Search Party: Interview with John Early who plays Elliott

6 August 2018

For those who’ve not yet seen it on All 4, explain a little bit about Search Party.

Search Party is a kind of – excuse the reference that involves the sexual predator Woody Allen – a millennial Manhattan Murder Mystery, his movie where Upper West Side people accidentally get involved in a murder. It’s a satire, using these millennial tropes of aimless people in their late 20s, living in Brooklyn, brunching, and then getting swept up in the mystery of this missing girl, Chantal, who they went to college with and tangentially knew. Dory, who is played by Alia Shawkat, is the one who is really using the disappearance of this girl to build a sense of identity and purpose for herself. She brings her friends along for the ride, including my character, Elliott. Elliott would like to think that he’s above something this silly, but I think they’re kind of all maybe secretly hoping to, at the very least, have fun, but at the most, find her, and have more of a sense of purpose in their lives. And I guess Elliott would also want the personal fame that would accompany that. And then something catastrophic happens at the end of season one, and season two is all about them dealing with this matter and the ways in which they try and get back to their lives before it happened. They spend the season trying to suppress this very, very sinister fact in their lives. The ways in which it bubbles to the surface become hilarious.

 

How do you see Elliott?

I love Elliott. It’s that weird, annoying actor thing that you play a character for long enough and you do start to take their side, even though he does so many despicable things. I do genuinely really enjoy playing him. After a while you start to see the good in there. I think Elliott is an extreme narcissist, he is ruthlessly ambitious, but I would say he is also very grounded. When he’s not manically performing in an attempt to get ahead in the world, I actually think he’s pretty smart and relaxed. When he’s just with his friends, and he has no-one to peacock for, he is in some ways the most pragmatic and wise of the group. But that’s just me trying to figure out ways to love him, because he’s very tough to love, he does some really despicable things.

 

Do you need to find something to like in him, in order to play him?

It’s not really important, it just happens naturally. I’m not a precious actor – I went to acting school and was traumatised by that experience. Then I got into comedy as a reaction to that. So I think that my approach to any acting job is to scream and mug until people laugh. The beauty of playing someone for so long is that you can only scream and mug for so long, and then eventually, for your own boredom,. You have to diversify your approach. So eventually I found that there was something very cathartic about playing him, because I was brought up in a culture where you need to be nice. You’re taught to be nice. I grew up in the south, and Elliott is liberating for me, because he is so blunt and forthright. He can be severe in a way that is very exciting for me to try out. I think, through that, I’ve gained a kind of respect for him.

 

I’m almost scared to ask this, but is there any of you in him?

Yeah! I definitely have a troubled relationship with performance, and that comes from being a comedian and coming from the south. I definitely get that knee-jerk response to being in public, where I go into some sort of self-presentational mode that I don’t even have that much control over. That’s something I absolutely relate to. Before I know it, I’m deep into some sort of performance.

 

Did you have any input in creating Elliott?

I knew Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Roger before this – I did a very small part in their film Fort Tilden, and we have a lot of mutual friends, and they were living in New York as I was coming up in the comedy world, and they wrote this part for me. They wrote it around me, which is so flattering and so nice, because I’d been trying to make projects for myself and still am, that’s always the thing I’m naturally drawn to doing. So it was like a beautiful gift to have this perfectly-written show with a character that was in my sweet spot. That’s where that ends, though, as far as my input goes. The rest was just me sitting back and them writing really genius scripts.

 

As someone so used to performing their own work night after night, does it feel strange delivering someone else’s lines?

I love it. I thought I was going to be uncomfortable with it, but it’s kind of a dream, because it takes away a perfectionistic tendency in me. It’s such a relief to just show up and not be responsible for the dialogue. And I think I have so much more fun doing it, because I’m not worried about how the whole project is coming across, or really even how I’m coming across. It’s just a very good group of people, and we’re very silly with each other, and it just feels very low stakes – at least until we’re shooting scenes like you’ll see in season two that are extremely high stakes. When you’re doing stand uip or writing your own material, it’s really easy to have a white-knuckle grip of the whole process. And then I’m editing my own stuff, and I’m in this crazy hall of mirrors, watching a million takes of myself – I hate it! So it’s very nice to just show up, memorise my lines, make people laugh, and then go home and never see it until it comes out.

 

The characters are these pretty self-absorbed and directionless Millennials - is that a real thing in New York.

Yes, definitely. That’s another reason why this show is cathartic. I spent my entire 20s in Brooklyn, I was living in these neighbourhoods that were in various states of gentrification, and watching families that were originally living there being pushed out. And there is something very sinister about that, about these neighbourhoods losing all of their history and vibrancy so that someone who has a blog can move in. These people literally don’t have jobs, and are living of their parents’ money, and their lives are completely directionless. It’s pretty gross! And that makes for very fruitful comedy. And Search Party is a capital ‘c’ comedy. Of course, there are very emotional elements, and very dark elements, but it is very satirical, and there is something about it that shoots Millennials down. I think we’ve had plenty of movies and TV shows about Millennials in the last ten years, but I think Search Party does a really good job of just putting the nail in the coffin. It’s pretty brutal, in a way that I find very exciting.

 

How would Elliott get on in your home state of Tennessee?

[Laughs] I think he would go crazy. I think, in the beginning, he would sidle up next to the church ladies and charm the pants off them, and then I think he’d be exhausted within an hour. He would not be able to keep up the niceness. I don’t think he would last a day.

 

How has the show been received in America?

People really like it. I think young people like it because it is so incriminating towards Millennials. People of my age or younger are lumped into this category of Millennial, and it’s a term always used in a pejorative way. The way that this show puts these people through the ringer, and makes them squirm and suffer, is a way for young people to distance themselves from them, to go “I am actually not them. I’m doing something of value with my life, and it is nice to watch them squirm, and it is also maybe nice to laugh at myself, and the way that I am like them. I do get pretentious coffee every day. I walk to the coffee shop and spend $4 on a coffee every day, when I could just make it myself.” And I think older people like it, because it shows that the Millennial age creators and actors in the show actually do have some perspective. I think that’s a surprise for older people.

 

Fans of the show may just want a little insight into you. Tell me about the role that Toni Colette has played in your life.

[Laughs] I fell in love with her when I first saw Clockwatchers, a very small movie that no-one’s ever seen. And I was about 11 years old, and then I saw Muriel’s Wedding and that was it. I rented every single movie I could of hers that was available in America. I made a website for her, I named my dog Muriel, I made her a collage for her birthday, but never sent it, because I realised that it was too embarrassing. It just goes on and on and on. When I go back home to Nashville to visit my parents, I will always go through my closet, and I will find crazy Toni artefacts, like a huge bag of press clippings I ordered off eBay that I’d forgotten about. It’s insane. I was drawn to her in a way only a preteen can be. But you’ve seen Muriel’s Wedding. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her.

 

And to have your heart broken by her as well…

Oh my God! Absolutely. And she embodies in that movie specifically everything I have always wanted to do as a performer. It’s a very big performance. It’s really expressive. It’s full of subtlety, but it’s not subtle. She’s not aiming for naturalism for the sake of naturalism. Because the character herself is super-expressive. But I just really respect that performance, it’s deeply funny, and deeply sad. That, to me, is the pinnacle of a certain type of sensibility that I’ve always looked up to. So yeah, I’ve been in love with her forever. And I then spent years burying my love for her, because I suddenly realised I was gay, and I was like “Oh no! This is so obvious! Everyone knows, I didn’t realise.” And then I had the great privilege of working with her on the movie Fun Mom Dinner two summers ago, I got to spend a couple of days with her, and it was totally surreal.