The Arrested Development star has spent a decade perfecting cocky, clueless idiots. This year, he’s made two movies that have taken $500m and are, he says, more grounded in the real world. Even if they do star Lego men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Will Arnett is having himself a pretty good year. In spring he loaned his iron-and-gravel Bond-villain voice to The Lego Movie, playing an infuriatingly pedantic and melodramatic Batman in a delightful movie that made a tasty $468 million (£290m) worldwide. In the summer he went toe-to-toe with his Lego co-star Chris Pratt as their respective movies, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and the Michael Bay-rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, faced off in an epic struggle at America’s multiplexes. Guardians may have won the cultural moment and the summer box office ($644m/£400m), but don’t sniff at TMNT either. Don’t sniff at any movie that makes $350m (£215m) in worldwide receipts on largely middling reviews. In a year of historically dismal receipts at the American box office, Arnett was in two of the biggest smashes. He also has a new sitcom, The Millers, that’s been renewed for a second season. Life is good all over again. (He says he did it all for his kids.)

In TMNT Arnett plays Vern Fenwick, hapless and lovelorn cameraman to intrepid city desk reporter April O’Neil (Megan Fox), who barely notices his knock-kneed crush as they happen upon the titular subterranean superheroes. Vern, snarky but likable, infatuated but not creepy, is a step away from Arnett’s usual brand of hyper unself-aware egomaniacs and priapically inclined winner-losers.

“Vern’s much less broken than those guys,” says Arnett, “a lot less psychologically cracked. That in itself was kind of interesting and important to me. I’m not so interested any more in those parts that I already played.”

This, I must admit, is tragic news to me, fan as I am of the entire, seething menagerie of dicks, douchebags, dimwits and dunderheads he has created in the decade or more since the debut of Arrested Development. In sitcom after sitcom and movie after movie, and in his other job as a voiceover actor and artist, he has staked a place for himself as perhaps the most aggressively amusing, terrifying, vanity-free and daring of post-Apatow, post-Seinfeld comic actors – an incredibly dependable and omnipresent A-type bully and crybaby with a heart of pure mush.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Once I was in comedy, I was in it for good, and I never imagined doing anything else’ … Will Arnett (right) in Arrested Development with Jason Bateman. Photograph: Rex

“I spent a lot of time quasi-fascinated with characters who were super-dumb and super-cocky,” he replies. “I always liked that combination. I find that lack of self-awareness amazing. But now I’m probably not as interested, it’s a new phase. I spent 10 years doing it. With Mutant Ninja Turtles I wanted to play a character who lives more in the real world, although yes, I grant you, he immediately encounters, um, turtles, of the teenage mutant ninja variety. He’s got a thing about Megan’s character, and he doesn’t really go about it in the right way. His timing isn’t great. He’s interested in her, but she kind of shoots him down or doesn’t even notice, but I like to think of him rising above it.”

Director Jonathan Liebesman says Arnett was the studio’s idea, but he couldn’t have been happier with what resulted. “I knew him from Arrested Development, but as everybody will tell you, you just wind him up on set and he comes up with so many things, an embarrassment of riches to choose from. And the writers had given him some great jumping-off points. One throwaway moment with him tossing a hat into a van, I thought, well, nothing much we can do with that, but Will made it work beautifully. He knows comedy better than I do, so it was good to learn from him how it was done, and believe me, he knows how it’s done.”

Arnett, practical Canadian that he is, is pretty “aw shucks” in the face of such effusive praise. “The Turtles are a known entity – there’s a fun factor to them, almost a parody of superheroes, but they’re still superheroes, just jokier, more smart-ass and funny, and you have to keep that balance. My job was to make it lighter, to give you a contrast to the more hard-driving action scenes. There was a lot of space given to improvisation, to finding things that felt fresh, made sense and were funny. They wanted someone associated with April who could inject a little humour and levity, not in a farcical way but in a real way. And as long as it moved the story forward in some way, there was nothing we weren’t prepared to try.”

He also spent a lot of time on set plying the ice cream-addicted but lactose-intolerant director with gigantic sundaes to see if he’d ever refuse one. “And he didn’t!” says Arnett. “After it became a daily thing, he’d say, ‘No, no, no, no, NO! I do not want any more ice cream!’ and we’d go, OK, we’ll just leave it, uh, right here … and he’d always buckle and eat it – like angrily, furiously!”

Arnett’s good year followed a pretty bad year or two. In April 2012 he and his wife – and his incestuous skating sister and co-star in Blades of Glory, Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler – separated after nine years of marriage. In the meantime, his well-reviewed new sitcom Up All Night, in which he co-starred with Maya Rudolph and Christina Applegate, was meddled with, then cancelled by NBC. A rotten time, overall?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Will Arnett with Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler, from whom he split in 2012 after nine years of marriage. Photograph: NBC/Getty

“I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. NBC wanted to breathe some new life into it and wanted to switch directions on the show – and we just became kind of rudderless at some point. Very strange, it kind of came apart at the seams. I looked at Backstage magazine one morning and it said, Christina Applegate is out and I thought, well, that’s officially falling apart now. I came through, though … I had some difficult times, but really, let’s keep it in perspective, nobody died. I’m lucky, I’ve got great kids who are healthy and happy, and as far as I’m concerned, the rest is gravy.”

Then, almost the same week, he was sought out and cast by My Name is Earl creator Greg Garcia as the lead in his sitcom The Millers. “And now Margo Martindale is my mom!” His dad is Beau Bridges, Glee’s Jayma Mays is his sister, and one of his oldest friends, Sean Hayes, is about to join the cast. The critics have embraced the show – most of them were just blown away just by the cast – and it got renewed for a second season in March. That, on top of two certified movie mega-hits.

But flash back a decade or more and ask yourself if you can name who Arnett played on … The Sopranos? I can’t either, off the cuff, but he was the usually out-of-focus husband of the FBI agent who went undercover as Adriana LaServa’s big-hair Jersey-girl gal-pal. Two, three episodes, maybe, a tiny role in a historic show. That’s how Arnett’s career was then. His early credits demonstrate that casting directors strongly believed in him – Sex and the City cameo, Law & Order walk-on, a Third Watch part, one in Boston Public – but nobody big was biting. He appeared in four pilots that weren’t picked up, in series that were cancelled nearly immediately, or where his part was excised after the pilot. He drank a lot, he says, and the year 2000 was all about bottoming out then resurfacing with renewed commitment and purpose.

It must have worked, because he next was cast in Arrested Development which, while famously anaemic in terms of ratings, was deemed a groundbreaking American comedy by critics and cult fans. Arnett’s Gob Bluth – an insanely unintegrated magician, clueless cocksman and a champion of lachrymose self-loathing in times of crisis – stood out as a brilliant comic creation even among the monsters and gargoyles in the rest of the cast. Thus began Arnett’s glorious decade of assholes and idiots. He followed Arrested creator Mitch Hurwitz to two other shows, Running Wilde, in which he was another drunk, degenerate creep, and the animated Sit Down Shut Up, in which he played a priapic and self-regarding English teacher. With Arrested co-star David Cross he appeared in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, as his incompetent, gambling-addicted, whore-mongering boss. And then there’s 30 Rock, another pinnacle. I could list a half-dozen others, and I wish there would be more, so much do I love Arnett in this mode.

And none of it was planned, he says. “When I was a kid I was a fan of comedy. I always loved Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Dave Letterman – not an actor, obviously but I’m still impressed by his wit. I wanted to emulate them because they made me laugh. I was probably a bit of a class clown in school [he got expelled from one], but I never thought I could do it as a living. I grew up in Toronto and that kind of thing didn’t seem available to me. I started acting as a teenager, but it wasn’t until I moved to New York when I was 20 that I made any kind of commitment. I never thought I was funnier than anybody else. Wait – that’s also NOT true!” he chuckles. “I didn’t get into acting to be a comedic actor, I wanted to be a dramatic actor. No, I was a dramatic actor. It’s just been a while since I did much serious work. I took a while to cycle over to the comedy side of things. Once I was in it, though, I was in it for good, and I never really imagined doing anything else.”

That magnificent macho Blofeld voice of his netted him work as the signature voice of General Motors a few years ago (it’s one over from his Batman voice in The Lego Movie, proof that macho and ridiculous are basically twins). And it is the heart of BoJack Horseman, Arnett’s new Netflix animated comedy, in which he plays an alcoholic, self-hating equine ex-TV star. Yep, he’s a fading TV horse-celebrity who drinks. The cast includes Alison Brie, Paul F Tompkins and Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul. Arnett may say he’s looking to get more serious, and I hope he does, but BoJack proves, happily, his reluctance to kill that old creepy Arnett I love so much, and for that I’m bottomlessly glad.

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