“It’s all deathly serious, it just happens to be really fucking funny”: Chris Diamantopoulos on ‘The Sticky’, voicing Mickey Mouse, and never doing the same thing twice
In a story so far-fetched it could only be true, the most lucrative heist in Canadian history occurred between late 2011 and early 2012. Thieves stole almost 3,000 tonnes of maple syrup, worth over $24 million, from a storage facility in Quebec. It’s a tale that seems tailor-made for the screen, but The Sticky isn’t beholden to the facts.
In fact, the six-episode series makes it abundantly clear that it’s got no interest in hewing to the absolute truth, instead using real-life events as a springboard to craft a fictional crime caper that focuses on the ambitious plan concocted by three wildly mismatched personalities to rob the nation’s maple syrup reserves, albeit with plenty of creative and artistic licence applied.
The three major players at the heart of the story are Margo Martindale’s Ruth Landry, a maple syrup farmer fighting an uphill battle against the bureaucrats who want to buy her land on the cheap and take away everything she loves, Guillaume Cyr’s Remy Bouchard, the head security guard at the facility who’s fed up of being constantly overlooked, and Chris Diamantopoulos’ Mike Byrne, a low-level criminal with ideas well above his station who’s desperate to prove himself as a major player in the underworld.
As a crime comedy inspired by—but not based on—true events that also doubles as a character piece that has plenty to say about the trials and tribulations of small-town life, the perils of big business, and the regrets drawn from a life of wasted potential, The Sticky is tasked with walking a tightrope to shift between so many tones. Fortunately, that was exactly what appealed to Diamantopoulos about the project.
“I think what attracted me to this role was the polytropic nature of Mike,” he told Far Out. “He starts out showing us that he’s one thing, and he ultimately evolves, or devolves, as it were, into another. That’s very attractive to me as an actor, maintaining that tonal stability. There are absurd things that happen, but they’re all grounded in reality.”
“The reason we can laugh at Mike is because there’s nothing funny about what’s happening to Mike,” he added. “He doesn’t find it funny when he falls when he gets hurt when shit hits the fan. This is life and death stakes. There is a desperation that informs every decision that he’s making. This is his chance for him to prove to his employer that he is not the fuck up that he has shown himself to be over and over again. It’s not only a chance for his redemption, but it could be a chance to escape from his tormentors. It’s all deathly serious. It just happens to be really fucking funny to watch.”
The Sticky is carried along by the chemistry between Diamantopoulos, Martindale, and Cyr, and the effortless way their dynamic came together surprised the latter. “Oftentimes, you’re working with co-stars that you don’t have chemistry with, and you have to manufacture that,” he admitted. “And if you’re both professionals, you can do it, and you can make it look right. In this instance, we didn’t have to manufacture anything. We were having the time of our lives.”
Mike is presented as the straight man of sorts in The Sticky, at least when he’s sharing the screen with Ruth and Remy. However, he’s still a crook and a killer despite being far from the criminal mastermind and ice-cold operator he initially presents himself to be. There is a redemption arc of sorts, and navigating that evolution was something Diamantopoulos relished sinking his teeth into.
“To be frank, I don’t give a lot of thought to if an audience is going to like me,” he confessed, pointing to his recurring Silicon Valley role as billionaire investor Russ Hanneman as an example. “He is not the most redemptive human being on the planet, and yet, there’s something about him that makes people chuckle and it just made people want to watch. I think it’s the same thing for Mike.”
“We tread into some pretty dangerous territory, given that Mike is a lethal person,” he continued. “Mike has killed someone, but there’s something about the way that the story is crafted that will have audiences grappling with their own desire for Mike to succeed. Mike’s history has shown him that it’s kill or be killed. He really comes from a dog-eat-dog world, and we come to realise that he’s had some major trauma in his life. Nobody wakes up in the morning twisting their moustache and saying, ‘Today, I’m going to be extra evil’. I think Mike wants to be the best version of Mike that he can be. He just doesn’t know how to get there, and maybe this maple syrup will at least give him a chance.”
It’s a fairly well-accepted fact of life that everybody loves Margo Martindale, and while this is her third project with Diamantopoulos after feature-length comedy Wedding Daze and the streaming series Mrs Davis, The Sticky is the first time they shared any scenes, and it was exactly how the actor hoped it would be.
“I’ve been a fervent admirer of hers for years and years and years, and she didn’t disappoint on any level. Playing opposite her was like a sparring match with the best of the best of the best. We found beats in the script, and we found moments that weren’t scripted. We trusted each other, and we were able to create this world where we kept each other on our toes, and it crackled. Man, it was so much fun.”
Speaking of sparring with the heavyweights, The Sticky‘s executive producer and Academy Award-winning icon Jamie Lee Curtis guest stars as a notorious mobster and Mike’s boss, Bo Diamantopoulos gets several one-on-one scenes with Curtis and shares a memorable encounter that also involves Martindale and Cyr, which was an experience he’ll never forget.
“I’ve been a Jamie Lee Curtis fan since I was a very young man. A Fish Called Wanda, to me, is one of the finest comedies ever made, and I’ve mined elements of that movie in many projects that I’ve gone on to do as an adult. I was starstruck, to say the least. They say, ‘Don’t meet your heroes’, but if Jamie Lee Curtis is your hero, as she well should be, then you should meet her and work with her because you won’t be disappointed. I mean, dude, she is a powerful human being. She just has this presence of spirit that is undeniable, and she elevates everyone around her. Check that off the bucket list! I got to go toe to toe with Jamie Lee, and I lived to tell about it.”
The Sticky tells a complete story by the end of its sixth and final episode, but the door is left wide open for more. If the chance of a second season arose, Diamantopoulos would sign up “without equivocation” after going into the shoot “with the knowledge that the story is only scratching the tip of the iceberg.” That said, he thinks it’s a “wonderful iceberg” and one with “so much more to tell.”
The actor doesn’t want to leave Mike behind when there are “too many loose ends that have unravelled that we need to follow down the rabbit hole,” and he even has some ideas of what he wants to see from the semi-reformed but still criminal should he return, which includes going full Harrison Ford.
“Remember that scene in The Fugitive where Harrison Ford’s in the bathroom, and he’s cutting his beard, and he’s putting the dye in his hair?” he asked. “I see one of those moments for Mike, like some shitty Quebecois gas station, emerging with a shaved head and a shorn beard, needing to escape and trying to find passage to Argentina or something.”
The Sticky leaves Mike “stripped of his armour”, and Diamantopoulos loves the fact that the first season “shows us who Mike has built himself to be,” whereas the beginning of a prospective second run “will show us who he has been stripped down to.” The actor hinted that “there’s a new level of ferocity that can emerge when you risk losing everything and live to tell about it, and there’s something amazing about that.”
Outside of The Sticky, the list of TV shows Diamantopoulos has appeared in over the last two decades is nothing short of mind-blowing: Frasier, The Sopranos, 24, Arrested Development, Community, Family Guy, Hannibal, BoJack Horseman, Silicon Valley, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Daisy Jones & the Six, to name a few. With that in mind, does he ever get hit with a ‘holy shit’ realisation where he can’t believe he’s been a part of so many iconic things, or is he more inclined to constantly be looking forward to the next one?
“I will say this: there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t recognise with immense gratitude how fortunate I’ve been as an actor to be able to entertain on the level that I’ve been given the chance to entertain on these various shows and films that I’ve done. The truth of the matter is that the more I work, the more I want to make sure that I will keep working and that I will keep on testing my range and limits.”
Although Diamantopoulos would prefer not to “look at it in terms of scope of work,” he’s immensely appreciative of how that work has been received. “That’s about as gratifying as it gets,” he said. “Because I’m an audience member. I’m a voracious watcher of television, and I am a cinephile. I got into this business because of how I felt about walking out of the movie theatre, holding my dad’s hand, bubbling with excitement over what I just watched on screen. I knew that there had to be a way to take that and turn it into a vocation.”
He may not be inclined to take a step back and view his career as a body of work, but Diamantopoulos is also the current and two-time Emmy-nominated voice of Mickey Mouse and has been for the last decade. In terms of pop culture, it doesn’t get much bigger or more indelible than Disney’s marquee mascot, which obviously wasn’t something he could have predicted for himself when first starting out.
“They wanted to find a Walt Disney soundalike because Walt was the guy who originally did the voice, and at first, I was very trepidatious,” he recalled. “I didn’t want to touch it because I have a deep speaking voice, and Mickey Mouse is Mickey Mouse. I mean, you don’t want to mess that up. And I watched a documentary with Walt and realised that there is a similarity there. There’s the way he carried himself, the way that he spoke. Our vocal quality had a similar sort of vibe.”
Diamantopoulos studied Disney’s performance of the role, and even though he thought he could pull it off, he “never expected that I would get it.” Still, the opportunity to audition and re-record 1938’s Brave Little Tailor was one that he couldn’t turn down. “I never imagined that I’d be able to do that,” he reflected. “And now, here I am, I’m that guy. I wear it like a massive badge of honour. I feel like that’s one for the ages, that’s for sure.”
As prolific in live-action as he is in animation, Diamantopoulos has been a working actor for four decades but wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s a grand masterplan in strategy behind his desire to never stay out of work for too long. The next challenge is always looming over the next horizon, and it’s one he’s always ready to meet.
“I am about as lucky as a solid working actor can be, right? I have access to scripts, and I can read them, but so do hundreds and thousands of other actors as well. I can hope that I can throw my hat into the ring, but so can hundreds and thousands of other actors as well. It really is a confluence of doing the work and reading the material, and then taking the risk of putting yourself out there for the job, the luck and good fortune that you’ll be hired to do the job, and how the studios will decide to release that job will affect what next work comes out.”
It’s a measured approach, and Diamantopoulos puts it largely down to luck that he hasn’t “necessarily doubled down on roles, archetypes or characters as things come out.” Based on the variety of credits he’s racked up, it sounds like he’s doing himself a bit of a disservice, but it’s all coming together into what he described as “this odd tapestry, this collage of a career that I’ve been building.” He’s not one for standing still, though, boiling it down to a simple yet effective mantra: “I want more.”
The easiest way to sum up that unending desire to never repeat himself is that thanks to the made-for-TV movie Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy, miniseries The Kennedys, animated comic book adaptation Harley Quinn, and his ongoing Disney work, Diamantopoulos is the only actor in history to have played Robin Williams, Frank Sinatra, Aquaman, and Mickey Mouse.
“That’s very, very funny,” he marvelled. “I never would have thought of that. Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting thing. Early in my career, I had an agent say to me, ‘Well, you have to decide what you want to be. Cary Grant played Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart played Jimmy Stewart. Even George Clooney, as great an actor as he is, he’s George Clooney. We expect to see George Clooney. You have to decide who Chris Diamantopoulos is.'”
He left that agent shortly afterwards because he wanted to have it all, and he was confident that he could do it. “I just want to keep them guessing, and I want to keep going. Listen, should I get so lucky that some brilliant screenwriter writes the ‘Chris Diamantopoulos role’, whatever that is, and it hits a nerve, I’ll play that to the end of my life. But I haven’t found it yet.”
Throughout his career, Diamantopoulos has riled fans of The Office by getting in between Jim and Pam as Brian the boom operator, he was the serial killer Clark Ingram in Hannibal who stored his dead victims inside of animal carcasses, he was Marky Bark in Arrested Development, played villain Soto Voce in Red Notice, the biggest movie in Netflix history, and spawned a catchphrase as Russ ‘This Guy Fucks’ Hanneman in Silicon Valley, but what role gets him recognised – or accosted – in the street more than the rest?
“‘This guy fucks’ is yelled at me, and it’s the strangest thing, too,” came the answer, with Hanneman taking the crown. “I can be in Europe or in Greece, I can be in Canada or New York and people will scream it at me, and I just love it. Russ is malignant, and the fact that audiences love him shows that audiences are savvy because they recognise there was a method to the madness bringing Russ in. He was that necessary, very volatile element for those guys.”
“And that was also the beginning of me really not giving a shit if anyone liked me,” he continued. “It doesn’t matter because he’s so fucking funny and so committed that if you don’t like me, you’re gonna like me.” Hanneman emerged as top dog, then, but Brian the boom operator wasn’t too far behind.
“My brother will send me every so often: ‘Oh god, look at what they’re saying about Brian, the boom guy. People hate you. People hate you’. I haven’t experienced that for the most part. When people come up to me, they’re like, ‘I love Brian’. That was an interesting time shooting that. That was a weird shoot because it was at the very end. Stakes were high. Everybody had a different horse in the race in terms of how they wanted the relationship to go.”
The Office was a beloved show, but it doesn’t sound like the greatest experience. “It was tense and odd. They didn’t want me to collaborate. It was a very, very tense shoot. I can’t say that it was the most fun. We shot a lot of things that didn’t end up onscreen because I know that John [Krasinski] and Jenna [Fischer] and Greg [Daniels] all had different ideas of where they wanted it to go. Rightly so, of course. It was just, you know, ‘Hey, I’m just here to fuck things up a little bit. That’s why you called.'”
As a veteran of film, television, live-action, and animation who’s touched base with almost every genre, Diamantopoulos has thrived on freshening things up. As an actor always on the hunt for something they’ve never done before if there’s such a thing as a dream role, he knows exactly what it would be.
“I want to do some sort of screen or stage version of the musical Man of La Mancha,” came the ironclad answer. “I want to play Don Quixote de la Mancha. I did that show as my last show in high school, and that was really the beginning of the understanding of diving into character. I would love to do that now that I’m not 17 years old and really tell that story.”
Potentially combining his two chosen mediums, Diamantopoulos ruminated on how “it would be fascinating to do a sort of Tim Burton-esque or Guillermo del Toro-esque version of that musical as an animated or hybrid animated thing, that would be remarkable.” He’s already the voice of Mickey Mouse, but what if the actor to lend his vocal talents to any character of his choosing?
“I was a massive Looney Tunes fan growing up, so the idea of doing Daffy or Bugs or something like that, should the opportunity present itself,” he revealed of his dream to add another classic character or two to the collection. “I mean, I’m as much a Looney Tunes historian as I was a Three Stooges historian with regard to Moe [who he played in the 2012 Farrelly brothers movie], so that would be super cool.”
Another option would be the chance to pay tribute to one of his lifelong idols. “One of my early heroes was Danny Kaye, and most of the generation today don’t know who Danny Kaye was, but he was this brilliant actor, pantomime dancer, singer, and mimic. It’d be great to do some sort of an animated project where Danny is the conduit, the storyteller. I don’t know, an anthologic Danny Kaye-esque thing to introduce that style of humour and music to a younger audience. I don’t know. Spitballing here!”
Diamantopoulos also has ambitions to direct, so why not go for the whole triple threat, combine the best of every world and helm Man of La Mancha as a live-action/animated musical? “You get 5%, you’re in,” he promised. “I’m just telling you, you got it. You get the finders fee. I love it.”
