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"FacebookPinterest\n\n\"You want a roadie?\" Jason Bateman asks. We're in the kitchen of his production company, Aggregate Films\u2014first feature: Identity Thief, $125 million and counting\u2014loading up on caffeine before climbing into his golf cart for a late-morning tour of the Universal Studios lot. I say yes; Bateman fills a travel mug. When I mention that my creamer of choice is hazelnut Coffee-Mate and not to knock it till he's tried it, he regards me like I'm Tobias F&amp;amp;#xFC;nke and says, \"I think your vagina's bleeding.\"\n\n There he is! There's the guy\u2014pretty much the exact same guy, even though he's not acting at the moment\u2014whose withering but somehow affectionate deadpan has cracked us up for thirty-two of his forty-four years now. In his teens: Silver Spoons, It's Your Move, Valerie, The Hogan Family. Bateman's twenties were pretty much lost in a haze of partying and sitcom pilots that went nowhere, but he roared back in 2003 with Arrested Development, a \"career-defining\" role that led to supporting parts in films (Juno, State of Play), which led in turn to lead roles (The Switch, Horrible Bosses), which eventually added up to enough Hollywood juice to score his two-year production deal with Universal. He's presently editing his directorial debut, a comedy called Bad Words that he also produced and starred in. And now, to the delight of millions of Arrested Development fans, he's just a couple of short months away from reappearing as Michael Bluth in the long-gestating resurrection of the show, which was canceled in 2006 after only three seasons. Apparently, though, the fourteen new episodes of AD that will stream on Netflix in May are...not the fourth season?\n\n \"It is not season four,\" Bateman says emphatically. \"It got misbranded or mislabeled way, way, way back when and was never corrected for one reason or another. There are different agendas at work there, but it is not season four.\" Hmmm, mysterious. Much more on Arrested Development in a minute.\n\n First, though, that golf-cart tour. As we step out of his bungalow, Bateman pauses. \"See this office right here?\" he says, gesturing at a window to the right of the entrance. \"This is where I did my schoolwork when I was doing Silver Spoons on Stage 42. Having an office here, in this same bungalow, is just like this incredibly humbling full-circle kind of great thing.\" He turns and points to a little slope of exposed reddish dirt that's been carved from the hillside. It's maybe a dozen feet high, but steep. \"I remember Ricky Schroder was coming back from rehearsal one day, and he slid down this hill by accident\u2014he was trying to show off\u2014and he slid right over a hole, a yellow-jacket hole. I'll never forget that image, looking out that window and watching this cloud of yellow jackets around him and him running around here yelling, 'JASON! GODDAMNIT!' \"\n\nMore Jason Bateman:\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\n He smiles his sideways smile and leads me to the golf cart, parked right next to a BMW 7 Series in a space reserved for JASON BATEMAN.\n\nGQ: Are you still in touch with Ricky? \n\nJason Bateman: No.\n\nGQ: Were you friendly during that period?\n\nJason Bateman: Very friendly. We hung out a lot. We'd ride our bikes around the lot for ercise, or fucking around, and we'd hold on to the back of one of those trams [gestures at a tram full of tourists on the tour], and we'd let the tram pull us along this route right here with the people in the back of the tram going, \"Oooh, it's those two kids from Silver Spoons!\" We'd have the tram pull us all the way up to Jaws Lake, where we'd roll up our pants and wade in and net a bunch of goldfish and put 'em in a plastic bag to take back to Ricky's fish tank in the schoolroom. He had a bunch of fish-eating fish, you know, like big fish that all they ate was fish? Eventually the tram people sent a letter to our parents saying, \"Can you please have your kids stop wading in Jaws Lake? They're ruining the effect. You know, 'cause people are supposed to be afraid of this great white shark\u2014\"\n\nHe pauses as the tram approaches Jaws Lake and the fake shark swims toward the tourists. There's some kind of faux fire erupting on the surface of the \"lake.\"\n\nI don't remember there being fire in Jaws. Look, there's the shark!... So cheesy.... You'd think they would update this thing, right?... Oh, my God, that guy's about to be eaten. Trouble! Look at the blood.\n\nGQ: Jesus, if you're 6, that would be legitimately terrifying. To see that massive thing coming up at you? \n\nJason Bateman: Special effects! That was pretty good.\n\nGQ: Okay, Arrested Development. What was that like to get everyone back together after all those years of talking about it and fans clamoring for it? \n\nJason Bateman: It was something that, every month or two since the end of the show, there would be an update about the progress [about some kind of reunion]. So it wasn't that big of a shock when it happened, because it always seemed like it was a half a year from happening anyway. But when we did finally all come together on the set, it was pretty neat. I just don't know how many examples there are of that\u2014where people get to come back and do a reunion-type situation and have it not be a bit of a Hail Mary, careerwise. That show launched a lot of our careers and everyone is doing great, so to come back together while things are going well is really a fortunate situation. Everybody had to be big boys about not making it financially impossible.\n\nGQ: What else can you tell me about the show? The entire Internet wants to know.\n\nJason Bateman: The last line of the last episode of Arrested Development was Ron Howard saying to Maeby\u2014she's pitching him a show about her family at Imagine\u2014and he says to her, \"No, I don't see it as a series. Maybe a movie!\" And then the screen goes black. That's it. So Mitch [Hurwitz, the show's creator] was always planning on writing a movie. Every time he went to start a movie script, there was so much work to be done just to fill the audience in on where the family had been since the end of the show, and to also initiate the uninitiated about who these characters are. So he thought: The only way to tell a story of this size is to do the first act in episodes. So it's really a hybrid distribution of one big story. The episodes are simply act 1, and the movie will have act 2 and act 3 in it. So one does not work without the other.\n\nGQ: So there are stories in the episodes that won't resolve until the movie? \n\nJason Bateman: There are many, many questions that these episodes ask that only the movie will answer. And there are many stories where the loop is closed inside the episodes. But the overall story, the bigger story, once you see the movie you will see that \"oh, this story started with those fourteen episodes,\" because the action in these fourteen episodes happens simultaneously. Each character has their own episode. There's a Michael episode, a Gob episode, a Lindsay episode, a Maeby episode. And the action across the episodes is happening simultaneously. If I'm driving down the street in my episode and Gob's going down the sidewalk on his Segway, you could stop my episode, go into his episode, and follow him and see where he's going.\n\nIt's not exactly like a Choose Your Own Adventure type of thing, but Mitch has written these episodes exclusively for the distribution platform and format of Netflix, knowing that they were all going to be released, like an album, on the same day. So certain clues are revealed to you based on the order in which you watch them. There will be an order that is suggested, but because part of the fun of what he does is so dense and multilayered\u2014I mean, if you could see the writers' room before we started shooting\u2014the cards and literally the strings of yarn, different colored characters where plotlines and index cards are matched to this one, and then there's an entire other room that is the movie. It looks like A Beautiful Mind. \n\nGQ: Another Ron Howard project. The career you're trying to build\u2014from child star to adult actor to producer-director\u2014seems modeled on Howard's, who of course is the narrator of Arrested Development and one of its ecutive producers. Had you met him before Arrested Development?\n\nJason Bateman: I had not, no.\n\nGQ: Have you talked to him about this, your career goals? What's your relationship?\n\nJason Bateman: Yeah, it's great. I'm not picking his brain on a monthly basis about the model of his company and how I want to emulate that, but he's aware of my goals. He's very supportive and answers any questions that I have. He'll be one of the first people I show the film that I'm cutting [Bad Words], to get his take on whether I know what the hell I'm doing with directing or not.\n\nI remember when things were really dry for me in my twenties, when things really slowed down. It was a confusing time for me. I was really having a hard time with, literally, how to behave at an audition. Your natural instinct is to go in there and let them know how much you want it and be affable and be ambitious. Yet in this business, much like high school, a sexy indifference will go a long way, sort of that playing-hard-to-get thing. I never wanted it more, but I never felt more conflicted about looking like I wanted it. So I'd go in there and I'd be acting twice. But my point is, I remember somewhere in there seeing some interview with Ron Howard, and I remember watching him be that famous, kind, affable, engaging, almost eager persona, and I remember thinking, \"Boy,\" you know, \"there's no way anybody would ever misinterpret that kindness for weakness.\" And I thought to myself, \"If I'm ever lucky enough to find some relevance again and some access and some success, that's going to be the best part of it, is that I'm going to be able to be as nice as I want to be and not be nervous that that's going to be misinterpreted for desperate. So the fact that I've been able to say that to Ron\u2014I've literally walked him through this long-winded story\u2014it was just really, really nice to be able to do that and to have him be a mentor and a friend and then obviously such a huge part of what was a career-defining job for me on Arrested Development.\n\nGQ: Can you remember any specific parts that you really wanted but you fucked it up because you were afraid to show how much you wanted it? \n\nJason Bateman: Well, tons of them. You never find out exactly why you don't get the job, but I can tell you that I wasn't accurately representing myself. I wasn't being me.\n\n This business, to a young kid, is kind of a mind-fuck. This is one of the reasons I don't really recommend parents putting their kids in the business as an actor. I grew up training myself to pretend to be other people. If you do that at an age where you're trying to figure out who you are, which is when you're a kid, you don't develop schizophrenia, but you can really slow down an organic process, which is trying to find your identity. I didn't really have a great engine to navigate this confusing period of my life.\n\nGQ: This is right after The Hogan Family ended. You're trying to figure out how to make that transition into an adult career. But there's no financial pressure. \n\nJason Bateman: No! I had all the money a 21-year-old could ever want, and I'd moved out when I was 18. It was as if my parents went out of town and they left me the keys to the car and the bank-account numbers and I didn't know when they were coming home. I spent ten or fifteen years having so much fun with all of my buddies and obviously losing my place in the business. By the time I regained an appreciation for a career and a work ethic and all those types of things, I had to do a lot of catching up. It wasn't necessarily there for me when I wanted it, and that was difficult and frustrating and extremely humbling. I just kind of had to start over\u2014rebuild an ego and self-esteem and an identity.\n\nBateman brakes the golf cart alongside a fence that marks the perimeter of the Universal lot. On the other side, across the Los Angeles River, is a golf course.\n\nDuring my twenties, I spent every day playing golf here. This is the fifth hole. Every time I'd be on this fifth fairway, I would look across and I would remember Silver Spoons and It's Your Move just on the other side of the castle walls, and I'd think, \"I'd love to be able to have another crack at it.\" I kind of clocked these bungalows. So these sort of moments, they're not lost on me, because I'm so appreciative of the chances that I've gotten. It's so easy to be irrelevant in this business, and it's so easy to be relevant, too. Everybody is just a job away. For me, it was Arrested Development. I didn't take any talent pill the morning before that audition. If I didn't get that job, I'd probably still have all the time in the world to be over there playing golf all day and not doing anything.\n\nGQ: Last question on that period. On one hand you say it was fun\u2014you were hanging out with your buddies, making up for lost time. You also say it was difficult and frustrating. Would you say you were depressed at this time? \n\nJason Bateman: Oh yeah! Yeah, yeah, absolutely.\n\nGQ: So what was the interplay between that depression and the fun you were having?\n\nJason Bateman: I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing it. I sort of relegated my depression to my frustrations in work, but my fun was in just being me and living my life. I really tried to keep those things separate. I wasn't partying to mask pain. I was partying in a celebratory way as opposed to \"Oh God, I'm so depressed, so now I want to drink and party.\" I don't know how valid that sounds or how valid that is, but it is the way it felt at the time, at least, and still does in retrospect.\n\n Eventually, though, and not too surprisingly, you keep putting in the hard work, you rebuild and develop that for yourself. It's just like anytime anybody's ever been single and you're like \"God, if I could just get another girlfriend, I'd feel a lot better.\" Well, you're not going to get a girlfriend until you don't need one. Right? So as soon as you stop looking, things come. So that time was healthy. It was painful, but it was healthy. So along comes Arrested Development, along comes Amanda, my wife still to this day, and sobriety, too. So all of these things kind of coalesced around my early thirties, and it has fueled and continued to fuel the respect that I have for people, for work, for this business. I really feel lucky that ambition is matched with access right now.\n\nGQ: What kinds of films do you want to make as a director? The kind of films you've acted in, or something different?\n\nJason Bateman: Bad Words is a comedy, but there's no pie in the face. It's a comedy only because of the raw humanity that somebody is showing. The character would be mortified if he heard anybody laughing at him. It is a comedy because of the character losing dignity. So sort of character stuff, human stuff, as opposed to concept stuff or jokey things. The Coen brothers' stuff, Paul Thomas Anderson's stuff, Alexander Payne's stuff\u2014that's what really gets me going. Not loud stuff. Things that bounce very seamlessly back and forth from comedic moments to dramatic moments. You know, unfortunately those aren't the ones that make a shit-ton of money, 'cause they don't hit you in the face, but you do them at a price, so you're not obligated to make a hundred million dollars.\n\nGQ: Say Identity Thief had happened a few years from now. Would you have wanted to direct that?\n\nJason Bateman: Yeah, 100 percent.\n\nGQ: It's a pretty singular career you've had. I can't think of another one quite like it\u2014being away for that long and making this kind of comeback not just as an actor but producing, directing.\n\nJason Bateman: And I hope to have the opportunity to act\u2014no pun intended\u2014on all of the things that I want to do from this point forward. I don't want to look back at this point as \"He was up, then he was down, then he got up again, and it was the end of the fight.\" I want to look back on this as truly the midpoint of a sixty-year career, and the next thirty years are like what Clint Eastwood did with his career. You hardly even think of him as an actor anymore. The career he's had as a director is just insane! Look at what Ben Affleck is on the doorstep of. Great fucking story. That's maybe a reach of a parallel\u2014he's definitely doing something different\u2014but...\n\nGQ: Well, his purgatory was just seeming like kind of a douche for a while.\n\nJason Bateman: Right. His Gigli was my Teen Wolf Too, right?\n\nGQ: So what do you see for yourself as far as acting versus directing versus producing? What do you want that pie to look like in terms of your time?\n\nJason Bateman: As opposed to Ron Howard's career, which is exclusively directing and producing, no acting, and like Favreau's career and Pete Berg's career, where it's mostly directing\u2014I think, more realistically, I'd like it to be more like George Clooney's career or Ben Stiller's career or Ben Affleck's career as far as splitting the time between acting and directing. I'm so... I just vibrate at how excited I am about the complexity of the process, of making a fake world for an audience. It's not a God complex, but that's what directors are doing: They're creating a fake world, and it is four-walled. It's 360 degrees. When a movie is great, you don't notice the effort. It is a real world that you've just watched. There's no better job in the world than directing a film. I'm convinced of it.\n\nAt this point Bateman puts the golf cart in drive\u2014we've been idling across from the golf course\u2014and heads back toward his offices. \"Should we go urinate?\" he asks. \"That's something I like to do in every interview. I like to have a little bit of a urine sword fight. I will fucking kick your ass, too.\" \n\nGQ: Jeffrey Tambor [who plays George Bluth in Arrested Development] once compared you to Johnny Carson in the way that you play the straight man but with this dark center. When I read that, it occurred to me that you might be a good talk-show host. Have you ever thought about that?\n\nJason Bateman: That's interesting, I was just talking about that. Without getting too specific about it, because I can't, I've thought seriously about it as recently as last year. Having just come back from doing a week of talk shows last week [to promote Identity Thief], I was talking to Amanda about, in twenty years\u2014when the girls go to college and we can finally move to New York, which is what I've been wanting to do forever\u2014if television will have me, I would love to do that. Regis retired at what, 80? So in twenty years I'll be 64. To host a talk show then, that would be a fun way to do the last bit.\n\nGQ: I'd love to talk to Amanda about you. Do you mind?\n\nJason Bateman: No! That'd be fucking great, actually. She'll probably say some fucking shit that she's going to realize she shouldn't have said. She's fucking great. You will not get her to fucking shut up. Jesus Christ, does she like to talk. It's really nice, 'cause I don't have to say shit. I'm not that chatty. You might be surprised to hear, but I actually don't like to talk, even though I haven't stopped talking, but when I'm at social dinners or whatever, I'm usually the guy just sitting there just listening, 'cause she does all the talking. In fact, I situate myself at the dinner table, not next to her but across from her, so I can watch her fucking shoot that thing off. Just take 'em all down. Bring some gauze for your ears. She's the best.\n\nA few days later I call Amanda Anka\u2014yes, Paul's daughter\u2014who does in fact use many words in conversation. But she's also a delight to talk to. As far as I can tell, she doesn't seem to say any fucking shit that she's going to realize she shouldn't have said. But she does tell me the following things about her husband: \"He's not selling a six-pack. He's not selling an image. He's the Everyman's guy.\" He became emotional when he learned he was going to get to direct a feature film. He only wears Falke socks. He has thick skin: \"He's the most sensitive, generous man without being fragile, which is interesting to me.\" They met at an L.A. Kings game but didn't start dating for ten years, because \"I just wasn't into where he was at.\" These days, however, \"I can't get him off the couch to go to a party. This is a guy who wants to go get frozen yogurt and come home.\" He likes her opinionated personality: \"We disagree all the time! I think he secretly likes it. I think he likes that it doesn't bore him, that we're not just agreeing on everything.\" And finally, his motto is \"It's not going to work out the way you think, but it'll work out the way it should.\" Which brings me back to my interview with Jason.... \n\nGQ: I listened to you last week on Howard Stern, who really pushed you on your parents\u2014how they managed your career when you were younger, the money, et cetera. How is your relationship with them now? How have you guys weathered that? \n\nJason Bateman: Great. The relationship is fantastic with both parents [who are now divorced]. It's as normal as the relationship could be, since it started so abnormally. There was this accelerated peer dynamic. Usually you have that dynamic of deference to your parents that is forever. They'll always be your mom and dad, a pair of people who nurtured you and you're trying to impress and you look for their approval, blah blah blah. But at a very, very early age, we were in a business partnership, and in fact there were financial responsibilities shared. So that typical dynamic was abbreviated or altered or destroyed, whatever you want to call it. I took the positive of it, which is that I learned at a very early age how to handle responsibility\u2014huge adult responsibility at like 11\u2014which was difficult at times. If you don't keep a C average on your report cards, you lose your work permit, and if you lose your work permit, you're kicked off the show, and if you're kicked off the show, we can't make the mortgage. That was tough.\n\nGQ: And Justine [his sister, who played Mallory on Family Ties] is dealing with this same thing?\n\nJason Bateman: Yeah, exactly. It was a challenge, but with all challenge comes some nice scar tissue, which is muscle\u2014not to get too fucking poetic. You can take the positive or the negative out of it. You can be angry about it, or you can be flattered that there was that much responsibility offered to a child from the parent because they thought we could handle it, and we did, and we could. As a result, I've been working as an adult for thirty-four years, and I'm only 44. I can now take this opportunity that I'm afforded right now and hit the ground running, as opposed to spending ten or fifteen years getting my feet under me, by which time I'm 60 and out of the business. I wouldn't change a thing.\n\nGQ: So your career continued as an actor, while Justine stopped acting. How do you feel about that?\n\nJason Bateman: She on purpose slowed things down to have a couple of kids. And by the time she wanted to make a more concerted effort to get back into the workplace, I think her passion for it had waned a bit. And so the fact that her activity is not as frequent or as high-profile as it was back then, I don't think bothers her as some might think. In fact, her interests have gone into other areas. She's now studying, I think, computer science. She's far too smart to sort of be at the mercy of somebody else's agenda or rhythm or schedule\u2014at an industry's rhythm or schedule. So I'm positive that she's happy. To have an expectation that two careers could accelerate or decelerate at the same time would be naive. I'm not surprised that one of us is in a different place than the other\u2014no better, no worse, just in a different place. It's just too volatile a business. There's nothing predictable about it. It was surprising when [our careers] were at the same place or similar: both on television series, both on the same network. Hers was wildly successful, my stuff was sort of middling all the time, but it was pretty neat to be in the same house and both be on television. It was pretty interesting.\n\nGQ: Last question. There's this thing that you do sometimes in scenes, when you look at the other actor right here [I point to the top of my forehead, kind of off to the right], often when you're disgusted with them or, in the context of Arrested Development, baffled that you're related to them\u2014\n\nJason Bateman: Really!?\n\nGQ: Yeah. I think of it as one of your go-to moves. Is that something you think about? \n\nJason Bateman: I'm sort of picturing it now, rehearsing it in my head. I'm certainly not aware that I'm doing it, but that's a pretty hilarious.... I could see that look. A look above the eyes to the forehead and just around the body, like, \"This person, this whole\u2014it's just a miracle, how do you do it? How does this happen every day? I don't know how you get up. I don't know how you're okay with what you see. What I'm looking at, when you hit a mirror, how do you not cry?\" But you know, this is something that Mitch and I talked a lot about, because that character [Michael Bluth] is written as very disgusted with his family. And my instinct is to be a little nastier, a little darker with anything. But Mitch will always remind me, \"Don't forget, he loves these people.\" So it's less of a \"This fucking guy is my brother-in-law\" and more of just like a naive fascination with \"Man, I wish I had this blissful ignorance. How did I get fucked with all of this introspection?\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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