Ken Jeong, Jason Segel and Sacha Baron Cohen have gone full monty in movie comedies. Will you up the ante?
"I don’t think I’d ever do it, because of the internet. Once you show your dick, that’s the first image that comes up on Google for the rest of your life. I don’t want my dick on the internet."
You got hired as an SNL cast member, and your Lonely Island partners were hired as writers. Did the pressure of doing the show put a strain on your relationship?
"I had done a lot of stand-up and we led with me for that first audition. Akiva didn’t want to be on camera. He took a writer’s meeting. Jorma auditioned, but he was a theater major. He is super funny and would have been great on the show, but he never did the Groundlings or tried improv or anything like that. We all wrote and submitted a writers’ packet together, and Jorma and Akiva helped me write my audition. The fact that we all got hired was incredible and a victory for the three of us. Once we were hired, we started to make those videos together, and it was always about the three of us. The nature of the show sometimes threatened to drive a stake between us, but we rarely let it happen."
When did you first feel “I’m famous”?
"You get hired on SNL, but except for the show’s die-hard fans, nobody knows who you are until you do something that everyone’s talking about. After we did Lazy Sunday with Chris Parnell in 2005, I would be out in public and people would go, “Hey, Lazy Sunday!” That first wave feels the biggest because you’re going from not at all famous to thinking, Holy shit, somebody just spotted me on the street. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying, but the truth is, you’ve just scraped the surface to the point that, if there’s a Google search for you, now at least there’s something there. The second big one was Dick in a Box, and to this day that’s still probably the biggest. Lorne likes to joke about the thing you’ll be most remembered for on your tombstone. He’s like, “I’ll be Lorne ‘SNL’ Michaels, and you’ll be Andy ‘Dick in a Box’ Samberg.” I’m very comfortable with that. I love that video. I still find it really funny, and it was huge for our careers. It was a moment. There was a Justin Timberlake explosion happening and the video got picked up everywhere. That was the first time I really felt the power of the media and the first time I was getting more attention than I was comfortable with."
There is, of course, that other comedy cliché—that all comedians are depressed. Have you ever had to dip into the Xanax or talk to a therapist?
"Yeah, I have. Not a ton. I’m generally a pretty happy person. For a lot of people, the honesty and realness that produce the best comedy means you’re facing the world as it is. You’re trying to uncover some truth, and that can be painful and scary. There’s a lot of things about being a human on earth that there are no answers to, and that’s the scariest part of it, depending on your faith and what you believe. I think most comedians believe in comedy, which we do with some pretty daunting unanswered questions, and that can lead to depression. That said, when I get down it’s generally more about working myself too hard and losing my handle. Or something incredibly sad happens in the world or in my world and I’m affected by that. I definitely feel things deeply. And when you feel great joy and major highs, you are susceptible to major lows."
You didn’t wait until college to lose your virginity, though, did you?
"I was, I believe, 16 or 17. It was at summer camp. I was on the junior staff and she was girls’ head counselor. She was 24. She could tell I probably was a virgin. I was flirty; there was a friendship and a playful thing between us, but I didn’t really think it would ever be real because of the age difference. I think she just decided for me. It was only once. I wouldn’t say I was good, but it was great for me."
Read the full interview at Playboy, which is now, surprisingly, SFW.
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