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Curious
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Chris O’Dowd might not immediately scream “menacing hitman” at you, but that’s part of the reason why he’s so damn convincing in his role as Miles Daly in Get Shorty on Epix. Now entering its third season, the series is based on the Elmore Leonard novel but is more of its own story than a reboot of the 1995 film. O’Dowd is excellent as Daly, a guy who is working on leaving his dangerous old life behind (spoiler alert: he can’t) in order to become a big movie producer in Hollywood (spoiler alert: he’s…still working on it) and make a better life for his teen daughter (he’s really trying!).
O’Dowd stopped by the Decider offices this week to give us a preview of the new season, including the fact that his character gets “treated like a piece of sex meat.” Intrigued much? He also discussed his character’s tattoos and why he wasn’t nearly as brave about getting his own, and the on-set stunt that left him with a handful of stitches. Plus, it will come as no surprise to you that of course he’s the actor that loves having babies on set.
Decider: So tell me about Miles in Season 3, he’s out of prison?
Chris O’Dowd: Yes, so when we’ve seen him last, he’s in prison. He’s been somewhat set up there by Lawrence Budd (Steven Weber), who’s something of a Harvey Weinstein figure. And Miles at the start of Season 3 is released, ends up in a halfway house where he encounters some small-time trouble, and he has to start at the bottom again. So he gets an assistant job in the agency where he was working because it’s the only place that he has a relationship, and he manages to squirrel his way in there under the auspices that he is a changed man. Essentially Season 3 plays out like a very long-form revenge story, where he’s trying to enamor himself to Lawrence Budd by putting himself forward as a person who was willing to break the rules for Lawrence’s success. And so Lawrence’s whole ambition is what works against him.
I’m excited to see more of you and Steven Weber together too.
Oh, me too, he’s the best. And then my boss is played by Michaela Watkins, absolutely gloriously. Her depiction of an LA agent is better than anything I’ve seen. She’s clearly had a lot of dealings with them over the years and the cold neediness of it is delicious. She, of course, treats me like dirt on her shoe and has no idea that I’m a dangerous person, because why would anybody tell her that? So that’s quite a beautiful dynamic to watch, of Miles being put-upon and being degraded, and being eventually, I don’t know how much to give away, but being [takes a long pause] treated like a piece of sex meat. I don’t know why I took such a long pause before, that’s all I could come up with.
Real dramatic effect there!
Yeah, I’ll just say that. Miles is also dealing with this spiraling relationship with his wife and daughter, and his romantic involvement with April (Megan Stevenson), which is certainly compounded in this season. It turns into something really serious.
Oh, good! I was rooting for that a little bit.
I think it’s a really good couple. And so I guess the question that will be asked is: Once you know the truth, are you okay with it?
For everybody, really.
For everybody. Yeah, that’s I guess what we’re all battling with.
I like all the couples on this show. Some are more surprising than others, but I’m rooting for them.
Oh yeah, I think Lidia (Porto) and Ray (Romano) are a love story for the ages. It’s beautiful. This season, he has to hide the fact that he was an FBI spy from the woman who he loves. He has written a script about his experiences and he doesn’t know how much to divulge, I suppose. And once Louis (Sean Bridgers) and I find out that he’s written the script, then we have to try to get it back from everybody he’s sent it to, otherwise it would be the end of us all. So there’s a lot of conflict there. And then Amara has an accident and…that’s troubling.
And speaking of couples, I love the Miles and Louis relationship. They had some ups and downs but there’s a real root to it, where they’re incredibly loyal to each other. What do you think makes that special?
Yeah, I love that. I love working with Sean and I think the characters are gorgeous together. Because in a lot of ways, he has all the integrity. His character is defiantly loyal to the end, whereas I can be swayed by ambition. In Season 3, the relationship between Louis and Gladys (Sarah Stiles) is going strong but Gladys gets a job in Tootsie on Broadway. Which I think is this beautiful meta thing because Sarah Stiles, who plays the character so wonderfully, ended up in Tootsie on Broadway, so Davey (Holmes, the show’s creator) wrote it in. So she’s out of town for a while and I end up living with him and it turns into two men raising a baby for a minute, but they’re both hardened, blood-thirsty criminals.
That baby is very cute.
Very cute baby! When I saw the actual baby, it couldn’t look more like Sean, but it’s a very, very sweet little kid, so that’s nice. I love babies on sets.
Really?
Oh yeah, I love it. Because I’ve got two young kids, so I long for it when I’m at work.
Are they good?
They were great! What we had to stop doing, because they turned up the first day and I’m like, ‘Give me that baby!’ [laughs], snuggling the shit out of this baby. And then you go into the scene and the baby just wants to be with you.
You’re really setting him up to be a child star with abandonment issues at this point though.
I feel like that is a concern that I’ve had throughout my career. I wrote this show called Moone Boy which was a bunch of 10-year-olds and are now 18, I think, going to college and doing all of that. And even on our own show, we’ve got my daughter, played by Carolyn Dodd, who has taken to fame very well, I think.
One of the things that I think really makes your character are the accessories. The sunglasses, the leather jacket, and my favorite, the neck tattoo. Do you find that too?
The tattoos I find very useful for that. As soon as I put the tattoos on and the necklace, which I would never wear. I’ve actually got to the stage now, I love wearing the tattoos so much, that whenever the show, very sadly, ends, in seven or eight years’ time, then I’m going to get a tattoo on my upper arm.
Okay! Not the neck one?
I don’t think the neck one. It’s a bit full-on.
What is it?
It’s a Celtic thing. This [one on the arm] is a Celtic cross and this [on the neck] is a three-headed dragon kind of a thing. But it makes me feel quite tough.
Yeah! Because he would have to sit there and get that done.
Yeah, that’s right. Whereas in my own personal life, I have one tiny tattoo which is a heart that I got in Hawaii [on the left side of his torso], and I squealed like a pig.
Oh, I was hoping it was a tramp stamp.
No, that would’ve been good, wouldn’t it? It was only relatively recent, only three or four years ago. Not brave, I was not brave at all. I believe my first words when he started doing it, I was like, ‘Fuck! Did it slip?!’ He was like, ‘No, that’s what it feels like.’
How about when they put the bumps and the scars on your face with makeup. Is that fun?
Yeah, kinda! In the last season, I ended up busting open my chin on a stunt man’s head. It was when we were in the prison, obviously entirely my fault, but you do that thing where you’re taking a punch in a scene and you double over, and he was a little bit shorter and I just banged him on top of his head and it really split open. It was wild!
Did you have to get stitches or anything?
Yeah, I had to get like six, eight stitches, I think, in my chin.
Then did they leave it or did they have to cover that up?
Then we had to just try and get makeup on it because I was working the next day.
Isn’t that weird that you actually got hurt and then they covered that up and then instead put different marks on you?
I know, they’re killing me here!
This show makes me nervous for my fingers as many are threatened or injured throughout the series. Was there a scene that either performing or then when you saw it later, that made you —
Cringe a bit? The scene where I’m taped up to a chair and getting the shit kicked out of me was quite intense, and all of the stuff with Ray where we kidnap him. All the fight scenes are fun to do in a way because it’s not something I get to do an awful lot, so there’s something quite balletic about it, the rhythm of it all. I’m not a gun person, so there’s a scene even in the pilot where I wanted to be very adept at handling a gun because obviously the character would be, so to learn the skill that you’d never thought you’d need to use, which is unusual. But yeah, all of that stuff is fun just because it’s still a novelty to me. It’s like riding a horse. I don’t know how we would get that into this show, but we’ll try!
I’m sure they would figure out a way. I want to ask you about the moment at the end of each season where Miles looks into the camera. It feels like a nice punctuation to things. Is there a way that you interpret that moment?
It wasn’t written, it was something I just decided to do in the scene, in the first and in the second one, I think, and there’s something just so devilish about it somehow. I think because the show is essentially about storytelling, and Hollywood, and all of that — it’s cheeky. But to break the fourth wall in the final shot of each season is, it’s nice. I don’t know how to explain it, really, but it feels a little bit naughty. It’s almost like you’re saying to the audience, ‘You want me to succeed and you know I’m an asshole, so what does that say about you?’ We did it in the second season, I think it ends up being the last shot of the show. I think in my head I was trying to edit where I think the show should end, because the scene that was shot ended up being like four or five scenes from the end. But I thought that’s where we should end it, so I just looked at the camera [laughs] as if to say to Davey, ‘This is where you should cut.’ I think we did it at the end of Season 3, as well. There’s something a little bit cheeky about it, but I do like the devilish nature of it.
From your experience, how far-fetched — or not at all — is this show when it comes to a lot of these elements, of novices coming in to try to produce, or shady investors, or things like that? Is it pretty accurate?
I think ours is probably mild. [Laughs] It’s an industry awash with charlatans and drowning in money — some of it from good places. But even if you’re wearing a shirt and tie, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a good guy. Particularly so much money from different sources coming into the industry that nobody really questions that much, and because it doesn’t suit them to know the truth. Maybe some of the real heavy-handed physical stuff doesn’t happen so much, but there are definitely touches of it.
It is pretty ironic too that the actress that played the FBI Agent last season (Felicity Huffman) was the one that got in trouble in real life.
I know. Yeah, that’s certainly ironic.
Have you talked to her at all?
No, not since. I feel for her though. I didn’t get to hang out with her a lot but she seemed like a good person and it felt like she was doing what she thought was best for her kids. It was the wrong thing to do but prison seems like a lot.
I liked the picture of you and the guys from the show at a soccer game. Seeing you in real life was fun.
Oh yeah, we’re real buds. Isaac (Keys) and Goya (Robles) and Sean and I hang out a lot. When we were in Albuquerque, we would go to these hot spring places and stuff. They’re a great bunch of people. Ray’s so warm. It’s a really good bunch. We’re very lucky.
This is probably one of the longer projects you’ve been involved with, three seasons of an hour-long show. Do you like that?
Yeah, it feels nice to do a deep delve into something. This probably is the longest thing. Twenty-seven hours is a lot of anything, especially when you’re from Ireland. We just don’t make long shows like that or even in the UK. What’s cool about this season is it feels like a long movie because it’s slightly shorter (seven episodes). It very much has a beginning, middle, and end. And we moved around a lot so it hasn’t felt staid, really. We filmed the first season in Albuquerque, the second season in LA, and the third season in Vancouver, so it always feels like there’s a new impetus, a new crew each time, and feels like starting over a bit.
Also congrats on the Emmy!
Oh thank you! So cool.
I loved State of the Union, it felt very rich even though it wasn’t very long. It was interesting to have a show in these 10-minute installments, I liked that.
Me too. I love that as a format, really. I think what might end up happening, obviously there’s all this Quibi stuff and that will be a big thing, but I think it’s a future for filmmakers where you can make ten by ten, the length of a movie. It’s just then dissecting it a little bit as time goes on, and for independent filmmakers that’s going to be a great outlet.
And for viewers.
For sure. It’s only going to be good for filmmakers because I think it is so great for viewers. I can imagine doing that. I’m trying to develop something now that’s the same format because it is so accessible.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B3MvzbepA7c/
We had Aisling Bea here recently and she told us about your Joshua Tree jacuzzi experience.
[Laughs] Oh god, that’s right! That was gross! I don’t think I got in? I don’t think so. I remember looking at it and going, that doesn’t seem right. She’s great though and her new show [This Way Up] is great.
She said there is a friend group of Irish people in LA, and as someone that is neither from Ireland nor living in LA, I still want to be in it.
Come over. Come over, it’s an open-door policy. It’s such a lovely little bunch that we’ve got. I lived in London for 10 years after I left Ireland and I was never an expat guy, really. And suddenly we found ourselves in this odd little pocket. It’s very sweet. We play poker together and go to Irish gigs and do loads of Irish charity stuff and support each other’s stuff. We’re very far from home and my wife and I are definitely conscious of becoming a hub for that, and for our kids. So yeah, come by. We’re the house with the giant Irish flag.
I am surprised it took until the middle of Season 2 of Get Shorty before crystals were introduced, it seems like such an LA thing that would’ve popped up sooner.
That’s right, that keeps going for a bit. [My character] keeps up meditation with crystals as I’m trying to work out stuff. Davey I think is attached to it because it speaks to a bigger concept, which is LA is the kind of city where people are clutching at straws a lot to be grounded or spiritual or something. So I don’t know if Miles is totally on board with it but I think he’s willing to give it a go because everything else is crumbling.
There was a similar storyline on The Real Housewives of Orange County recently too.
[Joking] Well, I presume that’s why it’s in our show. I would be one of those people where, you hear this a lot, [the women on set] would always go on about how Mercury is in retrograde, which is not a sentence I had heard for the first 30 years of my life. People are like, ‘Oh, this is why all this stuff is happening.’ I don’t feel like it’s connected to crystals, but in my head it is.
Get Shorty Season 3 premieres Sunday, October 6 at 7pm ET/PT on Epix.
