Nick Offerman’s favourite actor of all time: “His moustache is a work of art and then some”
Professional woodworker and facial hair icon Nick Offerman may be best known to the public for his unforgettable tenure playing small-town bureaucrat Ron Swanson in the sitcom Parks and Recreation.
Whether he was ripping out his own tooth with pliers in the middle of a meeting or playing the saxophone in the guise of his smooth-talking alter-ego Duke Silver, Ron had a way of stealing the spotlight from his colleagues, whether he wanted to or not.
None of this would have been possible, of course, if Offerman were not such a brilliant comedian. As Ron, he found a way to project caveman-inflected hyper-masculinity while hinting that at heart, he was really just a big softie.
During the run of the show, there was no one like Ron anywhere else on television, and he quickly became a fan favourite. For Offerman, though, that man’s-man schtick didn’t come out of nowhere. He was modelling himself, at least in part, on the actor he idolised and who also (probably not coincidentally) had a world-famous moustache.
According to Offerman, he’s been looking up to the one and only Sam Elliott for pretty much his entire life. The veteran actor known for his bristly white moustache and roles in westerns set the template for the Ron Swansons of the world, emanating a cool, gruff masculinity built around cowboy mythology. The Coen brothers capitalised on this persona when they cast Elliott as the Stranger in The Big Lebowski, essentially making him the voice of God (did I mention that his voice is so smooth it could melt a stone?)
Reality took a turn for the dreamlike when, in 2013, Elliott was recruited to play Ron Swanson’s lookalike in the Parks and Rec episode ‘Doppelgängers’, which centred on the forced alliance between the Pawnee Parks workers and their counterparts in the town of Eagleton. According to showrunner Michael Schur, Elliott was the only person on Earth who could have played the role of Ron Dunn.
Audiences would probably agree, but for Offerman, it was beyond belief. His first reaction upon hearing who would be playing his Eagleton equivalent was “a deep, ruby flush of embarrassment that anyone would remotely consider putting me in the same room as my personal hero.”
In an interview with the AV Club, Offerman admitted that even after accepting this turn of events, the experience had been pretty surreal, especially when he discovered that his hero was already a fan of the show.
Of course, the elephant-sized elephant in the room is the facial hair, and Offerman had plenty to say on that front. “It’s cheap to limit the conversation to moustaches,” he acknowledged, “But in terms of that currency, he’s basically the bank that has issued my ATM card. His moustache is a work of art and then some.” All of this synergy prompted the Parks and Rec writers to get devious.
By the end of Ron Dunn’s time on the show, he was revealed to be exactly the opposite of Ron Swanson. Not only is he a hippie who wears sandals and does yoga, but he is also a devout vegan. An unforgivable offence in the Swanson code.
