Matt Walsh has made his career, in recent years, as the guy you sort of know, the comic character actor who can step in and make an everyman memorable, often due to the little bit of edge that belies the suburban-dad appearance.
“He’s in every movie that Rob Corddry’s not in,” comic Jimmy Pardo said in identifying Walsh during his appearance on Pardo’s “Never Not Funny” podcast.
In “The Hangover,”he was the doctor the lead trio visits to try to retrace forgotten steps. He busts Ed Helms’ character on being a dentist and tells the group to get directions themselves: “I’m a doctor, not a tour guide.”
Walsh was also in the HBO series “Hung,” doing seven episodes as Matt Saline, a boyfriend to the Anne Heche character, the ex-wife of the lead. “Ultimately I turned out to be, like, a big jerk, which I play very well,” Walsh, 47, said during a recent return to Chicago.
The Hinsdale South High School graduate and co-founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv troupe was here promoting a non-jerk role, on “Veep.” The show is Walsh’s chance to be in something that’s good and, for a change, might last more than a season or two — and it is also HBO’s next great comedy series hope, premiering Sunday.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus(“Seinfeld”) plays a vice president struggling to do something useful — or something that will be perceived as useful — and to keep her office together. The great joke propelling the show is the job itself, as grandiose as it is ineffectual.
“You’re so close to having the best job in the world,” said Walsh, “but the reality is, nobody really wants that job when you’re doing it.”
It’s a cast thick with Chicago connections. Louis-Dreyfus went to Northwestern. Oak Park’s Anna Chlumsky plays the vice president’s chief of staff, and the Chicago background of Timothy C. Simons, playing the White House liaison, includes training at the Second City.
Walsh, meanwhile, is just right as veteran communications director Mike McLintock. He showed up at the HBO event looking dapper in a jacket and tie, but the character is sweat-stained, a little burned out. But he’s also loyal and canny and not put off by Dan Egan (Reid Scott), a smooth, striving newcomer to the VP’s press office.
“I always fancied that I came from, like, a Chicago political scene and I know how to survive,” he said of the character. “So I’ve seen guys like Dan come and go … and I know, ultimately, guys like that are self-serving. They’ll either destroy themselves or go on. At some point I think I realize he’s not a total threat.”
So McLintock, early on in the series, deflects Dan’s direct challenges to his authority with self-deprecation or basic male verbal jousting.
But then, during a failed vice presidential photo op at a Washington frozen “yoghurt” shop — “We are an established shop; we spell yoghurt with an ‘h’ in the middle,” the owner announces — McLintock steps in, hard, to stop the younger man from leaking a news story that would be detrimental to the vice president.
It’s part of the realism that Walsh said the revered Scottish writer-director Armando Iannucci insisted on for the show, which, like the British “The Office”or Iannucci’s own “The Thick of It” and “Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge,” is shot in a deadpan, verite style.
Where Aaron Sorkin’s series”The West Wing” put politics on a sort of pedestal, “Veep” takes it back down to human scale, all the way down to the vice president having, in one episode, emergency digestive issues.
“‘The West Wing’ sort of transports you, seeing people doing, perhaps, God’s work through government, and there’s a lot of battles and impassioned monologues,” Walsh said. “In ‘Veep,’ there’s none of that. This is, I think, the truth of what if you were a career politician, and what you would have to go through every day.
“We toured the offices of the West Wing and the Eisenhower Building and various chiefs of staff and senators, and it’s actually quite dreary at times. A lot of boxes of documents have been there for a year, and cups of coffee, and people who don’t have desks are writing on couches. The set of our show looks like that. That’s sort of the truth of politics.”
With HBO seeming to be fully behind the show, with some bright early notices and with the pedigree of Iannucci, whose screenplay for the 2009 political film”In the Loop”was an Academy Award nominee, Walsh is optimistic enough, in these final days before the debut, to almost forget to be cautious.
“I think it’s really funny. Knock on wood, but I do. I believe it’s really funny,” said Walsh, whose last two starring TV roles, in “Dog Bites Man” on Comedy Central and “Players” on Spike TV, were in shows that didn’t make it to a second season.
He’s right — it’s laugh-out-loud funny. But “Veep” scenes play mostly in a minor key, trusting the audience to find the humor in, often, the very realistic discomfort of its characters. When, for instance, a political event is woefully underattended, Louis-Dreyfus’ aide tells her to play it off, just “mingle.”
“How do you suggest I mingle with this few people?” she replies. “Did Simon mingle with Garfunkel?”
Walsh came into comedy almost sideways. He took only one acting class at Northern Illinois University, he has said, where he was a psychology major. But inspired by a performance in a Hinsdale South variety show, he did start driving into Chicago to take improv classes during college, and from there, he just kept at it.
“I just pursued improv. I just followed it,” he said. “I’m sure I worried my parents tremendously. Going to New York with three other people was kind of a throw of the dice. But, yeah, it’s been surprising.”
He’s referring to the Upright Citizens Brigade’s decision to move to New York in 1996, in part to separate itself from a crowded Chicago scene. He, Amy Poehler, Matt Besser and Ian Roberts decamped, and UCB became a New York institution that has now spawned a theater, a short-lived but fondly remembered Comedy Central series, and a very active schedule teaching improv in New York and Los Angeles.
Walsh moved to Los Angeles in 2005. There were career reasons, he said, and “by that point a lot of my friends were in LA. And I was getting ready to settle down, so I think LA felt like the right place to be.
“All the obvious things are true. The entertainment industry is too prevalent, and obviously you meet people who are just finding out how hot you are. There’s a lot of surgery, especially in the Beverly Hills area. But I live in the Valley, which is like a sleepy part of the town. And you can have, like, a suburban yard, which you can’t in have in (New York), and it kind of feels like Chicago that way. It kind of feels like I know my neighbors. My buddies live a block away. It has that sort of Midwestern vibe.”
And when “Veep” came up, Walsh jumped at the chance, in part because Iannucci’s “Alan Partridge” work “is one of my favorite things.” By his second audition (of four) he was in a room with Louis-Dreyfus, improvising, and now he’s on a show that gets to start its life right after”Game of Thrones.”
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
‘Veep’
9 p.m. Sunday, HBO
