Tim Heideckerim Heidecker knows that, despite all of the things he does – his TV show Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, its bizarre big-screen translation Tim And Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, his On Cinema podcast, albums both somewhat serious (Heidecker & Wood) and absolutely not (The Yellow River Boys) – he's always going to be best known as the groom without any lines in Bridesmaids.
“I'm sure all living US presidents have seen that movie, and have seen me in it,” Heidecker laughs. “It was offered to me as a movie with Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph. I thought: 'This'll be fun, those two ladies are hilarious', like I'd go shoot for a few days, and then maybe a couple of years later I'd see it on cable. I had no idea it'd be this juggernaut, and that it'd be the thing most people know me from, even though I didn't speak in it.”
Right now Heidecker is working with John C. Reilly, Gregg Turkington, and director Rick Alverson on Entertainment, a “dark, depressing, bleak yet funny look at what it means to be an entertainer on the road”. It's the kind of project the 38-year-old likes working on: a somewhat strange collaboration with friends.
He and the staunchly independent Alverson first worked together on 2012's The Comedy, an incisive satire on white male privilege and the currency of irony that, despite its title, is emotionally brutal. Alverson reached out to Heidecker via Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. “He [spoke] to me about rich guys in Williamsburg who communicated through sarcasm and grotesque humour, guys who shouldn't still be hanging out drinking in the afternoon, guys who should've long ago got their shit together. Now I'm a guy in my late 30s who's married with a family, but it really connected with me. I recognised people I know who are still just hanging out in Williamsburg or Echo Park; I even saw some of myself in that.
“I think of him as a guy who's smart and funny and has the potential to be a decent person, but he's just been drinking and fucking off and behaving poorly for so long that he's gone too far,” Heidecker says.
Alverson wanted the film to be filled with actual friends getting actually drunk, so Heidecker roped in his Tim And Eric homie Eric Wareheim, Turkington (with whom he does On Cinema), and the cast was filled out with indie musicians (James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, Will Sheff of Okkervil River, Richard Swift) for whom this Comedy cut close to home. This meant that, making the film was a sheer joy. “It was a lot of running around New York with this tiny crew, stealing shots on subways. At one point it occurred to me: my job, at that point, was like a dream. I was hanging out with friends, getting drunk on a sailboat, making a movie.”
