-Our first guests tonight
are two very talented actors of stage and screen.
You know her from the iconic sitcom "Will & Grace"
and him from NBC's "Parks and Recreation."
They star in the animated series "The Great North,"
which airs Sunday nights, on Fox.
Please welcome back to the show
Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman.
How are you?
-Good. Hello. -The Liz and Dick of today.
-Yeah, the -- Which one is the --
Which one is the Liz, is my question?
-That's for you guys to decide. We don't --
We're not gonna tell you how to live your marriage.
-That's what makes it more modern.
I actually love the Liz and Dick reference.
I think it's so amazing. I've used Lunt and Fontanne,
so you tell your writer that he's on the cutting edge
compared to me.
-Oh, the person who wrote that's way too old to be a writer.
[ Laughter ]
-Did that -- Did that not come from Shoemaker?
-It was Shoemaker. Yeah.
Yeah, that was absolutely -- a producer came up with that.
That's what we call people too old to write.
[ Laughter ]
Now, Nick, you were actually --
The last time we had an audience here, you were with us.
You were here on -- on March 11th.
So it is lovely to see you again,
albeit under far worse circumstances.
-You too. It was very strange.
We were uncomfortably, like, laughing and touching elbows.
-Yeah. -"I guess -- I guess this is
gonna be a real thing." -Yeah.
I feel like the last day any of us did shows,
we would not look back on proudly, like,
"Ha ha ha! Elbows! This'll be over tomorrow."
And then it was like, "Get out of the city!"
[ Laughter ]
Now, you guys are back out.
You're working, which is very exciting.
You're doing an animated show,
which I know you can do from home.
That is not, of course, all you're doing.
And I want to ask real quick, are you happy with the way
you've been animated on this show?
That's you, Nick. -I am.
I mean, you know, anyone who's worn a flannel coat
that's wool on the outside and shearling on the inside
would tell you that's clearly a slimming outfit.
-Yes. -And I look like Cher, so...
And there's never anything bad about that.
-No. Absolutely.
I think they both did very well by you.
This is very exciting, Megan. You are going to be doing
"Anything Goes" in London, correct?
-Yes. You know, God willing
and the COVID don't rise or -- that's really terrible.
And that's on television now. But that's fine.
Yes. -Thanks, Shoemaker.
[ Laughter ] -Yeah, he wrote that.
-Yeah. -He wrote that.
I'm supposed to go over there and do "Anything Goes."
So it's supposed to open at the end of July,
and I'm taking tap classes.
I'm learning all the tap choreography.
So I've been tapping my troubles away.
-And now, do you do all the tap out of the house,
or is Nick sort of -- Okay.
So there's no, like, tapping in the home.
-No. It's an empty dance studio,
and it's me and this woman who's teaching it to me.
And it's pretty fun, I have to say.
-You guys met on stage. I, of course, knew that --
Nick, I knew you were doing stuff in Chicago.
But you had just come out to L.A.,
and you guys were in a play together.
Was it love at first sight?
-Well, we have kind of two versions of this.
For me, Megan says yes,
that, for me, it was love at first sight.
But I -- I was living in someone's dirt basement,
and Megan had just finished
her first two seasons of "Will & Grace."
So we were in such different places
that I had, like, crazy "Prince and the Pauper,"
like "Princess and the Pea" -- I had a real class struggle.
I had to get through two weeks of, like, inoculation
to sort of realize that Megan was --
that I was a human like Megan.
[ Laughter ]
Because I really, like, placed her so high on a pedestal.
So I had the feelings. I was like, "Oh, my God.
Am I -- You know, are we sparking?
Is this canoodling?" [ Laughter ]
But I was like, "No, it can't be.
She's, like, a professional actress."
But, eventually, uh... it worked out.
-Did he ask you for your number, Megan?
-Oh, no. He, um -- He had called --
The number I put on the --
The number I gave out to everybody on the call sheet
was my fax number because I didn't want --
I didn't want creeps like this to have my number, you know?
So I didn't know that he'd left a message on my fax machine,
asking me to go out and hear this cowboy band
until two weeks later.
So for two weeks, he thought he'd been completely iced.
But then, I finally heard it. -Yeah.
-It was -- It was his dulcet tones,
'cause he really does have a good speaking voice
except when he's in character. -Did he --
And did you have to sort of introduce him
to the finer points of -- of society?
-Oh, God. The first time we went to a restaurant,
he tucked his napkin into the bib of his overalls.
[ Laughter ]
-Which is how it's done.
That's how Jed Clampett did it on "Beverly Hillbillies."
-And he turned out fine. -If you're working class
and you end up in Los Angeles at a fancy dinner,
you tuck your napkin into your collar.
[ Laughter ]
-You guys, you also have a podcast called
"In Bed with Nick and Megan."
Now, I have always found you guys to be a couple
that is very happy to share the innermost details
of your relationship. Have you found any boundaries
that you haven't wanted to cross yet,
or is it the same as it always was, even in podcast form?
-I mean, it's pretty full-on, because the thing is that,
no matter how much we say about our relationship,
nobody really knows. You know?
They don't know. -This is fascinating to me.
Megan, you found -- Because you say that,
and I think that's true, but you actually found old letters of --
of your mother's. And so, this is actually --
You're actually finding out more than anyone, I think,
most normal people ever find out about their family.
-It's kind of unbelievable, really.
I mean, I have found giant bins packed with letters
written to my mother, like, love letters written to my mother.
I mean, I'm talking about 750 letters just -- just from guys.
And then, another giant bin of letters written to my father.
So they saved everything. And so, I have love letters
written to my father and I have all the letters
from his mother and his father and his brother and sister.
And I just found them. So that's what I'm doing,
like, full-time every day is reading these.
-Were they a passionate couple, your parents?
-Well, this is their -- it's before they knew each other.
-Got you. -So they're all things
that were written to them before they knew each other.
-That's fascinating.
-It's kind of unbelievable. -It's crazy.
And it's pretty also embarrassing for us in that --
Because this is before, obviously, texting,
but even before you comfortably would call someone on the phone.
And so, this is just the correspondence of people
in their late teens and early 20s.
And even the dumb ones are so, like, well-written,
and there's an erudition that's like, "Oh, my God."
You know, this is us being like, "Oh, my God.
Did you see 'Scooby-Doo'?"
And these people are writing about, like, the war effort.
-It's all wartime, also. But it's very humanizing,
because, you know, everybody -- you always think, like,
"People back then didn't have emotions like we do."
Of course they did. But also, there's some hot goss.
I mean, the hot-goss quotient is off the charts.
And there's a couple of kind of shocking --
You know, there's a letter to my father
from this, like, real floozy. And there's this really
disgusting letter that my father wrote to a guy friend
and never mailed that's so gross.
[ Laughter ]
-Oh, my God. I mean, it's bad enough
finding letters that your parents wrote
but the ones that even they knew they shouldn't send.
[ Laughter ] -Totally.
-They say really satisfying things like,
"I'm gonna come see you this weekend,
and we are gonna 'get tight.'"
-It is always a delight to lay eyes on you both.
Thank you so much for making time for us.
And I do hope we can do it again soon.
-Thanks, Seth. You too.
-Let's do it in person. -That sounds like a deal.
"The Great North" airs Sundays, on Fox.