Mr. Office Space Meets Neil LaBute
For someone who has starred in two of the more culty and quotable movies of the late 90’s—Swingers and Office Space—not to mention having carried the dubious distinction of being known to a majority of the female population as Jack Berger (a.k.a. that guy who broke up with Carrie on a Post-It note) on the sixth season of Sex and the City, Mr. Livingston is not big on Hollywood pretenses. When it came time to choose a table at the Five Points restaurant, he opted for the one outside on the sidewalk. He picked tap water, ordered a beer and offered to share his soft-shell crab appetizer. He answered questions readily, if carefully, his distinctive speech cadences part chilled-out Wilson brother, part nice-guy Midwesterner (he was raised in Marion, Iowa). If he noticed the double takes of the people passing by, he didn’t let on (“Most of the people you would call my fans are all cooler than me,” he said) and didn’t seem particularly perturbed when a man stopped short at the table with a rather abrupt “Hey, you look familiar—who are you?”
“I’m Ron,” said Mr. Livingston, reaching across to shake hands. “Ron Livingston.”
“How do I know you?”
“Hmmmm. You may be … you’re either watching Sprint commercials”—he’s the face of the recent Sprint Nextel “Power up” campaign—“or Office Space.” The stranger on the sidewalk continued to stare at him blankly. Mr. Livingston tried again, “Sex and the City, maybe?”
“Oh, I thought you were someone I worked with at the music business.”
“Oh, no—I wish I had that gift,” the actor said evenly.
“Oh, wait!” the man on the sidewalk said, growing excited. “You’re that guy. Wait. What commercial is it again?
“The Sprint commercial, maybe?”
“Are you the guy who says, ‘Can you hear me now?’”
“Nope, not that one,” Mr. Livingston said. “A different one. Good guess, though.” The man took off, walking a few paces before turning around and yelling back, “Oh, now I know. O.K.!”
Unruffled, Mr. Livingston went back to studying his menu. “It was a good guess,” he said again, softly.
“There’s just this very inviting quality to him. There’s something about Ron that makes you sort of go, ‘I like that guy,’” said Neil LaBute. “He seems like a guy you could know or wish you were friends with. He’s a perfect example of the secret weapon that actors have, which is themselves. That people just like them.”
In Mr. LaBute’s play (directed by Carolyn Cantor), Mr. Livingston plays Drew, a man at a court-ordered rehab facility who is reunited with his visiting older brother (played by one of Mr. LaBute’s regulars, Frederick Weller); however, being together dredges up certain traumatic past events. As with much of Mr. LaBute’s work, the characters are complicated, and unpredictable. Things have happened to them that have perhaps irrevocably ruined their lives (these twists unfold throughout the production). Drew is charming and sociable, but he has a bad habit of screwing people over (“He has a somewhat fluid relationship to the truth,” Mr. Livingston said).
Speaking of the actor, Mr. LaBute continued: “He has this boyish quality, and I think he feels somewhat—and I mean this in the best possible way—somewhat safe. He’d be, like, the great boyfriend. Even if it didn’t work out, you’d probably end up friends, you know what I mean? He looks like if he got drunk, he’d be a funny drunk—or just a quiet and smiling one. He wouldn’t be the mean guy. As an actor, that’s just a gift that came from genetics, or where you grow up. It’s Hi, I’m Ron from Iowa!”
Indeed, Mr. Livingston carries with him a boy-next-door appeal. Sure, he’s a star, yet weirdly approachable. If you know his work, he sounds and acts exactly as you’d expect him to. With his scruffy face and super dark eyes, he’s unquestionably handsome, but not in a from-another-planet intimidating way like other leading men. He’s that guy you know—just smarter, better-looking and more talented.
“I think part of it is working in television,” said Mr. LaBute. “Television is this magical passport, which is that, since it comes into your home, you feel like you really know that guy. I’ve worked with a couple of TV folks over the years, like when David Schwimmer was in Some Girls, and people actually called him Ross. It’s strange that their celebrity is one that people feel like they appropriate them. You are my friend! Ron has that kind of thing—people feel like they know the face, and the smile, and it draws you in.”
Born to a homemaking mother and an aerospace engineer, Mr. Livingston is the oldest of four siblings. He attended Yale as a theater and English major. “I loved it,” he said. “I don’t know how much of that was Yale and how much was just college in general. Everyone’s so damn cocky. It’s great to have that many people who thought they knew everything—all at the same time.” After school he moved to Chicago, where he did some theater and auditioned for television without much result.
Getting booked for commercials, he said, was never his strong suit. “You have to smile and have a lot of energy,” he said slowly. “Yeah … the smiling and the energy thing was always sorta tough.” Instead, Mr. Livingston said, he appeared in a lot of industrials. “You know, those company training films? It was great, actually. It was a great exercise, because you take the most boring writing of all—it’s like a user manual for a VCR or something—and then try to act it and make it interesting.” They all blend together, he demurred, when pressed for specifics. At the suggestion that perhaps they’ll show up on YouTube, he gave a laid-back chuckle (a literal “heh, heh”). “Why not?” he heh’d. “It’s some of my best work.”
Los Angeles beckoned (“They’d cast in Chicago, but then they’d hire the guy from L.A.,” he said). His very first West Coast audition was for the first-ever incarnation of The Real World (which apparently attracted tons of out-of-work actors). “I remember sitting in the room and listening to them try to explain it, and I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. You had to be in this room with, like, another 20 people shooting your mouth off about something. I walked out of there, and [actor/director] Shawn Levy, who I also went to school with, was there, and I remember being like, ‘Wow, it sure is weird out here.’”
Small film roles eventually followed, with one part—in the largely unseen The Low Life—catching the attention of Swingers writer Jon Favreau. “Swingers was the first thing that someone besides Jon Favreau saw,” Mr. Livingston said (an understatement, considering that for a time that film made it almost mandatory for men to call each other ‘so money’). The hilarious and endlessly quotable Office Space, co-starring a pre-tabloid-targeted Jennifer Aniston, followed. (When a supervisor asks Mr. Livingston’s character why he’s been missing so much work, he replies in what is now a signature drawl: “I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it,” managing to crack up even the corporate suits.)
Later, he turned toward more serious fare, like the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers, and landed supporting parts in Adaptation and The Cooler. He currently stars in Fox’s fate-to-be-determined drama Standoff, a hostage-negotiator drama, returning in June—at least for now. “Eight days is just not a lot of time for the writers, and it’s not a lot of time for the actors,” he said, referring to the fast pace of television production. “It’s gotten to the point now where TV has gotten so ambitious—especially when you compare it to when it was like The Rockford Files, just two guys in a car going down the highway. Now they’re trying to make a movie every week.” When asked for a wish list of projects or directors, he considered the question carefully. “I’m probably more reactive about it,” he said. “I mean, I want to work with Peter Sellers, but then it probably won’t happen and he passes away. Honestly? The best experiences I’ve had are working with people when I had no idea just how talented they are.” A few beats later: “All the Andersons,” he said finally. “Wes Anderson. Paul Thomas Anderson. The Andersons out there are all do wing great things.”
Mr. Livingston hasn’t done live theater in 10 years. “I’m looking forward to it. None of the other muscles I haven’t used in 10 years are still working, so hopefully this one will,” he joked. Of course, of all theater work, a Neil LaBute play can’t be the easiest project to jump back in with. Mr. LaBute’s plays tend to be on the emotionally devastating side, with not-so-lovable protagonists and controversial subject matter. In a Dark, Dark House is no different.
“It’s about the ripples created by traumatic events when you’re a kid,” Mr. Livingston said, careful not to give any of the plot twists away. “The same earthquake forms the ocean that can make a 60-foot wave in one place, and elsewhere be a two-foot wave, but all the buildings fall down.”
“Ron’s out there in a pretty naked play,” Mr. LaBute admitted. “There’s not much to hide behind, so it takes a pretty fearless actor. There’s very little to hang your sympathies on except these people who are standing up there and telling you what their story is. With a character like Drew, you can have an actor working subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways to say, ‘How can I make this guy more likable?’ Ron, time after time, was pushing—not to be more of a villain, but to make realistic choices. He was struggling to make Drew as truthful as possible. That’s a nice thing to see.”
“I think a lot of people have impressions of his characters as jerks, but I think Neil just likes to go to the place of language where [people say the things they say] when they don’t think anybody is judging them,” said Mr. Livingston. “The dialogue is amazing. It has that shape and flow to it that sounds like surveillance tapes, like how people talk when they have no idea that people are listening to them.” Of course, people haven’t always liked what they hear when they’re in a Neil LaBute universe (from In the Company of Men, where junior executives ruthlessly toy with and seduce a deaf female co-worker, to Fat Pig, about the struggles of dating an overweight woman). Outrage and calls of misogyny inevitably followed. “People tend to confuse a character’s voice with the author’s voice,” Mr. Livingston said. “Mike Judge [Office Space writer/director and creator of Beavis and Butt-head] got the same rap. People thought Mike Judge was dumb, and he’s actually very smart. He just likes the way dumb people talk.”
Mr. Livingston’s co-star, Frederick Weller, came in after original co-star Jason Patric dropped out early in the production due to the ever-handy “creative differences” plea. “He was there for the workshop part of it, and then when it got time to kick it over to production, I think it was really just a conversation between him and the director,” said Mr. Livingston. “Ultimately, I have a lot of respect for somebody who is responsible enough and knows himself well enough to know where they’re at—and give the playwright a chance to not have to scramble. I hope to a get a chance to work with him again.” (Agreed Mr. LaBute; “I wish there were more drama to it. He [Patric] is someone I’ve worked with a couple of times and will again.”)
Asked whether he takes advantage of Mr. LaBute’s presence at rehearsals to try to decipher the ambiguity that is another standard of the playwright’s work, Mr. Livingston gave another little heh. “I think the less you do of that, the better. Because once you ask him, then you have to abide by the answer. ‘Oh, yeah, he’s definitely left-handed.’ ‘What? Oh, shit. Damn it! Why’d I ask?’” He demurred giving his own theories on certain mysteries of In a Dark, Dark House. “If this was just a dark house, you’d know what went down,” he grinned. “But this is a dark, dark house, so there’s still a little bit of dark left over at the end.”
Copyright © 2007 The New York Observer. All rights reserved.
