Name: Will Arnett on Stand-Up Comedy, ‘Is This Thing On?,’ and Career Reflections
Uploaded: 2026-01-06T08:13:17.000Z
Duration: 18 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Present continuous

What tipped me off was that I'm living in an apartment on my own and my wife and kids don't live there.

Past simple

Will, welcome to the awards tour podcast.

I'm so excited to talk to you about this film.

You're so good in it, but it seems like something that would feel very intimidating for an actor.

I know you're funny, I know you've done comedy and improv stuff, but

how much familiarity did you have in the standup world before you decided to take is this thing on?

You know, standup is such a specific and really tough seeming, at least from the outside.

And so jumping in and starting to do actual standup was, to use your word, very intimidating and kind of nerve wracking at the thought of doing it.

I went up as my character and doing the material from the film and it was.

I already had a lot of like, really healthy respect for what stand ups do, and

it just deepened that respect going through the process of doing this and through the preparation when I was going up and going to the Comedy Cellar every night.

What standups do is so brave and amazing.

I hosted a podcast here with my co host who is a longtime stand up comedian.

He's got his name up at the Comedy Store, still tours and does all that.

And so I've like seen like kind of on the outside how tough that gig is.

But what I really respected in your performance in this is there's an intimacy on stage and this movie manages to make it even more intimate when there's just these scenes with you and Laura sitting in a closet talking about pickup schedules.

And I think that would also be something where it's like you already have this sort of hill to climb of that.

And then on top of that, you're having to do, I mean, stuff you've done before.

But I don't know how much of this kind of drama have you really done on screen?

Yeah, I mean, it's been a long time since I've kind of exercised this muscle and this is the kind of work that I wanted to do when I first moved to New York, when I was 20, 35 years ago from Toronto.

And I came down and was working on this kind of stuff.

When I went to Lee Strasberg back in the day.

These were the kind of roles that I thought that I would be doing with right from the get go.

My life kind of went in a different direction, A great direction, but different.

So it had been a while in a lot of ways to kind of go and just do something like this.

One of the things I kind of realized was because I did have this, it was kind of like these two different elements to the film.

This Alex as the performer and doing the standup and then doing these very vulnerable, quiet, emotional scenes with Laura that have a lot of different, you know, peaks and valleys to them emotionally, certainly, and

It was so much that I didn't have time to kind of think about it too much.

You have this sort of crossroads of like, I'm either going to freak out or I'm going to give myself over to this process and be as open as I can.

And that's a testament to Bradley and him asking me to trust him.

You know, in those moments where I'm doing things that are really simple, where there's not even any dialogue, when it's just behavioral and it's just crossing a street or folding the laundry or throwing my keys on the counter and going to doing stuff on my own or driving the car back and, you know, on my way to see my kids, all those things that was a matter of giving myself over.

And then the scenes with Laura just, you know, making myself as available as I could in those moments to try to let the scene play out and really discover whatever is going to happen, let happen in the scene.

And again, I have this great partner in Laura Dern.

I think we've seen her do this so many times.

I mean, I feel like she does it every year with a different movie.

But what I loved in the scenes that y' all did together, and

I thought it was an added element for how difficult what y' all did to pull off was, was the camera work, because you have Matthew or sometimes, I guess, Bradley, like right up on y'.

Because the camera work in this, I feel, is another added element to why this is such a brilliant performance.

Because this is another thing that you kind of have to ignore.

But I know that was, like, huge amount of rehearsal blocking.

Like, I can't even imagine what that was.

So I'd love for you to take us inside the process of bringing the camera into these very intimate scenes.

Well, you know, we started when we were doing the camera testing in pre production, and

Bradley and Matty Libatique and I were kind of running around New York with no permits or anything, just testing.

They were testing out cameras, and I was kind of there to let light bounce off me and.

And we shot a bunch of stuff outside and inside the cellar as well as we were in that testing process.

And that's where they landed on the language, the sort of the cinematic language of the film.

And it was also at that moment where Bradley decided that he really wanted to operate.

And Bradley joined the operators union and he operated most of the film.

We're in these scenes and Bradley's really close to me.

All of that, you know, we chose that very specific one six, six, one aspect ratio.

And he's this far away from me at all times for most of the film, certainly in the quieter moments and in the very.

But what's funny is because we do trust each other and know each other so well.

And it had been working on this for a few years, working on the script, knowing what we wanted to do.

There's so much familiarity that all of it kind of melted away.

And Bradley would talk to me during scenes as he's operating right close up and talk me through as we're doing.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Will Arnett on Stand-Up Comedy, ‘Is This Thing On?,’ and Career Reflections

stuff

specific

sort

incredible