Chris O’Dowd inspects some graves to look for some family connections. (
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When filmmaker and actor Christopher Guest researched his family history following the death of his father, he discovered a copy of a diary written by one of his English ancestors, in 1797. The man wrote that he had studied ventriloquism in London as a child, and once performed a puppet show for King George III.
Guest was stunned by the revelation.
“It’s very, very bizarre on a number of levels,” says Guest, whose new HBO comedy about a man’s quest to unearth his family’s history, “Family Tree,” debuts tonight at 10:30.
“At various times throughout my career, on ‘SNL’ and when I did ‘Best in Show,’ I played a ventriloquist. Now, 200 years later, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather describes himself, and he describes the kid that I was.”
Guest, creator of comedy classics including “Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” and “A Mighty Wind,” did not waste this inspiration. “Family Tree,” which runs for eight episodes this season, matches his films for pure hilarity, and for creating idiosyncratic and memorable characters.
“Bridesmaids” and “Girls” actor Chris O’Dowd plays Tom Chadwick, a man who is left a box of knickknacks and heirlooms by his Aunt Victoria, a relative he barely knew, which leads him on a genealogical quest that begins to feel like a magical mystery tour.
This puts him in contact with many of the sort of delightful eccentrics Guest excels in, including the theater managers who proudly share that one of Tom’s ancestors was renowned for playing the rear of a pantomime horse, and a cousin who tries to persuade him to neuter a sheep. There is also, unsurprisingly, a ventriloquist, in the form of Tom’s sister, Bea, played by real-life ventriloquist Nina Conti.
In developing the show, Guest and co-creator Jim Piddock took six months inventing and mapping out a genealogical guide — 200 years of Chadwick family history.
“We laid out this fake family tree that goes back to the early 1800s, including everyone’s birth dates, death dates, where they were born, and the names. We spent weeks just naming people, because it was important to have the right types of names,” says Guest. “This was our bible. All the actors were given the family tree, so that they knew what these connections were.”
The cast members, who never rehearse, were also given extensive character backgrounds and scene breakdowns, and then — as with Guest’s films — based their completely improvised dialogue on all this information.
Another unique aspect of Guest’s projects is the casting. He often uses longtime collaborators — and “Family Tree” will see Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Fred Willard, Ed Begley Jr., and Guest himself, at some point — but potential new members of his troupe never face the terrors of an audition. Instead, Guest chats with them for 20 to 30 minutes, and makes casting decisions based on gut instinct.
In this case, that included Guest newbie O’Dowd, who serves as evidence of Guest’s remarkable intuition for determining who can work within his challenging process.
“It’s kind of magical,” says Guest. “I spent half an hour with Chris, talking, and I thought, ‘That’s gonna be the guy.’ And he is stunningly good at this. You can do this or you can’t, and it would become apparent in literally a minute whether I had made a mistake. And [if so], it would have been, ‘We’re shutting down here,’ because you can’t fake this.”
“Chris [Guest] always knows. He’s got a really good gut for it,” says McKean, who plays Tom’s father, Keith, a former English soldier and beefeater with a weakness for politically incorrect British sitcoms from the 1970s.
“O’Dowd was on the money from just before the word go. He’s a very bright, funny guy, and a terrific actor.”
As if the show’s improvisational structure wasn’t challenging enough, Guest also created parody shows within “Family Tree.” The ’70s sitcoms Keith watches and a few modern spoofs required separate scripts, sets and casts.
To get the look and feel of authentic British sitcoms from the 1970s, the fake sitcoms were filmed in the same BBC studio where many of the actual sitcoms of the period were filmed, using some of the same crew.
Their content is intentionally ridiculous. “There Goes the Neighbourhood” features a white actor playing an Indian — complete with turban — who uses the show’s title as his exaggerated catchphrase. “Move Along, Please” is a cop sitcom where a large-breasted officer inspires jokes about making a “bust.”
“These were meant to be really bad, politically incorrect shows,” says Guest, “so that when [O’Dowd] comes over to visit, he has to be tortured by Keith, watching these dreadful shows.”
Every moment of “Family Tree” resides comfortably along the outer edge of silliness, and is made even more endearing by always remaining rooted in some aspect of real life.
“I like to have a basis in reality and then make the people strange, because then it’s even stranger,” says Guest. “In ‘Best in Show,’ Eugene Levy [literally] has two left feet. Of course, that’s not happening, but if you have a basis in reality in the way the character’s played, that makes it funny. In this show, you have an emotional connection to Chris O’Dowd, because otherwise, it’s just a bunch of jokes and scenes. The emotional thing — to me, that’s the key.”
FAMILY TREE
Tonight, 10:30 p.m., HBO