In spite of his early exposure to the entertainment industry, Newman’s journey to the plum part he plays in The Tick was not as smooth or speedy as you might think. Though he auditioned on-and-off as a child, and was profiled as a stand-up comic in The Observer at the ripe age of 12, he did not sincerely begin acting until he dropped out of Cal Arts as a freshman. Then, he spent several years climbing up the ladder of bit parts and near-misses. “Most of the acting parts I had before this year were playing the milquetoast, put-upon assistant,” he recalls. “I had years where I pretty much always played the assistant or secretary or adjunct. My job was to stand next to whoever the movie or TV star was, deliver a bunch of exposition, and fuck some stuff up. Be awkward. Be uncomfortable. Be nervous. I used to joke that there was always a scene where someone insulted me to my face, and I was good at playing that moment of, ‘No offence taken.'”

AGE: 28.

HOMETOWN: New York, New York.

CHILDHOOD DREAMS: I was always single-mindedly focused on movies, TV, plays, and comedy as a child. That was the only thing that made sense to me. It was a thing my teachers would bring up in parent-teacher conferences: “Your son can’t talk about anything else. You maybe need to find a way to get him interested in other things.” I would steer any conversation back to some piece of pop culture ephemera. I remember a point where my parents banned me from talking about movies for a week. They were like, “We want to see if you can talk about anything else,” and I really couldn’t do it. I took kid movies more seriously than anyone else. I was thoroughly obsessed with whatever the kid movie du jour was, but also really obsessed with the production and the development and all that kind of stuff. Toy Story was my major obsession. I had this coffee table book that I made my parents buy about the production of Toy Story. It was this very dense, adult book that was very dry about the development of a computer-animated movie. I would read that to myself to fall asleep every night. It was talking about the production designer and their rendering software.

STAGE DEBUT: I was [also] very obsessed with The Muppet Show as a child. It presented this bunch of broken creatures that struggle to put on a show together, and is so based in vaudeville comedy troops. That was always kind of my thing. I wanted to be in that world—the hubbub of what it feels like behind the stage of The Muppet Show. There was this program in New York City called Kids ‘N Comedy, which still exists, where they rent out comedy clubs once a month and have kids perform. I made my dad take me to see one of those shows. I had always wanted to be performing, and I went to a lower school that didn’t have a theater program, so there wasn’t really any outlet for me. I would get really jealous when I saw kids in movies or TV shows. My mom especially was very adamant about not wanting me to become a child actor, for all the obvious reasons. But I saw this show with my father, which was these kids performing, and it felt like a reasonable, contained enough thing. I did get some press from doing that. There started being offers to audition—people would come around [to shows] when they were looking for precocious kids—but I never really got anything.