Jason Bateman, our guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast — which was recorded in front of students enrolled in a Chapman University journalism class called “The Art of the Interview” — is an actor, director and producer who has been in the business for 45 years and has never been more respected or successful than he is today.
Bateman started out as a child actor — and became something of a teen idol — in the 1980s on the TV shows Little House on the Prairie, Silver Spoons and Valerie, later renamed The Hogan Family. In the 1990s, though, work dried up for him, he developed substance abuse issues, and he largely disappeared from the Hollywood scene. But in the 2000s, against all odds, he returned with a vengeance on the landmark single-camera comedy series Arrested Development, reinventing himself as the consummate straight man not only for that Emmy-winning show, but for a wide range of other projects on screens big and small.
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“I don’t take anything away from actors that like acting,” Bateman said when he first was a guest on Awards Chatter back in 2018, “but I am really attracted to something different.” At that time, he was just embarking on the next major chapter of his career, as not only the star but also a director and executive producer of Ozark, a drama series about a Chicago family man who becomes indebted to a Mexican drug lord for whom he agreed to launder money. It was there that we picked up the conversation for this episode.
As you can hear via the audio player above or via any major podcast app, the 57-year-old reflected on why the opportunity to direct on Ozark was a prerequisite for him agreeing to act on it (he won an Emmy for his direction of an episode of the show’s second season); why he and friends Will Arnett and Sean Hayes decided to launch the podcast SmartLess, and to what he attributes its massive popularity and financial success (it has generated nine figures of revenue); and what led him to step outside of his aforementioned acting comfort zone in two limited series that dropped over the past year, Netflix’s Black Rabbit, on which he played the black sheep of two brothers who started a restaurant together, and HBO Max’s DTF St. Louis, on which he played a meteorologist for a local TV news station who bonds with a colleague who is equally frustrated in his life (Bateman also served as an executive producer of both shows and directed two episodes of the former).
The episode closes with questions from students.
And so, with great thanks to Jason Bateman for doing this, and without further ado, let’s go to that conversation!
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