‘Loudermilk’ Star Ron Livingston: Unapologetically Uncensored [EUR Exclusive]

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*If you’re looking for a new binge-worthy series to watch before or after your Holiday festivities, you might want to consider the AT&T original series “Loudermilk,” which airs on the Audience network via AT&T U-verse and DirecTV Now.

Many of you know actor Ron Livingston from the hit comedies “Swingers” and “Office Space,” and as Roy Phillips on “Boardwalk Empire.” He currently stars as Sam Loudermilk —  a recovering alcoholic and substance abuse counselor with an extremely bad attitude about everything. He is unapologetically uncensored, and that’s what we love about the series. Although Loudermilk has his drinking under control, he discovers that when your life is a hot-ass mess, staying sober is the easy part.

“Loudermilk can say the things that most people can’t,” Emmy-winning scribe and co-creator Bobby Mort told EUR during TCA 2017. “I think that’s a fun aspect of that character. And being able to take it out on the world, in a nice way, is sort of the impetuous of that character.”

Director and co-creator Peter Farrelly (“Dumb and Dumber,” “There’s Something About Mary”) added that “There’s a little Larry David in him,” and he compared the series overall to “Cheers.”

“Those guys at the bar, they were never drunk. You would think they would have had one episode where they get hammered — never. They were constantly drinking, particularly Norm, but he was never drunk and these guys (Loudermilk’s AA group) are kinda those guys without the drinks in front of them, and as the season goes on you get to know all these characters,” said Farrelly. “They become a little more friendly. Every time I’ve ever seen a group like that, it’s just the most depressing thing in the world. You see people sitting in there talking about doing horrific things and feeling bad about themselves but that isn’t how it is. The more you’re in these groups the more you realize it’s not painful. It’s actually loving. You get to know people and help people and I think by the end of it, if you watch all ten episodes, and if people have said, “Hey, you should go to a meeting,” but you didn’t want to do it, maybe you’ll say, “Fuck it. I’ll go. It doesn’t look so bad.”

And when it comes to series star Ron Livingston, Farrelly describes him as “unusually likable” because “he’s a good-looking guy yet guys like him.”

Adding, “A lot of guys don’t like good-looking guys. He’s good-looking in a James Garner kind of way. But also, he mumbles. He’s from Iowa, and it’s a very real way of speaking. He’s not actorly and that to me is the likability.”

EUR/Electronic Urban Report sat down with Mr. Livingston in Beverly Hills during TCA to dish about “Loudermilk” and how much of his own personality was embedded into this wildly delicious character. 

Check out our conversation below.

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How much of your own persona did you add to Loudermilk’s world?

RL: More than I would have thought going into it. Somebody asked me how I was able to find a way to play that guy and my answer was, “I’m kinda that guy with a thin veneer of this guy (points to himself) over the top.” There’s a hypocritical thing. There’s a restless attention to niggling details about every little thing. It’s kinda fun to turn that loose and to do it in a gloves-off comedy kind of way. We moved away from the era of standards and practices. Television is starting to blossom away from that and we’ve seen a lot of that already with like, “The Sopranos” and “Deadwood” but we haven’t really seen it in (the) world of half-hour comedy. I’m sure you’ve seen it but I haven’t seen a half-hour comedy that really pulls that off and still be funny, sound kinda real, get two or three jokes in on a page but have it feel like it’s still flowing.

Loudermilk is a substance abuse counselor and the scenes with the recovery group are hilarious. Do you have a personal connection to this subject matter, or, in terms of your research, did you attend any Alcoholics Anonymous meetings?

RL: I did and I’ve known some people in the program for a long time so it wasn’t like I was coming into it completely new. I wanted to go to have some meeting experience to get a feel for it a little, and it’s a really compelling environment. There’s something very humbling about the idea of people who have just fucked up as badly as each of them may have but they’re all there to try to affect change in their lives and to be there to support each other. Even if they’re being dragged there to do that, that’s the ultimate goal. That’s a very hopeful thing to do and you don’t think of recovering alcoholics as being particularly hopeful people but I think it’s supremely hopeful. It’s a fun world to live in and I think what it does is it gives us an excuse. We can go wherever we want. We can go dark. We can cross the line and be offensive and then bring it back. We can show people trying to change their lives and be there for each other and none of them feels like it couldn’t exist in this world.

Talk about Loudermilk’s dynamic with his best pal, Ben. And what can you tease readers about the obstacles that he must overcome this season?

RL: Well, (Ben) has fallen off the wagon. He’s a big rock in the pond and that’s going to have ramifications. And the girl that Loudermilk tries to get through to in episode one ends up sleeping on his couch so she becomes an integral person and now all of a sudden he becomes this dad figure and he’s the worse dad figure ever. So that’s kind of interesting. And then the story that he touches on about his wife and the car crash that reverberates throughout the season and we learn more surprising details. There’s a couple of big twists that I love ‘cause we can’t get too predictable with it. That’s something that Peter has actually said. He’s like, “You’re playing with the audience’s expectations. You never give them what they’re expecting. But you can’t give them something that’s so far away from what they’re expecting that they’re like, ‘What?’” You gotta find what’s the interesting thing that they were never expecting. But when it happens they go, “Oh, of course! It had to happen that way.”

How is his personal philosophy shaped or affected by the AA meetings and learning of Ben’s relapse?

RL: One of the things about addiction and recovery is you’re fighting the same damn demon. Even when you beat him, you’re fighting him again tomorrow. It’s like punching in to go to work and you’re like, “Ugh. okay… I gotta fight this fucking demon again.” So there’s something about that constantly being in it that returns us a little bit to where we are. I would say his philosophy is: bullshit and beating around the bush and trying to be diplomatic about things never helped anything ever. He’s not capable of doing it. Even in situations where he knows he should or supposed to or would get what he wants if only he could do it. He can’t do that. It’s who he is. It’s what gets him in trouble. If there’s one thing that changes him I think he’s going to get a little more self-knowledge and it’s not always good self-knowledge. As it goes, he learns something else about himself that he didn’t think of before and now I gotta deal with that in my day-to-day and it all kinda folds in.

What’s the most important question you ask yourself when building a character?

RL: Oddly enough, nowadays the way I do it is — ‘cause I’m getting old and running out of time —  I’ll start with: Where am I at in my life right now? What are the issues that I’m dealing with and thinking about? And, Is there a place for that in this show? Either in a positive way, the characters have those things, or a negative way, the character can’t do any of those things. I don’t really try to solve it anymore as much as try to just let it be what it’s going to be. But the swing-thought, to use a golf analogy, is just: let it fly. This is a guy who just lets it fly. He doesn’t think about the civilians standing behind the target. He just lets it fly and he’s as hard on himself as he is on anybody. And every once in a while this horrible, pissed off at the world guy is exactly the thing that somebody needs to hear from to change their life. It’s a fun thing to play with, especially in a comedy, because as many times as he tries to do that, it’ll be a feeble attempt and he’ll fuck it up and it just goes down the drain.

Catch an all-new “Loudermilk” Tuesday at 10:30pm ET on Audience, DirecTV Now and DirecTV CH. 239. 

Get caught up with full episodes using your participating TV provider subscription here.

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