Kansas kids have whirlwind adventures, whether it’s Dorothy en route to Oz or Jason Sudeikis tilting at movie stardom. The American comic bounces into London jet-lagged and bleary, slurping coffee from a paper cup. He has a gilded status as a Hollywood clown and a glossy fiancee in Olivia Wilde, formerly of House. He is not in Kansas any more; the place is a memory. But he is poking all kinds of fun at red-state USA.
We’re the Millers casts 37-year-old Sudeikis as a Denver-based pot-dealer who changes his hairstyle and his surname in order to pass as a tourist and smuggle drugs across the Mexican border. Disguise complete, our hero chugs towards the checkpoint in a respectable motorhome, with TLC’s Waterfalls playing on the stereo. Inside sit two tonnes of narcotics and a fake American family cobbled together from the neighbourhood deadbeats. I liked the film: it’s slick and funny, a meld of Pineapple Express and Addams Family Values. Jennifer Aniston co-stars as the phoney wife, whose pole-dancing day job gets the phoney son aroused.
We’re the Millers also serves as a neat calling-card for Sudeikis. Aided by the wardrobe department, he makes a startling transformation from David Clarke to David Miller. One minute he is a shambling Jason Segel type, a stubbled cherub gone to seed. The next he is a new-model Steve Carell, cornfed and uptight, his eyes on the prize.
And yes, he says, the Miller gene is in his DNA. “I was raised in the suburbs of Kansas City. Minivans and khakis and culs-de-sac. Wearing polos and tucking them in. We were allowed to play hide-and-seek until the wee hours and there was no crime to speak of.” He grins. “I mean, I got in trouble for doing, like, nothing. It shows you’re living in a safe environment when the cops come to your house at 10.30 on a Saturday to tell you to stop playing basketball. Some neighbour had complained about the sound of the ball bouncing.”
That’s it? That’s the extent of his wild-youth stories? “That’s it, I’m sorry. I’m not Jay Z.”
When Sudeikis was a kid, his uncle, George Wendt, had a long-running gig playing Norm, the mordant barfly in the sitcom Cheers. Sudeikis remembers going to visit him in LA and being driven around in a flashy BMW. But he stresses that he was never especially drawn to that world in his youth (“I was never a child actor, I was child smart-ass”). On the whole he preferred goofing off and dreamed of becoming a professional athlete. Eventually, he left home to play college basketball.
The door opens and a waiter enters carrying a pot of coffee. Sudeikis brandishes his cup. “Not for me; I brought my own. Because I heard you guys piss in the coffee.” The waiter bends to pour out the coffee. His face is a perfect blank.
Sudeikis was born without a sense of smell. If his drink contained urine, he would have to taste it to know for sure. If his room sprang a gas leak, he would probably wind up dead. “Well, yeah,” he says. “It nearly happened when I was a kid. Our laundry was downstairs and my dad came down to the basement where I lived during my last few years of high school. ‘Jeez, Jason, what’s going on?’ The sump-pump had broken. It was leaking methane gas and I had no idea. I had headaches for two days afterwards.”
Every day the man takes his life in his hands. It is as though he is constantly crossing a busy road blindfolded. Sudeikis shrugs. “I don’t know how I cope, I guess I just evolved. The thing about me is that I’m exactly like Daredevil.”
When the college basketball did not pan out, he turned to comedy. He performed improv in Chicago, Amsterdam and Las Vegas, shouting to be heard above the whir of the slot machines. In 2003, he landed a job on Saturday Night Live, which has been his base for the past 10 years. Sudeikis wrote the scripts and cavorted on screen, doing impressions of everyone from Bill Clinton to Mel Gibson, Joe Biden to James Stewart. But now he is moving on, giving movies a shot. In recent years he has cropped up in the likes of Hall Pass, Movie 43 and Horrible Bosses.
“Memorising lines is the biggest difference,” he says. “On Saturday Night Live, things keep changing up until the very last second, so that’s why we use cue-cards. But in film there are no cue-cards, at least not yet, not until you become Marlon Brando and start sticking bits of face tape on the actor you’re talking to. If I tried that now, I don’t think Jen would have liked it.” He shakes his head. “In any case, I don’t want to cover up Jennifer Aniston’s face with my Post-it notes. That’s vandalism.”
Right now he is in limbo. Having left Saturday Night Live, he finds himself between movies, cut loose, without a structure. He points out that Wilde has been helpful in this regard, having herself quit a role in House. Even so, it’s a weird time. On the one hand, he has the sense that he has somehow arrived. On the other, he can’t yet tell exactly where he has landed.
He explains that Wilde was going to accompany him to London, but he advised against it. He didn’t want her at a loose end while he promoted his movie, which in hindsight is ridiculous – she would have found something to do. “I mean, I shouldn’t think, ‘Oh, just because you can’t be around me means you won’t have any fun, you’d just be channel-surfing in a hotel room.'” He pulls a face. “Maybe that’s what I assume everyone’s doing when I’m not there. I assume that’s what you’ve been doing all your life, until this very moment.” Sudeikis grins at me across the table. “But it’s OK, relax. I have arrived.”
We’re the Millers is released on 23 August.
Watch the trailer for We’re the Millers
News on Sudeikis’s departure from SNL
Sudeikis on his previous collaboration with Aniston, Horrible Bosses
