Silver Spoons, the Hogan Family, “these shows in front of a live audience, where there’s a performance type of obligation: you’re incorporating their laughter, it’s more like being on stage”. Kent Bateman was an actor, writer and director, and the producer of the 1987 fantasy comedy sequel Teen Wolf Too, the lead role that sealed his son’s teen-idol status as mischievous, unthreatening and very 80s.īateman became a complete sitcom fixture in titles that are familiar to US viewers but less so in the UK (TV didn’t travel so much then). His father would be the more obvious role model in professional terms. If something is hilarious to him, it’s because “my mother is British and everything is dry to her”. He talks about his mother – a Pan Am flight attendant, originally from the UK – a lot. His career dates officially from a Golden Grahams advert in 1980, when he was just 11 (he’s now 53). Bateman didn’t join the cast until the early 80s. Little House on the Prairie first aired in 1974. It’s pointless of course to pretend not to have been a child star if you were one, but it also takes a certain kind of comfort in your skin to underline immediately how incredibly long your career has been. I saw by example there that the opposite is true.”Ī regular, affluent, middle-aged couple on the run … Jason Bateman and Laura Linney in Ozark. There’s this theory that you need to scream at people to get them to work their hardest. My first big job, Little House on the Prairie, had Michael Landon as the director, actor, producer – and sometimes writer. “I had a very fortunate first experience. I can get them to speed up or slow down or trick them by being more emotional.” Finally, he clarifies forcefully and winningly, he’s not a control freak at all. “I don’t have to have any sort of creative negotiation with that actor.” Then he slides into the territory of the self-aware control freak: “Especially when I’m the lead character, I can just adjust my own performance to motivate a different performance out of the other actor. “It’s more efficient for me to be playing a character in something, because that’s one less person I need to direct,” he says. He starts off describing the appeal of being an actor/director quite neutrally. Typically (although not this time, because of Covid) Bateman would direct the first two episodes of each season. The smart thing to do is to turn yourself in. “Sometimes that narrows your options as a writer, trying to keep things plausible. “Marty and Wendy are really intelligent characters,” Bateman says. But all that nuance was a double-edged sword. What passed between them gave such propulsive energy to their characters that from the very beginning you could trust one thing: it might be improbable, but it was never going to be boring. They hated each other, except they didn’t. What was haunting about it from the start were the subtle performances of Bateman and his co-star, Laura Linney just a regular, affluent, middle-aged couple, except he was about to launder $500m for a drug cartel and she’d just watched the murder of the lawyer she was having an affair with. Tense and lingering, Ozark has the dizzying pace and visual sumptuousness that the modern long-running box set demands. But today we’re here to talk about Ozark, a drama with a reputation that has been climbing each season (it’s now in its fourth and final) and so has, arguably, become even more defining for Bateman. To fans of the show, its entire cast will always have traces clinging to them, as if they have all been, well, arrested in that dysfunctional family. It’s as if Michael Bluth, the character he played in Arrested Development, had dressed up as a therapist for some hilarious purpose. J ason Bateman appears on a Zoom screen from Los Angeles, bespectacled, calm and in uncluttered, butter-coloured environs.
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