

I guess this news about David Cross may have come out a while ago, but it’s new to me and I wanted to cover it. Cross has been making headlines recently for complaining bitterly about his gig on the Alvin and The Chipmunks series. He called the last film, Chipwrecked, (which I haven’t had to sit through yet, yay!) “The most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had in my professional life.” David, whom many of you know from “Arrested Development,” did the Alvin movies for the money and he’ll tell you about it.

Cross is promoting his show on IFC, “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret,” and has an interview with Playboy Magazine. I was all prepared to bash him for this, particularly the really immature and douchey things he said about doing cocaine in the same room as President Obama. (Why? It’s stupid.) Then I read the rest of his interview, and he’s obnoxiously funny and outspoken. He will talk trash and I admire that. So I have mixed feelings about him. Here’s part of his interview, with more at the source:

PLAYBOY: Rumor has it you did cocaine at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, just 40 feet from President Obama. How the hell did you not get busted by the Secret Service?

CROSS: Maybe 40 feet is a bit close. It was probably more like 65 feet. And it wasn’t even that much cocaine. It was literally the size of, I don’t know, a tick. It was a tiny granule of coke that I put on my wrist and said, “Watch this. I need a witness.” And then I ducked under the table and did it. It wasn’t like I got high. The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup. It wasn’t about that. It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president. I’m not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. My one regret is that I got my girlfriend [actress Amber Tamblyn] in trouble by association. I was her date, her plus-one, and she got dragged through the mud because of what I did. She had nothing to do with it. She didn’t know I was going to do it. And because of that she’ll never be invited to the White House again. That’s not cool.

PLAYBOY: There’s a popular YouTube video of you being dragged off the stage by bouncers at a Jim Belushi concert. What happened exactly?

CROSS: I had a very unpleasant experience with Jim prior to that. We were working on a movie together [1995’s Destiny Turns on the Radio], and his behavior was reprehensible, shitty and awful. I don’t want to rehash what he did, but from that point on he was fair game. My girlfriend and I were visiting friends on Martha’s Vineyard, and I saw in the local paper that Belushi was performing. We went to the show, and it was like $45 to see his shitty cover band, which is basically just a vanity project. I decided to hop on stage and dance with him. I got kicked off, and then I hopped on again. I thought it was hilarious that I got kicked out of the club. Jim Belushi is such a c*ck.

PLAYBOY: Tobias Fünke, your character on Arrested Development, had an obsession with joining the Blue Man Group and often wore blue makeup. Was putting on all that blue paint a pain in the ass?

CROSS: It was a huge pain in the ass. It took a long time to get completely made up, and then you couldn’t touch anything. The paint is fairly greasy, and if you touched anything at all, even just a finger to your nose, it’d smudge and you’d have to go back to makeup. So I’d be sitting there for hours, trying not to touch anything. At the end of the day I’d have to take a minimum of two showers and quite often three before I’d get it all off and could go to bed. There was no jerking off without serious colorful repercussions. Then in the last season the real Blue Man Group was on the show, and George senior [played by Jeffrey Tambor] had become a member. They were putting the blue makeup on him, and the Blue Man guys were like, “No, no, no. What are you doing? We don’t do it that way.” Apparently they just wear a big blue unitard with an oval opening for the face, and their face is the only part they actually paint blue. Makes sense if you think about it, but I wish I had f’king known that two years earlier. It would’ve saved me a lot of misery.

PLAYBOY: You don’t seem to be the kind of guy who’s bashful about his body. When was the last time you were naked in public?

CROSS: I’ve been kicked out of a number of places for getting naked. The last time was the Soho House. Or was it the Metropolitan? It was some fancy place in London where I took my pants off because I didn’t want to be there anymore and all my friends wanted to be there. I was really drunk and being a brat, so I was trying to get us kicked out. It worked, by the way.

PLAYBOY: You infamously appeared in the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie and its sequels. Given your reputation for subversive humor, were you ever tempted to tell any of the chipmunks to go f*#k themselves?

CROSS: [Laughs] What good would that have done? It just would’ve ruined the take and I’d have to stay on the set even later. All I wanted was to get the f*#k out of there as soon as possible. They encouraged me to improvise and come up with funnier lines if I wanted. But my entire strategy on those movies was to come in on time, shoot as much as I could as quickly as I could and then get the hell out of there and buy a summer home with the check.

PLAYBOY: You’ve been an outspoken atheist. As you grow older and closer to death, have you started to soften on religion?

CROSS: Of course not. Every day brings a fresh, exciting new example of religion’s and/or religious people’s hypocrisy and utter inability to reconcile with science and the basic, simple tenets for the betterment of all mankind. It’s a delightful patchwork of man-made precepts designed to dress up the chaos, injustice and disorder of life with ideas that supposedly make miserable, unfortunate people feel better and assuage the guilt of the better-off. I have no need for either of those things.