The only movie Nick Offerman would watch 20 times in a row: “If I had to pick just one”
Nick Offerman has carved out a singular niche in Hollywood over the years, cultivating his brawny, lumberjack appearance and his comedic chops to become a very particular type of character actor. He first broke through to mainstream audiences with his performance in the sitcom Parks and Recreation, where he played the moustachioed government department head, Ron Swanson. Gruff and stridently libertarian but with a heart of gold, he quickly became an audience favourite. The fact that Offerman is actually a seasoned woodworker in real life only added fuel to the fire.
As is usually the case with skilled comedians, Offerman has shown that he can carry a dramatic performance, as well. His brief appearance in the series The Last of Us was one of the most talked about television moments of the decade and earned him an Emmy.
Elsewhere, he’s been honing his CV as a character actor, consistently disproving anyone who thought he could never outrun the Ron Swanson association. He’s appeared in everything from Alex Garland’s harrowing 2024 thriller Civil War to the film adaptation of Dicks: The Musical. The man, as they say, contains multitudes.
If you were asked to predict his favourite movies, you’d probably struggle. Is he more of the fun-loving guy you’d expect from a Parks and Rec alum or the kind of person who prefers the heartrending pathos that you’d expect from a person who ripped your heart to shreds in The Last of Us? As it turns out, the answer is more of the former than the latter. When asked to name his five favourite films for Rotten Tomatoes in 2013, Offerman rattled off a list that skewed towards comedy but was by no means predictable.
The first film on his list was Midnight Run, the 1988 buddy movie starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Mel Brooks’s classic Blazing Saddles also made the list. On the dramatic end of the spectrum, he picked John Ford’s The Quiet Man, one of John Wayne’s rare deviations from the western genre that contains one of his greatest performances. Akira Kurosawa’s pioneering nonlinear mystery Rashomon also made the cut. “I mean, any Kurosawa blows my mind out my ass,” Offerman conceded, but explained that he chose Rashomon because he did a stage version of it at university.
His fifth pick, and the one for which he reserved special praise, was the Coen Brothers’ 1998 cult comedy The Big Lebowski. “If I had to pick just one movie, I’d say, ‘Give me The Big Lebowski,’ because I can watch that thing 20 times in a row,” he said. His primary source of delight in the film is the performance of John Goodman as the Vietnam War veteran Walter Sobchak. It’s not hard to see a resemblance between Offerman and Goodman — not just in their appearances, but in the self-serious-to-the-point-of-comedic characters they’ve played.
Offerman sees it, too. “All I really want to do is be John Goodman when I grow up,” he admitted. “He’s so incredibly intelligent and full of pathos and hilarity, while at the same time, being this crazy linebacker of a man… When he eats that fucking bowl of cereal while smoking a cigarette in Raising Arizona, I’m like, ‘Alright, there is room for me in the pantheon of actors.’” Not everyone gets welcomed into the tent of Coen Brothers collaborators, but if anyone has the potential to belong there, it’s Offerman. Perhaps if the Fargo directors ever make a movie together again, they’ll give him a call.
