Seth Green Breaks Down His Career, from 'Family Guy' to 'Austin Powers' | Vanity Fair

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- I love performing and I love telling stories
and I love making an audience feel something.
And so whenever I pick roles, it's always in that pursuit.
If I read something that's particularly inspiring
or compelling, I chase it.
If I get it, it just means that I was the right guy for it.
And if I don't, then I just move on to the next one.
Hi, "Vanity Fair".
I'm Seth green and this is the timeline of my career.
[melancholy instrumental music]
- What was the bear's name?
- State of Maine.
- Mm-hmm, the bear was on his last legs.
- [Children] But they were the only legs he had.
- I got "The Hotel New Hampshire" by auditioning.
I was eight years old and auditioned in New York City.
I had been working for over a year living in Philadelphia
and taking the trains back and forth
to New York for auditions.
This was the first feature film that I got
and I was thrilled, thrilled to get it.
I actually don't remember the original audition,
but I remember the followup where my mom came into the room
with me and spoke with the director and the casting agent.
And they told her that they wanted me to play this part.
And when we left that room, we skipped down the stairs.
It was the most exciting thing ever.
- Hey bro, I'm only kidding.
I mean, who could beat a night of cards, chips, dips,
and dorks. [laughs]
- I was maybe 13.
I might've turned 14 while working on "Can't Buy Me Love".
The reason that that particular project was so significant
was it marked a change in the way my mom tried
to prepare me for auditions.
When I went to audition for it,
I had already memorized my lines and so in the waiting room,
I was kinda playing around
or hanging out with other kids that I knew.
And my mom saw other kids sitting in chairs
dutifully going over their sides with their parent,
and she felt a little irresponsible and tried to say,
"Well, we should be going over our lines."
And I was like, "I'm fine.
"I've already done all my prep
"and I'm ready to go in the room."
And so when I got that job,
it changed the way my mom thought about it
and she realized that we didn't have to do
what everybody else was doing
just because they were doing it.
Each person's process was gonna be their own process.
And from that point on, she kinda just let me approach
the work by my own design.
- Something stinks in suburbia.
[people chattering]
- Hi.
- Oh, that's what I was gonna say.
- Whatcha looking at?
- This cheerleading trophy.
It's like its eyes follow you wherever you go.
I like it.
- Well, I've really spent my whole career
playing guest stars or, you know,
coming in in a recurring way and that's a position I love.
That's something very comfortable for me.
And so I didn't look at coming onto "Buffy"
as something scary.
It was really exciting.
It was a great way to come into something
that was already well functioning and play a part
that seemed really organic to me.
And to get to do things I hadn't gotten to do
on film very often, like play guitar or kiss a girl.
But I knew both Sarah Geller and Alyson Hannigan
from having worked with them when we were much younger.
And then when I got to audition for it,
it was as Aly's potential boyfriend,
and since we'd already worked together a bunch of times
I thought, "Oh, this would be great.
"She's fantastic to work with and I'll bet we could play
"a pretty convincing couple."
But actually getting to make that show
over a couple of seasons
and really develop that character into something,
that was a thrill.
I love Oz and I'm so grateful for the chance
to have got to play him.
- You're trying to make your friend Xander jealous,
or even the score or something,
and that's on the empty side.
- It seems to tables have turned again, Dr. Evil.
- Not really.
Kill the little bastard, see what I care.
- But Dad, we just had a breakthrough in group.
- I had the group liquidated, you little shit.
They were insolent.
- I hate you, I hate you.
I wish I was never artificially created in a lab.
- I was working on a play in San Diego
and so I was very serious about acting
when I got that comedy project.
And my take on it was that Scott Evil is in a drama
while everyone around him is in a ridiculous comedy.
'Cause I'd been seeing so many angry, violent,
or outrageous teenagers on things like "Jerry Springer"
and they all seemed victim
of the same kind of parental apathy.
That, to me, was very funny to explore
when you have a character that is as bold and as silly
as Dr. Evil, who is trying as sincerely as he can
to form a relationship with his teenage son,
the notion of that teenage son being legitimately angry
or hurt [laughs] by the lack of participation
in his own upbringing,
that just struck me very funny.
And so that was how I approached it.
Instead of being a kid who's like, "I hate my dad.
"My dad's a dick."
I just thought it was funny to come from a place
of legitimate hurt or [laughs] deeply emotional pain
of trying to grow up and even understand myself
as a character with this malevolent dictator as a father.
The fun behind the scenes of that movie is incomparable.
I have had so few experiences that are as inclusive
and supportive and just fun as making "Austin Powers".
And what I found was the more serious and more committed
I was to the genuine pain of Scott Evil,
the funnier any of those scenes became.
'Cause none of those other characters care
about my character's feelings.
They are all just ridiculous
and in pursuit of world domination through
whatever idiotic means they're enacting.
And so from my perspective,
the more realistically I was hurt by [laughs],
the funnier any of those seeds became.
- Why make trillions when we could make
[dramatic instrumental music]
billions.
- A trillion is more than a million, numbnuts.
- All right, zip it.
- You can't even-
- Zip it.
Zip.
- Look, all-
- Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit A.
- Ugh.
[upbeat instrumental music]
- Yo Jana, you wanna dance?
- I'm allergic.
- Allergic?
To dancing?
- Yeah.
- I grew up loving John Hughes movies,
R-rated teen comedies, or PG-13 teen comedies,
and when that script came up, I knew the writers personally.
My friend Breckin Meyer had originally been cast
in the role that I played, Kenny Fisher.
The role was actually written for him,
but he got an opportunity to do a different movie,
a far more high profile drama and couldn't do it.
So I, just like everything else, had to audition
for this part.
But I wanted it so bad.
I really loved this script.
I loved this idea and I especially loved this character,
this incredibly insecure character who is full of bravado
and outward demonstrations of his lack of fear
while he is crippled by his worry
of what other people will think of him.
And so that's a great place to come from.
And I just wanted to bring honesty to that.
I wanted him to not just be a fool,
but a fool that you could sympathize with.
And I wanted to justify all of his fashion choices
or conversation choices, all of his intent,
I wanted that to be justified under all of this deep sadness
and insecurity that I think everyone feels
when you're teenage.
I liked playing underdogs
and challenging the audience to like them.
And then I love bringing a humanity to the character
that makes people feel empathy
for someone who is ridiculous.
Kenny Fisher gets a lot of love, and I appreciate that.
- Why y'all gotta waste my flavor? Damn.
- I've never seen this man before in my life.
Principal Shepherd, what are you doing here?
- Getting to make "Can't Hardly Wait" was a thrill
just because I got to work with so many people
who I knew personally,
and also getting to meet people who I had admired
for some time but never gotten to work with,
like Charlie Korsmo.
And Charlie and I became a really good friends
over the course of making that.
He came to L.A. to do the press junket for the movie.
He stayed with me in my apartment and we hung out all week
going to KFC and reading all of our terrible reviews
and highlighting the more severe comparisons
between us and some kind of undesirable woodland creature.
But while Charlie and I were spending that week together,
we just got into this riff of impersonating Ted Levine's
character in "The Silence of the Lambs", Buffalo Bill,
that character who has such a distinct voice
and physical persona and such an uncomfortable presence,
and we set about just applying it to comedy.
Like where was Buffalo Bill working?
How did Buffalo Bill make money?
Is he a telemarketer?
Like, is he trying to sell you Amway?
What is it that he does?
And at one point we started imagining him working
the drive-through and you hearing on the squawk box,
[clicks] "What, what can I get you?"
"Can I get a two-piece meal with mashed potatoes?"
"Ah, you want the two-piece, mashed potatoes.
"Do you want on a piece of corn for an extra 50 cents?"
And that just made us laugh all week.
And so when I got the audition for "Family Guy",
I read that script and I just loved it.
It was so funny.
I had never felt more seen than reading that script.
And I just wanted that job so much.
So I went in and they showed me the character,
and you know, if you look at Chris Griffin,
he's got that blonde hair and an earing and a hat
and kind of looks like a surfer kid.
And so that was the voice that I had even thought.
He was like, "What's up, dad?
Fight, the machine, dad, meh."
I did it like that and they were like,
"Okay, great, great, thanks."
And I said, "Hey, can I try something?"
And as an actor, I always advocate this.
If you have something, try it.
It's your audition.
If you say, "Ah, I wanna start again,"
do it, it's your audition.
Own that space.
And so I took a really silly risk and said,
"My buddy and I've been doing this voice all week,
"and I just feel like it's applicable somewhere.
"So what if this kid sounded like this?"
And I did that deeply, bass-y, grotesquely,
disturbing performance but in this animated comedy dialogue.
And they said, "Oh, can you make it a little bit younger?"
And so I raised the pitch up just slightly
but kept all the same details to it.
And then I wound up getting that job, which is bananas.
That's insane.
But they said the reason that I got it
was because I did something so different.
And if you really think about it,
that's the same reason that I got "Austin Powers".
It was just doing something that nobody else was doing
that felt sincere or appropriate.
I always try and trust that instinct,
and I always try and take risks
'cause if you do something that they can't unsee,
then it was always meant to be you.
- Could you maybe talk to Marco
about him always doing my face?
You remember in the "What?" video I established the face.
Well ever since then, every time you see Marco,
he's doing the face and it's mine.
You looked at him on "TRL", "Hi, Carson".
You look at them on the "Kids Choice Awards",
"This is ours, thanks."
And then right here on the cover of "Seventeen" magazine,
"Hi, little girl, beauty secrets."
- Deb and Harry who wrote and directed "Can't Hardly Wait",
wrote and directed "Josie",
and they, after the fact, approached me and Breckin
and Donald Faison and Alex Martin about playing
the boy band in the movie.
It was just gonna be this cameo at the very beginning.
And because I had spent the last, I don't know, 10 years,
20 years like watching all of these boy bands evolve,
you know, New Kids on the Block or O-Town,
the archetypes were so clear that it was really funny
to play this super exaggerated version
of any of those characters.
And whenever you look at those bands,
whether it's NSYNC or Backstreet Boys,
in the height, in the absolute height of their absurdity,
the audience is as big as it's gonna get
and they're doing things like arena tours
and, you know, coming out of the rafters on cables,
shooting streamer guns into an audience of 14 year olds.
Like the scene that we were doing was us arriving
on a tarmac with like thousands of screaming fans.
And they had gone through the effort of producing
all of this physical merchandise with our faces on it
in character, because that's the best way
to make this seem real.
There's a thing about acting where everybody knows
that they're playing along, but when you're in the scene,
you have to really give it as if it's true
or the audience doesn't receive it.
I became obsessed with this idea of like laying hands
on people behind the barrier. [laughs]
They were walking down the row
and just doing that thing that you see evangelicals do
of like putting your hand on somebody forehead
and then pushing 'em away like, "You're healed."
And I thought that was a really subtle way to demonstrate
the godlike certainty that my character
had come to understand. [laughs]
But I did have a moment during the filming of it.
You know, you got like 300 screaming kids
that are all extras that are wearing a shirt
with your face on it.
When you walk down the row and like shake their hands
or sign their shirt or their forehead,
or whatever it is that you're doing,
there was only one guy that like, he was like, "Ah",
and I walked, put my hands on him.
And I was like, "You're loved, you're important."
We, in that moment, we just like connected
in each other's eye
and we both knew it wasn't real. [laughs]
We both just knew.
My God, this isn't real.
[boy band yells]
- I'm gonna get an anti 770 digital decoder
with the 70 watt amps and Burr-Brown DACs.
- Yeah.
- It's a big stereo.
Speakers so loud they blow women's clothes off.
- Now you're talking.
- "Italian Job" was far less challenging for me.
I was a passenger through most of the thing.
Aside from having to get certified in scuba
and learn how to ride a motorcycle
and some basic stunt driving,
I didn't have to do anything on film
that was all that new for me.
I was able to speak tech jargon
as if it was a natural sentence
[laughs] and be a convincing guy in a van.
"He's on your six."
And so this guy was part of this elite, super cool crew.
And yet it was me.
So what's funny about it is him getting zero respect.
From every angle I was like, this guy should have the money
to do cool stuff, but just not be able to do it well.
Like he reads all the same magazines.
He can shop in the same high fashion stores
with the money that he's made from these heists,
but the jacket doesn't fit him right,
or he bought this expensive bike
and he doesn't know how to ride it well.
And that to me is where the comedy comes
since you have this guy who can compete
with all of these awesome, incredibly cool people
who run with guns and spin out cars and punch a guy out.
And the character rolls in that crew,
but is not cool like them.
So finding that balance for me was a blast.
Gary Gray let me run.
He wanted me to be funny anytime I could.
The best is where Jay Statham goes to get the key card
from the cable girl,
and I had just been imitating Jason
and Gary thought it was really funny.
He was like, "I'm just gonna film that."
And so we shot three takes of me running their dialogue,
and then they just edit them together
into whatever the most appealing bits were.
So any way to make that character more comedic,
I was given an opportunity.
- "Nice to meet you, I'm Handsome Rob.
"And you are?"
"Oh, my name's Becky but it's written on my shirt."
"Listen, I'm gonna need your shirt and your truck."
"Perfect, I'll give them both to you.
"Would you like my virginity as well?"
"If it's on the menu."
- Oh, James.
I'm so glad I ran into you.
Here, come to my party.
The first annual King and Queen of Downtown Pageant.
- I'd rather suck on a urine cake.
- But James, you have to come.
You're my best friend.
- How could I be your best friend
when I don't even like you?
- I had a meeting with Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey,
who had made the documentary about the club kids
in the early '90s
that they were translating into a feature.
They told me they were interested in me playing
James St. James and sent me home with James' book,
"Disco Bloodbath", and with the documentary
about the club scene.
And when I saw who James was,
I was in shock that they would give me this opportunity,
that they looked at me and saw the potential
to play this character.
And I only wanted to make them never regret that choice.
So I put everything I had into giving an honest portrayal
of James that was not a parody, that was not a novelty,
that was not some kind of sensationalized caricature.
James has such a unique voice and personality
that I wanted to do justice to it.
He's an incredibly impressive,
incredibly talented individual.
The filmmakers had hundreds of hours
of these actual people in those actual moments
that Mac and I attempted to recreate,
but we really didn't want to just imitate it,
we wanted to feel like we were being them.
And so we watched hundreds of hours of footage
and just practice letting the body movements,
the speech patterns, and the vocal tone feel organic.
We had about two years of developing the script
and finding financing before we actually shot.
And then we shot the whole thing in about 14 days.
So it was very fast,
and one of the hardest things I've had to do,
but also one of the things I'm most proud of,
even though so few people have seen it.
- You know, Michael, if it really was self defense,
then you've got nothing to worry about.
You can...
You should just turn yourself in.
- What's up?
Hey, you here for that thing of Body English tonight?
- Yeah.
- Oh cool. Yeah, me too.
It should be fine, I brought my whole crew out.
- Definitely.
Hey, you know know Ari Gold, my agent?
- Never met, big fan.
- Ha, that's funny, dude.
That pinky bought me a house in Malibu.
- I had just done "Italian Job" with Mark Wahlberg
and he was developing the show for HBO
and was asking any celebrity friends that he had
to come and do cameos on it.
So they brought me on for one little bit,
like pick a fight with Kevin on the roof of The Standard.
And while I was there,
Doug Ellin and I were talking about
what was the funniest about this interaction
and why Seth Green would have a problem with E?
Doug was like, "I'd love there to be this confusion
"about whether or not you slept with E's girlfriend."
I was like, "Oh well, this is very funny."
We wrote this whole backstory that, to me, was very funny
where I'd been on like youth group teen tours with Sloan,
Emmanuelle Chriqui, loved her or had tried to date her,
and maybe we even had some drunken something.
But now she's dating this guy who I have zero respect for.
He's dating the girl that I love deep in my heart.
Like I'm gonna go out of my way to destroy this person.
And then they just kept repeating it.
Like I didn't...
I don't think I realized how often,
even when I didn't appear in an episode,
they were talking about Seth Green as the villain,
as like the enemy of the good guys on the show.
What I didn't anticipate was people being convinced
that this was the truth.
And the mistake that I made was playing a character called
Seth Green and not playing a character called
like Joe Smokeshow.
I don't know.
I think because that show was so popular,
and I like to think
because my performance was so convincing,
it gave an entire generation bad information
about me behind the scenes.
It was so convincing that Matt Senreich's wife,
who had already known me for eight years, watched that show,
and I'd been to their wedding,
She said, "Gosh, is Seth really a jerk?" [laughs]
- So how's Sloan, man?
- She's still good, Seth.
- You're just letting him hit you, okay.
You wanna avoid that as much as possible, okay.
'Cause he's hitting you really hard
and there's only so much you can take
before you actually die, all right.
So main take away?
Don't get hit.
- Okay.
[crowd chattering]
Hey, are we fighting like for real?
- I kill you.
- Oh shit. [bell rings]
- But when I set out to make "Changeland",
I knew a lot of things upfront.
Making a movie is incredibly complicated and very difficult,
and that if I was taking it on as a director,
as well as an actor, that I needed conditions to be optimal
in every direction.
And part of that is making sure
that you've got very strong producers,
that you can control as much of the environment as you can,
or that you've done a ton of work in advance
to make sure that your conditions are just so.
And because of some of the places where I was choosing
to shoot, on the edge of a cliff
in the middle of the Indian Ocean,
that it was going to be challenging for the production
to even get there, let alone shoot several takes.
So I needed actors that I could depend on
who would immediately be convincing to the audience,
would do all of their work in advance
so that by the time...
And also who had a comfort and a chemistry with me,
that we could just get it.
And so that's what I did.
I cast people that I knew were excellent,
competent performers who were professional
and did a tremendous amount of work in advance.
And then also I know the Breckin and I
have great chemistry on camera,
and so selfishly, as an actor, I wanted another actor
that I would be able to interact with
because at the center of this movie is this friendship.
And if you don't buy this friendship,
if you don't care about these people,
then you won't care about any of the things
that they're trying to overcome.
And I wanted to tell a real simple story about life
and growing up and starting over and being scared,
making a lot of bad decisions, but also, you know,
especially in a time where a culture of toxic masculinity
is being observed and derided
and hopefully addressed and improved,
I wanted to show a healthy relationship between two men
who were not outward villains.
- I'm glad to be at a new school
after they turned my old one into a for-profit prison.
Hello, I'm looking for a surrogate father figure,
but I'll settle for textbooks.
- Yeah, "Robot Chicken" is a strange one
because it was not an intentional pursuit.
I'd spent, you know, over 20 years as an on-camera performer
and had gotten a little bored with doing chat shows.
And so I knew that I was supposed to go on "Conan"
and I wanted to make something.
I had seen that Conan O'Brien had a action figure
made of him as a promotion.
And I knew that I had a toy coming out from "Austin Powers",
and I thought, "Well, maybe there's some kind of
"stop motion adventure that our toys could go on."
And so I got my friend, Matt Senreich,
who at the time was the editorial director
for Wizard Publications, to help me figure out
how to make this short.
And while we were trying to find an animation house
that would help us produce it,
we got approached by Sony, which was developing a precursor
to YouTube called Screenblast.
So they got people like us and people like Fred Armisen
to produce a series of shorts for the wild, wild West web.
We produced about 45 minutes
and the whole thing spectacularly failed.
But I made a deal with one of the lawyers
to shop the content around.
We were in the midst of making a deal with Comedy Central
when September 11th happened, and it was about a year
before anybody would consider making comedy.
Just some coincidental timing.
"Family Guy" had been off the air on Fox
for a couple of years,
and Seth MacFarlane called me and told me
that there was a new division of Cartoon Network,
which I'd already pitched, called the Adult Swim,
and that these guys might be worth pitching to.
They took a risk and gave us 20 quarter hours to produce.
And at that point Matt Senreich and I had to figure out
how do we make television?
We set about just doing it,
not thinking that it was going to go more
than these 20 quarter hours,
never thinking that it was gonna go beyond that short
that I eventually brought on "Conan O'Brien".
We didn't intend to make a program.
We were just kinda making something that made us laugh,
something that was what, we thought,
for a very small audience 'cause at the time,
Comic-Con or pop at that level,
especially all this genre, superhero,
reflective '80s nostalgia pop,
like none of that was mainstream.
It remains shocking to me that we've been doing this
for 15 years.
That's really weird.
And the best way I can equate it to anybody is
imagine you put on a play in your basement
for your grandparents, and then you won a Tony.
I love making stuff.
And so that's really what I'm gonna try and do
for the rest of my life.
I intend to do this until I physically can't anymore.
So whether that's performing or directing
or producing or writing,
I am incredibly grateful to continue to have the opportunity
to express myself and put it out there.
Well thanks, "Vanity Fair".
This was a lengthy journey.
We could probably all use a resoling of our shoes
having walked through the timeline of my career
up to this point.
Hopefully we'll be doing the same thing
in another 10 or 20 years.
[cheerful instrumental music]