Jason Bateman on Arrested Development, smiling villains and his lost decade

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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...is-lost-decade

Back to the lost decade. “Having thought, ‘This is really fun,’ and staying at the party a little bit too long, I’d lost my place in line in the business; it was a case of trying to claw that back towards the end of the 90s, and not getting a lot of great responses.” The official end of that dry spell was Arrested Development, which first aired in 2003, but also, Juno, in 2007, a fascinating indie film about a teenager who gets accidentally pregnant and agrees to have the baby adopted. It’s quite an uncomfortable movie, seen, at the time, as implicitly anti-abortion, and deliberately vague and airbrushed on what the experience of giving a baby up for adoption is actually like. But the characterisation is complex and interesting, in large part because of Bateman’s prospective adoptive dad, reversing and messing with expectations.

He starts out as something you think you understand – a wholesome everyman – then becomes a much darker character, on whom the coating of nice-guy shellac shimmers somewhere between shtick and active deception. It’s not a huge role but is a perfect distillation of Bateman’s mature performances; the guy who uses his everyman face like a Trojan horse. He says he likes to play characters as “not too far from the average person. Even if the part is not right in that lane, but maybe adjacent to it, I will pull the character into that. Even if they’re not vanilla on the page, I like pulling them into vanilla.” He has said before that he only took the role in Juno because Francesca, recently born, had colic, and it was a guaranteed three weeks out of the house. “No, no, no,” he now says, disapprovingly. “I said that to be fun. I said it with, hopefully, an obvious wink.” There he goes again, pulling himself back into vanilla.

To rewind to Arrested Development: it started at Fox and was an immediate success, winning five Emmys for the first season. It was cancelled, because Fox is crazy. The first three seasons were breathtakingly good – and surprising. The way each actor was so distinct and yet so locked together in the ensemble, the sheer quality of the cast – Jeffrey Tambor and the late Jessica Walter as the parents, Bateman, Arnett, Portia de Rossi and Tony Hale as their adult children – was remarkable. Bateman is very clear about what made it funny: “This is not funny to anybody inside the show. This is a drama to them. Almost like an animal documentary, where you’re watching these freaks, and how they gather their food, and how they make their house. And let’s make sure we all whisper because we don’t want these folks to know how much we’re laughing at them.”

Having been dropped, it was picked up six years later by Netflix, back when the streaming behemoth had no real track record of programme-making, except for David Fincher’s House of Cards. “What’s good for David Fincher sure as **** better be good enough for us,” is how Bateman describes the united attitude of the cast.

There were plenty of people queueing up to say it wasn’t as good at Netflix, and truthfully, the fourth season wasn’t. Critically, the reception went up and down – at its putative worst, it’s still funnier than most things – and career-wise, he says: “I will always respect the access and relevance that that show gave me, and try not to take that for granted again, and do everything I can to earn this place in the business that I love. It created an environment; I loved going there every single day.”

This is surprising, since if Arrested Development is famous for one thing, other than itself, it’s for a terrible atmosphere on set. Or at least, that was the story in a New York Times cast interview in 2018. Walter, who died in March last year, said of Tambor: “In almost 60 years of working, I’ve never had anybody yell at me like that on a set.” Bateman and Hale tried to damp down the situation, and the whole thing – particularly coming when it did, when the lid was just being lifted on Hollywood harassment, sexual or otherwise – saw them accused of minimising.

Bateman remains adamant about his original stance and says of that interview: “Things got misinterpreted and there was a fallout – it was unfortunate. But it was an anomaly. Any family work environment, you’re going to have situations where things go a little pear-shaped every once in a while. I just have the fondest memories of 100% of that experience. You know, the ups and the downs, the good, the bad, the funny, the sad: all of it was a positive to me.”

There’s a lively internet chat scene on the similarities between Marty Byrde in Ozark and Michael Bluth in Arrested Development – that they are morally so alike, Ozark must have been (consciously or not) conceived as a prequel to Arrested Development. In this fan-fictional universe, Michael is actually Marty post-witness protection scheme. I disagree with that. Part of the genius of Bateman’s Arrested Development performance is how completely, learning-resistantly hapless he is, while as Byrde he can see round corners and get the better of any situation. He doesn’t really want to adjudicate on this question and ruin any fan debates, so says mildly: “I think they have similar blind spots. Their arrogance and hubris leads to early decisions. Perhaps they should think a little bit longer about what they do.”

If there’s another through-line, Bateman says, it’s that: “I’m not too far removed from a drama when I’m doing Arrested Development and I’m not too far from a comedy when I’m doing Ozark.” He reaches to describe some quintessence to his acting another way: “In a drama, I’m not the person with a knife, I’m the person getting chased. In a comedy, I’m not the person farting, I’m the person who smelled it.” It’s so neat, so succinct, and so drolly sums up the paradox: it’s actually terribly rare to meet an everyman, almost unique to meet one who’s everymanning on purpose.