It’s been nearly a decade since he regularly played beloved, gruff libertarian meat-eater Ron Swanson on “Parks and Recreation,” but every visit to a restaurant is still fraught for the 53-year-old, who has shed 30 pounds in the intervening years.
“When I go into a place where I can vibe that there are Ron Swanson fans there,” he says, seated in a pink upholstered booth in the dining room of the Sunset Tower Hotel, “I usually will apologize to the waitstaff and say, ‘Look, I’m really sorry. I am a terrible hedonist when it comes to meat products, but my cardiologist and I had a talk and I’m going to order the Nancy Reagan salad.’”
He gets it. He did, after all, write an essay called “Eat Red Meat” in his first of five books detailing his woodsman-like life’s philosophy. But now, as a humorist who tours the country, he performs a song called “I’m Not Ron Swanson,” which explains that if he lived like that guy, he’d be dead within a year: “He can eat a big-ass steak for every meal/ Because his colon is fictitious and mine is all too real.”
It was on tour that he’d encounter “Parks and Rec” fans who were outraged to find out that he doesn’t have Ron Swanson’s anti-government politics, and indeed was a supporter of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. “Sometimes they’ll leave angered to discover that I’m not a Second Amendment, guns-kissing coward,” he says.
So, he’s decided to agitate them more. In Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” out now, Offerman plays a nameless authoritarian president, vainly lording over a crumbling United States in a fictional, brutal, near-future conflict in which the Western Forces of Texas and California have teamed up with the Florida Alliance and are fast closing in on the White House.
It’s just one of a fascinating string of roles he’s taken on with a political bent, often playing someone far more conservative than he is. “For whatever reason, the way I was brought up and what Mother Nature made me look and sound like lends itself to getting cast to represent people who can use a shovel,” he says.
Offerman’s is the face we see in close-up opening the film, a flawed human in a suit who paces back and forth, practicing a speech: “We are now closer than we have ever been to victory — some are calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind!” Later, the speech plays on TV in a hotel bar where jaded war reporters (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson as veterans and Cailee Spaeny as the rookie they reluctantly let tag along) have just returned from a violent street protest and roll their eyes.
This is a president who, Offerman says, “tends to lean fascist,” but who he says is not based on any past president. “I saw one headline, I think from Fox News, that said, ‘Nick Offerman and Kirsten Dunst refuse to admit that this movie is based on Trump,’” he says. “And I just thought how ironic it is. There’s truly no evidence of that hypothesis, but you are insisting that this fascist, fictional president must be based on Trump.”
Instead, he likes to compare his president, who has maybe three minutes of screen time, to Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings.” Garland has said the movie is meant to drive home the vitality of a free press, as the journalist protagonists set off through the lawless wasteland of the country with the goal of getting the last interview with Offerman’s president before he inevitably falls to a coup. Like Sauron, Offerman says,…
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