Celebrity culture gave us Donald Trump … it’s poisoning America, says The Beanie Bubble star Zach Galifianakis
The greed and excess of the ‘90s produced a secretive billionaire who exploited a global toy craze until it went spectacularly bust. Now anti-celebrity Zach Galifianakis is exposing the myth of the lone male genius.
Celebrity culture is poisoning America, says Zach Galifianakis, comedian, actor, producer and, er, celebrity.
Even with – or perhaps because of – his Hollywood success (he is best known for his goofball role as Alan in The Hangover trilogy), the bespectacled 56-year-old doesn’t quite get the slavish admiration of the famous, the mass adulation of those who, through looks, luck and/or talent, are afforded god-like status.
His internet talk show Between Two Ferns, a series of awkward interviews with in-on-the-joke A-listers, poked the Hollywood bear in ways funny, mean and ludicrous and became a cult watch (and a 2019 Netflix movie) in the process. From 2008 to 2018 everyone from Jennifer Aniston to Jennifer Lawrence and Keanu Reeves turned up for a roasting.
Even [then president] Barack Obama got in on the act. “What are you plugging?” Galifianakis asked him, knowing the answer (affordable healthcare) but making us smile anyway.
His skewering of the pomposity of fame is sharp, winningly absurdist. “What do you have against showers?” he asks “Bradley Pitts” of 12 Years a Salve [sic].
“Would you rather be in Marvel movies or stuff that no one’s heard of?” he asks Paul Rudd.
“You have the type of face that masturbates all day wearing a helmet,” he informs Benedict Cumberbatch.
Galifianakis’s early Comedy Central series Dog Bites Man was a fake news program in which people were fooled into thinking they were being interviewed by a real news crew, and puffed up accordingly. His interest in the vagaries of human behaviour feels almost anthropological; comedy, for him, is a pointing finger, a great leveller, a means of revealing the truth.
“The only A I got in college” – that’s Wilkes Community College in his birthplace, North Wilkesboro, North Carolina – “was in anthropology,” he says, open and friendly on a Zoom call from an island in British Columbia, Canada, where he lives for part of the year with his Canadian wife, a charity worker, and their two young sons.
“Celebrity culture is how we got our last president, the other one [Trump].” He frowns, swats the air. “For the past few years I’ve been screaming to people, ‘Where are the anthropologists? Where are the sociologists to explain what’s going on? We need to hear from them more.”
Galifianakis is a determinedly unvain A-lister. He’s joked that he still can’t pronounce his Greek surname (his father’s family are from Crete), said that he loves anti-comedy (“Something so unfunny it’s funny”) over more traditional material. Still, given his rejection of the conventions of stardom, it seems ironic that two American publicists are here in the Zoom room with us – not so much Between Two Ferns as Between Two PRs – ready to jump in should I stray too far from the Apple TV+ movie he is plugging: The Beanie Bubble.
A semi-fictionalised take on the rise of Beanie Babies, the soft toy craze that blazed through American culture in the late 1990s, the film tells of former salesman and billionaire company founder Ty Warner (Galifianakis) and the three women who helped power his success.
Galifianakis gives a nuanced portrayal of a man-child who manufactured cheap stuffed animals in China for 30c then sold them for a profit to independent gift stores, who priced them even higher.
Embellished with heart-tags, understuffed to make them more huggable and positioned on shelves for maximum eye contact, small toys called things like Chops the Lamb, Chocolate the Moose and Speedy the Turtle became must-haves.
Soundtracked with hits by the likes of Prince and INXS, The Beanie Bubble is a ‘90s nostalgia-fest. Roller-skating is a thing. Dial-up modems are painfully slow. The rise of e-Bay facilitates a thriving Beanie Babies black market, driving prices sky high until – pop! – a combination of greed and overproduction bursts the bubble.
Taking their cues from Zac Bissonette’s 2015 book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble – Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, co-directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash choose to focus on Warner’s business partner Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), his girlfriend and mother-of-two Sheila (Sarah Snook) and Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), the tech genius who hooked the toys to the internet boom. In so doing they interrogate the myth of the lone male genius as well as the female relationship to the American Dream, using artistic license, giving things a feminist twist.
“Even with the book it was tough to try and figure out who Ty was,” says Galifianakis of the notoriously private Warner, 78, who bought Four Seasons Hotel New York with profits from Beanie Babies; controversially, the hotel has been closed since the Covid pandemic, leaving hundreds of employees out of work. “There is very little video of him. I think I was going off that greed-at-all-costs mentality which was prevalent in America in the ’90s and still is.
“When the script came in I thought, ‘God I wonder if I can do this’. And it turns out I can’t.”
He grins, shifts in his seat. “You know, I used to be a busboy in the restaurant at the Four Seasons but I couldn’t take the clientele. I quit after a week.”
That was around the time he moved to New York City to study acting, having majored in communications at college in North Carolina, with a side-hustle doing stand-up comedy. Acting school wasn’t for him: “Classes were like therapy sessions for a lot of people. I found it hard to keep a straight face. I was happy being a stand-up. It was an easy, fun life. But the acting roles kept coming in.”
His comedy act partly involved noodling on a piano while delivering spoken offbeat observations: “Absurdist jokes with sad music,” he remembers. “You can only do it for a few minutes at a time. But I still love playing piano even though I’m really not very good. I find it healing.”
He joined Saturday Night Live, played live rock venues with a comedy ensemble, got bit parts in comedy films (in 1999’s Flushed he’s listed as “Pathetic Guy”).
The Hangover – in which he played another eccentric man-child – was his breakout role. He’s starred in music videos and TV shows, voiced characters on The Simpsons and the Lego Batman Movie, won awards for his roles in 2014’s Birdman and (2016 to 2019) FX series Baskets in which he plays twin brothers. He is Left-leaning, socially conscious (in 2015 he bought an apartment for a homeless octogenarian woman who was living in a Santa Monica laundromat) and keen to lavish praise on his co-stars, particularly the Australian ones (including Snook).
“I’ve noticed in my lucky little career that the Australian actors, or Australian female actors as that is who I’ve worked with most, have the best discipline.
“There’s no ego, which is so refreshing. And the sense of humour is stellar. I’m like, ‘Man, what are they doing in Australia?’”
Galifianakis is now one of America’s most prolific contemporary funnymen. But fame and celebrity were never the goals.
“I remember getting together with my dad’s family as a kid and watching my older cousins do these very funny sketches and thinking ‘I want to do that’. I loved the sound of people laughing. It motivated me.
“Entertaining people and making them laugh.” He flashes a smile. “As simple as that sounds, that is all it is.”
The Beanie Bubble streams on Apple TV+ on July 28.
