A Piece of Life

There’s this thing most people from the center of the United States have mastered – we’ll call it the Midwestern Deflect.

You tell them, “whoa, nice job,” and the typical Midwesterner will point eight different ways to credit all the other people who helped them along. It’s not self-deprecation, exactly, just a willingness to say, “wait a second” and spread the credit around.

Actor Dan Bakkedahl, a Minnesota native who studied comedy at Chicago’s Second City and Improv Olympic, is a master of the Midwest Deflect. In the last few years, the actor has been in so many quality productions that a person could say, “Whoa, let’s cast Bakkedahl! Everything he touches is gold!”

But instead of claiming all the glory, Bakkedahl cites with appreciation and admiration all the wonderful people he works with. He's so adept at the Midwest Deflect that it takes you a few minutes to realize, "Wait, how'd he make this not about him?"

As one of the eight stars of the new CBS half-hour hit, Life in Pieces, Bakkedahl deflects all over the place.

“Every now and I’m on set and have to pinch myself and go, that’s Colin Hanks! That’s Thomas Sadowski! That’s Betsy Brandt! That’s James Brolin and Dianne Wiest! What am I doing here? This is insane!” Even though only a few episodes have aired, Bakkedahl and the rest of the all-star cast seem to have found their footing early, as members of the Hughes family.

The comedy goes story by story, then pieces the threads together, and Bakkedahl said the familial feel is as present off-camera as it is on.

It may not be long before up-and-comers are pinching themselves to work with Bakkedahl, who started out by training and working shows for Improv Olympic and Second City in Chicago in 1995, around the same time the scene was defined by stars like Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, Scott Adsit and Horatio Saenz. 

He made some of his first TV appearances on no less than The Daily Show with Jon Stewart starting in 2005. Now, in addition to Life in Pieces, he’s a regular guest star on the multi-Emmy winning Veep, and has appeared on comedy favorites from Community to The Mindy Project.

He’s also excited about his role in the highly anticipated Trumbo (directed by Jay Roach and starring Brian Cranston and Helen Mirren), out this December.

How did your Chicago comedy training prepare you for juggling all of this?

We had a term back in Chicago called “shots on goal.” Which means if you take enough shots, you’re eventually going to get a goal.

[In October 1995], I started to take classes at Improv Olympic and rose through the ranks pretty quickly and was doing shows two to three times a week. So two to three times a week I was in front of mostly drunken, hard-to-please crowds -- they’re Cubs fans and their team stunk so they’re unhappy. You’re really earning your laughs there.

I feel like that kind of comedy boot camp prepared me for being on difficult sets at times or dealing with a script  that maybe is not all there – it’s been a while since I had a script that wasn’t just gangbusters but there were certainly times early on when I was doing small films or student projects where you’re thinking, “I know I can bring something to this.”

But more than anything I think it was the repetition and the opportunity to fail and fail and fail – maybe you tried something three times and you go a fourth and it doesn’t work so you start to winnow down the things that don’t work for you.

And find out what performances do work for you?

It’s repeated performance of improv so you’re not even performing the same thing but it’s trying the same tack – like “Will this audience believe me as the loveable young guy?” and no, they didn’t – “But they believe me as the scumbag neighbor!” So, boom! Got it! I’d put it in the quiver to use anytime.

Even more than learning the characters is learning the impulse. It’s this intangible thing. You get an impulse for where to go and then you learn to trust your instincts because they’ve been sharpened.

And now those impulses guide you on sets.

For sure. I’m always a soft start. When I get a job I assume they want what I did in the room when they hired me or I assume they want what I think the role is.

For example, when I started working on Veep, I came in as a fan of The Thick of It which is the British show that Armando Iannucci had created. Peter Capaldi plays this horrible character on it so I thought “that’s kind of who this guy (Bakkedahl’s character Roger Furlong) is” so I’m going to do that character until they tell me to stop.

Within two rehearsals, [Veep producers] said, “This is great but it’s way too hard edge.” So we brought it back to Furlong being a dopey jerk rather than a total jerk. On The Thick of It [Capaldi’s character Malcolm Tucker] has no soft edge, it’s all reptilian where I feel Furlong has a little self-awareness. He’s thinking, “Hey, I’m an elected political figure so I’ll just call this woman babe.” And it’s horrible obviously but he’s trying to adjust.

It’s a good example of my process – I read a script and get a feel for who this person is – and know [the directors] are going to shape and mold it and hopefully I can take good direction that day.

Because you have experience collaborating, do you actually chip in on scripts or shape the character?

Not in any particular kind of way. First I would never do it if I was told it wasn’t okay.

But on Life in Pieces, they said, “the words are not really that important, it’s the sentiment we want to get across.” That’s what Veep does as well even though you have these amazing BAFTA-winning, now Emmy-winning, writers. But they’ll say, “The only thing I want you to say right as written is ‘Shut your mouth, you fat girl,’ and everything else you can play with.”

So back to Life in Pieces, they say, “It doesn’t matter how you say this, say it the way that’s comfortable for you.” There’s no ego on their side of saying, “I wrote this character of Tim Hughes perfectly.”  Instead, they’re saying, “Tim Hughes is an amalgam of you, and of me and of him and slowly we’re going to craft it into what it will be several episodes down the road. A big part of that is you being comfortable in his shoes.”

It seems to be working as the chemistry on the show is excellent.

I always say that starts at the top. If you have a cast that has Jim Brolin and Dianne Wiest in it and they aren’t the wonderful, caring, generous people that they are you might have trouble because people will be scared that they don’t want to step on anyone’s toes but Jim and Dianne come in with open arms and hugs and stories and friendship and friendliness.

Then you go, “Oh, I’m just one of eight because they’re just one of eight.” Whereas if someone comes in and says “I’m number one” then everything else goes from there.

Same thing with Veep. Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] is the most generous, brilliant comedic minds I’ve ever worked with. And if you look at my resume, you know I’ve worked with a lot of them. And she is without a doubt, the most generous.  You come in to her show as a guest star and you do something funny in a rehearsal and she goes, “Oh my God, I love that.” Do that. That’s not common. It doesn’t happen on every set. It’s praise from Caesar.

You’re in a lot. How do you deal with all the different characters and seemingly constantly working?

Really nothing overlaps – one ends, the next starts. But it all goes back to the Chicago training, really. In Chicago with the exception of when you’re doing main stage revue – when you’re doing touring company or business theater, you’re memorizing different shows every week and sometimes even multiple scripts a week if you’re doing business theater.

So everything is in that short-term memory, you just jam it in there, memorize it in 45 minutes, kill it then walk out and forget it. Then you do the next thing and you don’t have to remember the funny song you learned for Egan and Marino, some law firm. Although I do happen to remember it. It was 2001 and I still remember half of that song. But it taught you how to shift gears.

Wherever you were, that was what you focused on. You can’t do Monday night’s show on Wednesday night so you just focused on Wednesday night’s show.

It sounds almost Buddhist, to be in that moment.

When you’re in the midst of actually doing it, yes. And in the downtime, you’re thinking, “Oh my God, how am I going to buy milk?”

Do you have more constancy on Life in Pieces?


Yes, we not only have that job security --  at least for the first 13 episodes – but also on set when you show up, there’s an immediate camaraderie and catching up. Everyone really genuinely enjoys each other’s company.

You might say, “Hey Dianne, how was your trip home?” and you kind of catch up with two-time Academy Award winner Dianne Wiest on how her weekend was.

Every now and then you have to pinch yourself because you’re talking to Jim Brolin about surfing or something and you go, “What the hell? I’m talking to Jim Brolin about surfing and he’s not just amusing me by allowing me to talk to him, he’s talking to me, too.”

The show format has three distinct stories that come together. Are you all on set different days?

What’s nice is Wednesdays, we do our table reads so we call it Family Day. The whole family is there whether we’re shooting or not. But some weeks, like this one, I won’t see Betsy Brandt, who plays my wife, until Friday. The deeper we get into the show, the more crossover there is in the lives and the stories so that you wind up being in somebody else’s quote-unquote family story.

As a father, do you find yourself tapping into your homelife on the set?

Absolutely. I tend to be the dad who in real life has to catch himself before he starts to shout. I find myself with Tim having to do the same thing. Because I know that what in real life is frustrating and aggravating is often pretty funny when it’s on-screen and happening to someone else.

It’s another thing I learned in Chicago, is truth in comedy which is something Del Close and Charna Halpern taught us at IO, is that the closer you are to someone else’s shared experience the more they’re going to laugh at it because they’ve also been through it.

So, given the great year you’re having, what would your advice be to younger Academy members? Is it to take improv classes?

I think it’s interesting that you said that because it’s often the go-to – go to the UCB and take classes.

My advice is if you’ve always been interested in improv, then go take a class. But don’t do it because you see it as the hot thing right now. Nothing’s going to last forever. It won’t always be the hot ticket. It might always be an integral part of television and filmmaking from here on out but only do it if you’ve always wanted to.

The only advice I ever give is don’t quit. The only way to know exactly what you’ll get in this business is to quit. Because then you know you’ll never get anything ever again.  Don’t quit and who knows what will happen? There’s no guarantees and your claim to fame might be that you got to do a guest spot on The Big Bang Theory but that’s better than the guy who quit right out of college. He never got to experience that.

If what you want to be is an actor, then you’re an actor if you say so and that means you do small films, you do viral videos with your friends, you shoot stuff around your house, you do plays, you do whatever you can get your hands on. Getting paid isn’t what makes you an actor, that’s what makes you a paid actor.

I didn’t know this was going to happen. I didn’t know I was going to be on a CBS prime-time comedy with these types of people. I always hoped it would but I didn’t know. I didn’t know I would be on the Second City main stage. I didn’t know I’d work for Jon Stewart.

There were times when I was hawking CDs to buy milk when I was doing plays in Chicago. If I had quit, none of this would have happen. There’s no guarantee that sticking around is going to make it happen but the only guarantee is if you quit, you’ll never get anything.