A man walks into a bar. To dodge the $15 cover at the door, he puts his name on a list of stand-up comics volunteering to perform on an open mike stage. The man is no comedian. He’s a middle-aged dad on the brink of divorce who just split a cannabis cookie with his wife on a New York City subway platform before they went their separate ways. By chance, he lands in a comedy club. When his name is called, Alex Novak takes the stage and looks around, bewildered. “I don’t have a ton of jokes,” he says, with a self-conscious chuckle. There’s an uncomfortable silence as he scans a roomful of blank stares and looks for words. When he finds them, they’re not exactly funny. Alex has no jokes. But he has found someone to talk to, if only himself. And as his feelings coalesce in the heat of the spotlight, his life is about to change.
The same could be said for the guy portraying Novak. As the star of Is This Thing On? – a film about a lost soul who takes a blind leap into stand-up comedy – Canadian comedic actor Will Arnett has taken his own headlong plunge into Hollywood’s deep end. At 55, after 35 years in the biz, he has landed his first-ever dramatic lead in a movie – a project he brought to the screen with some high-powered help. Opening in Toronto theatres Dec. 19 and across the country Jan. 9, Is This Thing on? stars Oscar-winner Laura Dern as Arnett’s wife and is directed by his close friend, 12-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper, who also plays a supporting role and co-wrote the script. After the epic sweep of Cooper’s previous two movies, A Star is Born (2018) and Maestro (2023), this is a far smaller production, and an intimate character drama driven by dialogue. And at its heart is a raw, incandescent performance from an actor revealing a side of himself we’ve never seen before.
I’ve come to know Arnett as a fan of SmartLess, the hit podcast that he co-hosts with his longtime actor buddies Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes, which has just been nominated for the inaugural Golden Globe Award for Best Podcast. While Arnett lives between homes in New York and Los Angeles, on the show he never lets us forget he’s a Toronto boy with maple syrup in his veins. But what’s uncanny is how he rules the SmartLess clubhouse as the pumped alpha male, full of Yankee swagger. Bateman sounds more Canadian, moderating with the mild-mannered composure of a CBC news anchor, while Hayes merrily rolls with the punches as the gay sci-fi and theatre nerd that the other two make fun of. I’ve gotten to know Arnett as a voice in my earbuds – unlike most podcasts, SmartLess streams without video so its celeb guests feel more at ease. But like a lot of Canadians, I can’t unsee his appearance in the RBC commercial that aired incessantly during the World Series, as the smirking pitchman who breezes into a bank and hoists his butt onto a woman’s desk, saying, “It’s okay, I’m the spokesguy.”
When I sit down to interview Arnett at a promo day for Is This Thing On? in his hometown, this is who I expect to meet – the SmartLess smart aleck, the wise guy with a switchblade wit. After years of listening to him, I know too much. I know that he loathes press junket interviews, and I’ve heard him rant about the pathetic irrelevance of film critics. So, as a film critic at a press junket, I’m a tad apprehensive when I’m ushered into a black-curtained nook of a hotel suite where Arnett sits in a makeshift TV studio. (Junket print interviews are now routinely filmed for the web.) But from the moment he gets up to shake my hand and look me in the eye, I’m disarmed by his warmth and openness. Standing 6 feet, 2.5 inches, with sharp, angled features and a penetrating gaze, he’s one of those rare stars who seems more charismatic in person than onscreen. Usually it’s the other way around. Yet, throughout our interview, he is impeccably polite, candid and self-deprecating, while doing his level best to keep it real. In other words, a Canadian.
I begin by congratulating him on his dramatic debut and throw out a phrase they use a lot on SmartLess: “This is a very big swing. You must have thought about something like this over the course of your career. Was it how you imagined it?”
“It’s funny,” he says. “I left Toronto 35 years ago. Grew up right around the corner from here [in the city’s midtown Annex neighbourhood]. I moved to New York and always used to joke that I wanted to be a serious actor. Because I was young enough and dumb enough that I wanted the world to take me seriously. And I ended up stumbling backwards into more comedic stuff. I paid my rent doing comedy pilots. Because of that, Arrested Development came my way and changed my life. I’ve had the greatest experiences and been able to make a living and provide for my family. But I lost sight of why I started doing this in the first place. The dream was always to do more dramatic stuff.”
For more than three decades, Will Arnett has flown just under the radar of Hollywood’s A-list like a stealth bomber, cultivating a prolific comedy career and a reputation among his coterie of more famous friends as the funniest guy in the room. We don’t tend to hear him name-checked with the pantheon of Canadian comics like Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, Mike Myers, Catherine O’Hara or Seth Rogen. Arnett didn’t cut his teeth at SCTV or Saturday Night Live. And even with 132 IMDB credits, as an actor Arnett is still best known for his 2003 breakout role as Jason Bateman’s brother, gonzo magician Gob (George Oscar Bluth II) in Arrested Development. Since then, his voice has become more famous than his face in heard-but-not-seen in roles ranging from Batman in The Lego Movie franchise to an anthropomorphic equine in the Netflix series BoJack Horseman. Arnett’s gravelly baritone is his trademark, and a cash cow in commercial voiceovers that have him rhapsodizing over Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and personifying the virility of GMC trucks.
But the podcast has given the personality behind the voice an unprecedented platform. Created as a fun pastime during the COVID-19 pandemic, SmartLess has become a pop culture phenomenon, and a highly lucrative enterprise for its three hosts. First sold to Amazon for $80 million, then acquired by Sirius XM for $100 million (all U.S. dollars), it has generated a live concert tour and a documentary, and spawned a robust franchise of half a dozen other podcasts under the SmartLess Media umbrella. But all the while, Arnett had been quietly working on the film that would have us take him seriously.
Is This Thing On? was inspired by the true story of John Bishop, an Englishman facing divorce who ended up onstage in a comedy club to avoid the cover. His stand-up efforts evolved into a kind of public therapy, and Bishop is now a successful comedian. Arnett met him through a friend in Amsterdam in 2018, and his story stuck with Arnett long after his return to L.A. Later, the actor and his writing partner, Mark Chappell, met Bishop in London and began to write a screenplay. Then the pandemic came and went, a studio deal fell through and the script was at an impasse when Arnett asked Bradley Cooper, his close friend of 25 years, to take a look at it. “I just wanted free notes from him,” Arnett recalls, but Cooper, who was in the thick of making Maestro, called him a week later and said, “I want to direct this thing, and I want to rewrite it. We’re going to really strip it down. You’re going to have to trust me.”
By the time Cooper was done with the script, it was less about stand-up comedy and more about the drama of a man’s midlife crisis, and his relationship with his wife, their two kids and a tight group of friends. They include a gay couple – conveniently played by SmartLess pal Sean Hayes and his husband, Scotty Icenogle – and an unhinged actor named Balls, a kind of trickster character that the director created for himself. And when Cooper wasn’t in a scene, he also operated the camera, shooting almost the whole movie on a 40mm lens that put him right in the actors’ faces. “He was a foot in front of me with that camera,” Arnett recalls, “talking to me in a way I’ve never worked before.” That allowed me to just be in the moment and not worry about the result.” But the result paid off. In a special awards-season edition, the New York Times Magazine raved about his comedy club performance for “Best Close-up,” noting that “this actor who has always seemed to resist seeming soft is willing to risk something true and walk the plank of self-exposure.”
Despite his long career as a comedic actor, Arnett had never done stand-up. To prepare for the shoot, he spent six weeks performing night after night in New York comedy clubs. And when Cooper filmed him in those clubs, the audience was taken unawares. “They introduced me as Alex Novak,” he says, “and because a lot of people knew who I was, they thought I was losing my mind. Right as I’m about to go onstage, part of me wants to make the audience laugh. But we’re not there to do that. Bradley would stop me, he’d put his hand on my chest and say, ‘We’re doing something different.’ And that took the pressure off. I didn’t need to go out there and be a clown. I was there to investigate who this guy Alex is.”
As his wife, Tess, a retired volleyball star aching for her own third act, Laura Dern more than holds her own with a ferocious performance. But when she joined Will and the boys for a virtual love-in on SmartLess recently, she paused to ask if she could “pay homage to Will’s bravery” and delivered an off-the-charts testimonial: “It is incredible who he is, what he’s willing to reveal, his vulnerability, his willingness to explore everything . . . To be staring into his eyes, and forced to see myself in ways that sometimes were not comfortable and also beautiful and revelatory – what a fucking actor!”
Clearly, they had some chemistry. And as Alex and Tess tumble into a split-cute romance on the road to divorce, the movie takes the shape of a complicated marriage story. Meanwhile, below the surface, it’s propelled by a live-wire bromance between Arnett and Cooper. As Balls, who is a compulsive joker, Cooper pulls off a deft role-reversal as the real comedian. And his scenes with Arnett spark with rolling bouts of improv. “Bradley knows me so well,” says Arnett, “and we could be free and loose in a way that was really exciting. We have a deep, intimate friendship and wanted the movie to be a reflection of that, of a male dynamic that is not often portrayed.”
Three years ago, when Cooper showed up as a guest on SmartLess, he spoke about a critical moment in that friendship that he’ll never forget. It was in 2004, before he was famous. “I was so lost,” he said. “I was addicted to cocaine. I’d severed my Achilles tendon right after I got fired/quit Alias. I was totally depressed. Zero self-esteem. There was a year when all I did was try to access mean humour, out of insecurity.” As he began to choke up (“I know I’m not supposed to cry on this show”), Cooper recalled a dinner with Arnett where he tried to impress the table with cruel jokes. The next day Arnett, who lived next door, dropped by and said, “Hey, man, we had dinner the other night. How do you think that went?” As Cooper recalled, “I was like, ‘I thought I was killing it.’ And Will told me, ‘You were a real asshole, man.’ That was the first time I ever realized I had a problem with drugs and alcohol. That put me on a path of deciding to change my life – Will Arnett, nobody else. And it helped that it was the guy I thought I was emulating.”
When I ask Arnett about his friend’s gratitude, he says, “Everything he did to turn his life around, he did himself. I don’t know on what karmic level this operates. But he doesn’t owe me. If anything, I owe him the opportunity that he’s given me to find a new gear.”
Arnett has talked openly about his own struggle with addiction to alcohol, and about his relapse in 2016 when he was making the Netflix series Flaked – a dramedy in which he starred as a recovering alcoholic. With the support of Alcoholics Anonymous, he says he has stayed sober ever since. The evening after our interview, at a reception in honour of the film’s Toronto premiere, I’m surprised to see him at the bar, sharply dressed in a dark suit, drinking a beer. But Arnett quickly assures me it’s the non-alcoholic kind.
As we make small talk, a waiter comes by with a plate of sausage rolls. “Are they vegan?” Arnett asks, and pops one in his mouth after she confirms they aren’t. She then congratulates him on the great reviews his film has been getting.
“You can’t trust reviews,” I suggest, trying to get a rise out of Arnett about film critics.
“I don’t read reviews,” he says, but thanks her just the same.
If Arnett looks at home at the downtown bar, a quintessentially English gastro-pub called The Queen & Beaver Public House, it’s not just because he’s an anglophile who spends a lot of time in the U.K., and is a superfan of the Liverpool FC soccer team. He helped launch the pub as an investor, and he spends much of the evening deeply engaged in conversation with its proprietor, Jamieson Kerr, one of his oldest friends.
They met him in 1991 at a tree-planting camp in northern Ontario. “I was the project manager and Will was in my crew,” says Kerr, when I catch up with him later. “His sister was the cook, and I ended up dating her for a couple of years, just prior to Will taking off to New York City to start his career. You could tell he was a super bright guy. He was very amusing and we got on insanely well. We both share the same favourite movie of all time, which is Withnail and I.” Kerr, 60, says Arnett has invested in four of his restaurants and stays close to his friends in Toronto. “He loves to just come up and hang out. Will can hang with anybody. Deep down, he’s this real blue-collar hockey guy.”
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Born in Toronto and one of four kids, William Emerson Arnett grew up close to Upper Canadian power and privilege. His father is a corporate lawyer who was once CEO of Molson Inc., and has served as chairman of Beaver Lumber, the Montreal Canadiens, Ontario’s Hydro One and the Canadian Historical Society. Will has described his family as a loving one. But he was a troublesome child, and at age l1, his parents sent him to live as a boarder at Lakefield College School near Peterborough, Ont. The place had a reputation for straightening out difficult kids, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on Will, who only lasted a year before the school asked him not to return. Back in Toronto at an alternative high school, he found his vocation in taking acting classes at Tarragon Theatre, then, after a semester of studying theatre at Concordia University, he dropped out to pursue a career.
After the tree-planting gig, he made the pilgrimage to New York, where he studied acting at the fabled Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. He did countless dead-end TV pilots and landed small roles in shows such as Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Will and Grace (where he first met Hayes). Then, Arrested Development turned his world upside down. This bonkers Fox sitcom was so far outside the box, it was hard to believe it was on television. With a meta-doc style that was years ahead of its time, it won six Emmys and critical raves until low ratings led to its cancellation after three seasons. But as its cult status grew, Netflix revived it in 2019 and the show’s scattered canon of 84 episodes remains one of the wildest experiments in TV history.
“I remember seeing Will when he did Arrested Development,” Kerr recalls, “and I said, ‘Christ, Will, maybe this is the best thing you’ll ever do.’ And he said: ‘Well, this is the first great thing I’m going to do.’” Now, Kerr adds, “He knows that this is his moment. He’s reinvented himself with this movie.”
Seeing Arnett in Is the Thing On? made me wonder what he invested in the role from his own experience. Alex, after all, is staring down the barrel of divorce – something Will is no stranger to. He has been married twice – for just a month to actor Penelope Ann Miller in 1994, and then for nine years to Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler. Arnett has three children: two sons with Poehler, and a son from his six-year relationship with businesswoman Alessandra Brawn, which ended earlier in 2025. He is now dating legendary fashion model Carolyn Murphy, 51, who’s been on the cover of Vogue, is still very much in-demand and remains a face of Estée Lauder.
I never had a chance to ask the actor how close he is to his character in the film. When I ask Kerr for his impression, he says, “I thought that guy was more vulnerable than Will. Will does have an empathetic side, but he is also very demanding of himself, and sure of himself when it comes to business in any way, shape or form. He’s a real business guy, in equal parts to acting. He’s driven to be successful.”
It’s hard to measure success in Hollywood, where too much is never enough. But while Will Arnett may not yet be a household name, he is famous in all the right places. The manic magician of Arrested Development, a serious joker with boundless ambition, is now a ubiquitous Chairman of the Board, not unlike his dad. And in the end, the title of Is This Thing On? answers itself. It always has been.
