The L.A. Farmer’s Market is slow on an August morning. People drift in twos and threes through the green-and-white maze of wooden stalls and counters, pausing at menu boards or clustering in the shade. But even in a sparse crowd, B.J. Novak gets recognized.
The popularity of The Office defies generation gaps; teenagers who missed the show’s broadcast run clock Novak as Ryan, Dunder Mifflin’s resident weasel. (In the Season 2 writers’ room, when they were breaking the toaster-fire episode, Mike Schur told Novak, “People are gonna shout ‘Ryan started the fire!’ at you for the rest of your life.’” He wasn’t wrong.) But he’s also approached by a woman and her very shy son, too young to know The Office. Novak wrote the boy’s favorite children’s book, The Book with No Pictures, says the mother, and they take a picture even as the son feigns discomfort. As they leave, the boy softly repeats, “B.J. Novak, B.J. Novak.”
The writer/actor/now-director takes being spotted in stride, accepting that it’s part of the job. For the rest of our chat over coffee, he doesn’t pose for any more pictures, but makes eye contact and gives fans a considered moment, like a fist-bump. He’s showbiz-casual in a crisp white T-shirt and black shorts, with slightly mussed hair that blends in with the subdued morning crowd. His most conspicuous feature, those searching blue eyes, are more guarded than emotive: this is behind-the-scenes mode, not actor mode.
We’re here to talk about his new movie, Vengeance, a comedy-thriller that he wrote, directed, and stars in. He describes his directorial debut this way: “What if one type of Coen brothers movie turned into the other type of Coen brothers movie?” Imagine a Raising Arizona that spirals into No Country for Old Men.
We get to talking about Los Angeles, the place where the sausage gets made, or at least financed, a place that famously kills ambition and makes people insane. He loves it. The complexity, the contradictions. The “tiny microscopic gradations of weather.” The food, which he deems the best in the U.S. (He was the one to suggest Bob’s Coffee and Doughnuts, a cheerfully old-fashioned stand from 1947, ancient by L.A. standards. He was visibly annoyed when someone ahead of us tried to order a cappuccino in defiance of tradition.)
It’s not lost on Novak that L.A. worked out pretty damn well for him. “A ton of creative people, myself included, came here to make their dreams come true. How can you fault the city you go to for that to happen? It does happen!” He pauses. “Maybe that sounds like I’m praising the lottery because sometimes there’s a winner.”
If Hollywood is a lottery, Novak’s background scored him a couple of extra tickets. He grew up in the affluent Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, nourished by writerly roots: his father co-edited The Big Book of Jewish Humor and ghost-wrote the memoirs of Nancy Reagan, Lee Iacocca, and Magic Johnson. But the younger Novak didn’t want to study comedy; he wanted to make it. Seeing Mitch Hedberg on David Letterman as a teenager was intoxicating. “I had never seen anyone that free with their mind,” he recalls. By the time he discovered Mr. Show, it was over. Alt-tinged comedy was the path. After high school, he went to Harvard—a moth drawn to the Lampoon.
In a recent Boston Globe interview, he called his alma mater “the worst” thing to have on a comedy résumé, adding that “Comedy is an underdog profession. You’re speaking up for the underdog. You’re saying what isn’t said by the people in charge. But [Harvard] makes people think you’re in a different category. Or that you think you are.” Twitter swiftly objected that the Harvard Lampoon had long been a farm team for late night and sitcom writers rooms, with alumni like SNL’s Colin Jost and TV mini-moguls Michael Schur and Alan Yang. Plus, it’s Harvard.
Asking about the backlash elicits an exasperated sigh. He “meant the exact opposite” of the way people interpreted his quote. “I’m sad it was read that way, but I also think people are allowed to use whatever you say as a jumping-off point” for what they want to talk about. It’s part of being in the public eye, so I’m not gonna complain. Other people bring it up and then when you respond to it, they think you brought it up.” Reminding himself of that seems to relax him. He laughs, then shuts the door on the topic. “I’d rather just focus on what really matters to me and…and yeah. Period.”
Just two years after graduation, he was already a regular on the L.A. stand-up circuit, one of Variety’s “Ten Comics to Watch.” At a club one night, he opened with a Hedberg-ian joke: “I just graduated from college, but I didn’t learn much. I had a double major. Psychology and reverse psychology.” TV producer Greg Daniels (another Lampoon alum) loved it so much he called Novak in for a meeting.
Novak had other options—he’d been a regular prankster on MTV’s Punk’d and wrote on the Bob Saget WB sitcom Raising Dad—but Daniels sold him on a vision for a remake of Ricky Gervais’ acclaimed BBC series, The Office. Four years out of college, B.J. Novak was a writer and series regular on a prime-time sitcom. In a subculture where comedians grind in small clubs for years before getting a decent gig, his career ascent was astoundingly fast. In 2010, Andy Kindler quipped that “B.J. Novak gets the Perseverance Award for graduating from Harvard and being unemployed for the entire plane ride to Los Angeles.”
Since The Office, Novak has written books for kids and adults, acted in films and television, and created his own TV show. Vengeance feels like the inevitable next rung on the ladder: Directing himself in a movie that he wrote.
The film follows Ben (Novak), a smug New York writer who learns that a past casual hookup, Abilene, has died under mysterious circumstances. Her family believes he and Abilene had been in a capital-R Relationship, so Ben lights out for a West Texas town big enough for a Whataburger and a Subway and not much else, to pay his respects…and leverage the situation into a prestige podcast about America. Abilene’s family is convinced that she was murdered; Ben thinks they’re in denial about her tragically mundane Oxy addiction. But his self-serving “investigation” turns up real leads, and things get dark from there.
Variety compared Vengeance to Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’ 1941 classic about a Hollywood writer who sets out to document “the real America.” Novak naturally welcomes the comparison. His film is also about “a writer who thinks he’s going to tell a story about America, but what he learns is how wrong he was about America.” Novak believes writers should be forced to leave Hollywood “for long, long stretches, so they’ll write about things the rest of the world cares about. Otherwise, every show will be Entourage.”
Novak has taken aim at the state of society before. His previous project, FX’s The Premise, was a short-lived 2021 anthology series that squeezed morality plays out of cultural flashpoints: Black Mirror for The Discourse. An episode titled “Social Justice Sex Tape” is exactly what it sounds like. In a more grounded installment, a Justin Bieber stand-in rallies an underachieving high school by promising to have sex with the valedictorian.
Vengeance is a bigger swing, one Novak takes with enthusiasm. The film has garnered strong reviews as a surefooted and fleet debut, with solid-to-standout performances (Ashton Kutcher makes a surprisingly effective villain) and a wryly contemporary point of view. It revisits territory from The Premise—social media’s screwy behavioral incentives, Our Divided Nation—with a deeper emphasis on character. The result is less didactic, more philosophical. And at one hour and 47 minutes, it breezes by in the era of blockbuster maximalism. “I’m self-conscious about over-extending my welcome with any audience,” he admits. It’s a comedian’s preoccupation. “I want [them] to know, ‘Don’t worry, there’s a punch line around the corner.’”
Punch lines abound. We first meet Novak’s character, Ben, in his natural habitat among the cigarettes-and-novels Brooklyn set. An unmistakable cameo underlines Ben’s fear of commitment: John Mayer, a close friend in real life, expounds on his “31 flavors” approach to scoring chicks. You should be sampling more than one at a time, he tells Ben, so that you know what you like.
I ask if Mayer is playing himself. “No, he’s playing a guy named John. You can interpret it either way.” Okay: Is Novak playing himself? Some observers conflated him with Ryan from The Office, a smirking backstabber whose callous treatment of Kelly (Mindy Kaling) is a running joke. Novak’s Vengeance character is also a climber and a cad; he files women into his contacts like Pokémon, with labels like “Paris Review Party Asian.” Novak reminds me that Ben is his given name—but that he drew from “the parts of myself that I’ve come to roll my eyes at” as he’s grown. The implication being that he’s Ryan no more, if he ever was.
Novak puts up defenses against people inferring too much about him from his work. Throughout our conversation, he weighs his words, equivocates, doubles back to consider the flip side of what he’s just said. He returns over and over to the theme of anticipating the public’s response. When talking about the reaction to Vengeance and its themes, he says, “Someone’s impression of you could be completely different than what you intended. We all give away clues about ourselves without realizing it.”
He says he’s “surprised at what people gravitate towards” in his work. Still, he’s eager to absorb the public’s reaction. “I’m a couple weeks away from the thinkpieces. That’s when someone’s like, ‘You know what fucking bugs me about this fucking thing?’ Hopefully I’ll get some of those. That means the movie did matter.”
In 2014, the year after The Office ended its nine-season run, Novak released two books: an adult short-fiction collection, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories; and The Book with No Pictures, an anarchic pictureless-picture-book that is one of the best-selling children’s titles of the last twenty years.
Some children’s books seem written to flatter adults, but The Book with No Pictures does the opposite. “Everything the words say, the person reading the book has to say,” it proclaims in large text. And so grown-ups must debase themselves for the child’s amusement by speaking in monkey voices and saying things like “BLuuRF.” My sister-in-law, a second-grade teacher, assures me it’s a hit.
Novak felt compelled to write The Book with No Pictures because “there are almost no funny kids’ books.” Calling himself one of the only authors making kids laugh is a confident statement, to say the least (bestselling children’s authors Mo Willems and Dav Pilkey might disagree, for starters), but Novak has high standards. He’s a perfectionist, an exhausting tendency for a first-time director. On Vengeance, “I spent so much time on everything. There’s a voice in your head telling you that if the movie doesn’t work, the fact that you sweated over every detail will make you feel like a fool. But I took that leap of faith.”
That attention to detail is most evident in the film’s lived-in production design. He describes extensively scouting houses to make sure that his characters’ home decor would reflect what their real-life counterparts might choose. “You learn a lot during scouts: what they’re watching on TV, what’s on the walls.” (Abilene’s family has a high-but-believable amount of wall art.) Like most Texas-set movies these days, Vengeance filmed in New Mexico for tax reasons. “I stayed at Bob Odenkirk’s house, which was very comforting. It was decorated the way I would’ve decorated it, but with photographs of Bob Odenkirk on the walls.”
In the film, Ben stays in Abilene’s room, where he confronts the memory of a woman he never really knew. Novak grilled his production designers, roughly the character’s age, on props and décor, knowing Abilene’s bedroom had to make a statement. “I wanted that to be the first gut punch, when [Ben] realizes that she’s a real person.”
Chasing the ghost of a dead woman is a classic film noir plot. Novak is taken aback by the observation. “I’m not really a noir person.” He sees the movie as more of a Western, but he’s not into John Ford, either. (“Doesn’t speak to me.”) Novak is not one to shy from his opinions. When friends recommended that he watch The Last Picture Show, a touchstone of small-town Texas ennui, he found it similarly lacking: “Beautiful, but the design is what you remember.” With the exception of Paper Moon, “I’m anti-Bogdanovich. I think he’s full of shit. His wife, [production designer] Polly Platt, that’s really her movie. In our lifetime, all he’s been known for is long-winded, pretentious interviews about film. But what the hell has he even done? His interview-to-film ratio is way too high.”
So who does he like? “Rob Reiner had the best run in movies in my lifetime as a director.” He reels off Reiner’s hits with reverence and passion (“these are masterpieces”): “Spinal Tap, the definitive mockumentary. Stand By Me, the definitive coming-of-age movie. Misery, one of the definitive stalker horror movies. When Harry Met Sally, the definitive rom-com of our times. Princess Bride, the definitive four-quadrant family movie.”
Novak appreciates that a Reiner film is more than the sum of its parts. “He got great scripts,” but his true talent was helping those scripts realize their “iconic destiny” as sleek crowd-pleasers. “He did every one of them perfectly. That’s the kind of thing I aspire to do.”
That’s as close as he comes to sharing the B.J. Novak Grand Plan. His next project, also a feature film, is “very ambitious,” on a grander scale than the Blumhouse-produced Vengeance, but he’s not ready to give specifics. For now, it feels good. “I think everything’s gonna be the most successful thing in the history of the planet when I start it.”
His perfectionism makes him “work everything to death.” His first movie was a product of more than a decade and “like forty” drafts. But he’d rather spend too much time than too little. “It’s very, very hard for me to not regret something,” he explains, so he’s fine with working and reworking alone, “when you can still change it.”
None of that makes writing any easier. “The hardest part is every part,” he says, laughing. “No one should emulate [me]. I’m only prolific because I am stressing myself out 20 hours a day. Still trying to figure out how the hell everyone else does it.”