: We did. We shot it half and half. We shot five weeks on a ship off the coast of Dorset and then five weeks in Pinewood for the interiors. But we shot on a hydraulic platform on a thing called a gimbal, so it's always rocking, the whole sets rocks throughout to give the impression of being afloat.
NP: When you were doing the location stuff off the coast of England were you freezing your ass off?
COD: No. It was amazing. It was during the summer. Obviously it was in England, so at night it got very, very cold. But during the day sometimes, when the sun is out, and [they] played the music of the time over the Tannoy between scenes or between takes, it was petty amazing -- such a lovely experience.
NP: Global warming's done well for England. It's much milder there these days. I'm all for it.
COD: Oh, you are? I'm drinking some petrol now.
NP: Glad to hear it. So you've gone from one movie about 1960's revolutionary pop culture to another, because you've also done Hippie Hippie Shake which is about Oz magazine, which was the precursor to the lad-mag generation of publications. I understand you play Felix Dennis, who went from Oz to being Maxim's publisher, and the chap that defended him in the indecency court case, which the film focuses on, was John Mortimer who went on to write Rumpole of the Bailey.
COD: That's right. He's played brilliantly by Hugh Bonneville in the film. He was a civil rights lawyer for years and years and years before he started writing for TV. He did a lot of very high profile cases. And that whole Oz trial was a very seminal case. It made British legal history and it did kind of end up changing the rules about censorship and freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, so I think it was an important film to be made.
NP: Were you aware of the story of Oz before the script came in.
COD: Yeah. I had heard about it through a friend whose father used to do some of the design for the covers and things like that. He was a graphic designer on the Kings Road in the '60s, and I met him a few times and we talked about it. Then I ended up getting the film, which was incredible. It's a different time. It's interesting doing those two films that were both kind of '60s films, one of them is '66 to '68 and the other one picks up where that left off, '68 to '72. Things changed very quickly. The whole kind of hippie thing came in at the end of the '60s in Britain, and so it's a very different feeling.
NP: The Boat That Rocked being the earlier film, and Hippie Hippie Shake being the later one. They both deal with censorship, the difference being that Hippie Hippie Shake has a happier resolution where freedom of expression is concerned.
[Chris' cell phone battery runs out of power and the line suddenly goes dead.]
[Four days and several attempted phone calls later...Chris is now back in London and communication has been restored.]
NP: With all these technical difficulties with your phone, I just want to check, have you tried turning it off and on again?
COD: [laughs] I could feel that coming.
NP: So we'd moved on to and Hippie Hippie Shake and how the Oz case was an important milestone in British legal history.
COD: What happened in real-life and in the film, you know, we end up going to prison for a little while, and then the case is overturned. It did make a huge, huge difference, and John Mortimer had a lot to do with that, our defending lawyer. I think that the judge's name was Argyle [played by Derek Jacobi in the film]. He was just this horrible old curmudgeon of a man that was just part of the real old establishment.
NP: Your character went on to found Maxim and the publishing empire that created the whole lad-mag phenomenon. Are you a reader of lad-mags?
COD: I can't say I am. I tell you what though, I met up with him, you know, and he was an incredibly charismatic man. And he also runs a publication called The Week, which is terrific. It essentially condenses all the world's news into a weekly magazine, and he sent me a subscription, so I get it every week.
NP: Did you meet any of the other people portrayed in the film?
COD: I didn't. I actually have met Germaine Greer on different occasions, but nothing to do with the film. I think they're in Australia, so it's kind of difficult. They are pretty much all Australian except for Felix Dennis.
NP: This was another amazing ensemble cast movie.
COD: Yeah, Max Minghella, Cillian Murphy and Sienna [Miller]
NP: What was Sienna like to work with?
COD: She's a very bright girl you know. She puts a lot of thought into what she's doing. She's great. She was really fun, as you can probably imagine.
NP: And this is another British film.
COD: Yes. I'm all about the British film industry.
NP: It amuses me that you come over to Los Angeles, you've got a Hollywood agent, and all they do is send you straight back to England.
COD: It's incredibly frustrating. I'm back in London now to shoot Gulliver's Travels. That was the first time I'd spent any time in LA, but I really enjoyed myself, so I'll probably go back. And I do kind of think that there's some really quality writers over there. I'm eager to get over there and do some good work.
The first Season of The IT Crowd is available now on DVD from MPI Home Entertainment (we particularly enjoyed the l33t subtitles in the DVD extras). Season 2 will be available on DVD on June 30. The Boat That Rocked will be released in the US on Aug 28, 2009. A release date for Hippie Hippie Shake has yet to be confirmed.
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