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Nick Offerman Would Be Happy With a Guinness or a Delicious Passion Fruit-Flavored Candy Drink

“If the writing is good, that's all I care about. I don't think things like, "OK, I've played Ron and I did a sci-fi thriller, now I should do a musical. I'm not like checking off a list,’” Nick Offerman tells me in the dimly lit backroom of a Brooklyn studio space.

Even with the mustache shaved off and the Lagavulin put away, the actor, comedian and carpenter will always be followed by his iconic “Parks and Recreation” role as Ron Swanson. And while Offerman acknowledges his good fortune, he repeatedly finds himself declining roles that give off a similar vibe to the legendary NBC series — for good reason.

“I'm lucky enough that offers come my way, and I'm able to sort of pick the things that I find inspiring that I think are part of our society evolving,” he says. “You know, as you can imagine, I sometimes get offered parts on network sitcoms and those to me ... I have a hard time imagining an experience that would be as good as ‘Parks and Recreation’ was, so I tend to avoid those.”

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According to Offerman, he and wife Megan Mullally have two rules when it comes to picking their next projects: “Do we think the writing is good, and do we think the people that are making it are not assholes?”

While he spoke highly of “genius” Alex Garland, creator of FX’s “Devs” in which Offerman stars in, the focus of his praise during our chat went towards Guinness, the beer brand in which he’s partnered with to make sure this year’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration is the best it’s ever been.

AskMen: Of all the possible partnerships in the world, what stood out the most to you when approached by Guinness?

Nick Offerman: Well, I mean, growing up Guinness had sort of a mythic quality. I grew up in a small town in Illinois and so I knew about Guinness. Here and there I would see, you know, those charming old advertisements of pelicans, and back when they used to be a little more hyperbolic in their advertising of like "Guinness will make you impervious to disease."

And as a man of the theater and an Anglophile, I knew one day I would hope to get to London, try bangers and mash and get a Guinness poured for me. When my life brought me all the way around to where Guinness wanted to do this with me, it seemed like a wonderful and natural sort of inevitability.

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A post shared by Nick Offerman (@nickofferman) on Feb 24, 2020 at 10:25am PST

You’ve described Guinness as the “superhero of beers.” What superhero qualities does it have and if it took on a superhero form, who would it be?

The superhero Juggernaut springs to mind. Pretty simple, dependable, has pretty much one trick, but it's quite substantial. If you can do what Juggernaut does, you only need one trick.

How has your experience with St. Patrick’s Day evolved from your youth to today in 2020?

It's probably reflected the rest of my life. In our youth, I think that we perhaps over enjoy the treats of St Patrick's Day, and we tend to maybe over celebrate until we learn that is not wise or healthy. Some of us take longer to learn those lessons than others. My St Patrick's Day now becomes more about quality than quantity, and I really savor the flavors. But by and large, I'll have to drive somewhere so I'll maybe have a fraction ... I'll have one or two pints instead of seven or eight.

If someone’s not a fan of dark Irish stouts, how would you convince ‘em to try a Guinness?

I've done it many times over the years. I'm not very good at it because I always say, "Come on, try it, it's like drinking a loaf of bread." It's much more of a meal than a beer, and usually the petite young ladies that I'm saying that to don't feel that as an incentive for some reason.

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You’ve touched upon the topic of masculinity before, suggesting we stop genderizing everything in society. What’s your take on that in relation to booze — should a person be defined by the drink in their hand? 

Yeah, I mean, it's like Barbie dolls and baseball bats. I know women that are incredible baseball players, and I know guys that are obsessed with dressing dolls and are geniuses of fashion for that reason. I've seen every gender and every walk of person sort of drink every ilk of cocktail.

I'm a very open-minded person, [and] I just enjoy life. If I went to a party and somebody offered me a drink that was considered feminine by closed-minded stereotypers, I would say, "I don't see that. I see this as a delicious passion fruit-flavored candy drink." And again, I've seen guys love those and I've seen the ladies drink whiskeys straight from the bottle.

I think our society is coming into a time when those of us that are interested in moving forward and progressing have come to understand that everyone should be allowed to like what they like. We shouldn't tell our kids, "You're a girl so you don't get to play football, and you're a boy so you don't enjoy sewing." I love sewing. I take great pleasure in mending a tear with a whipstitch or mending a button.

On a similar note, as someone with such an open mind, what does “being a man” mean to you?

Given what biology has handed us, I think it's understanding the pros and cons of our particular makeup and representing ourselves with good character and values. Sort of eschewing the old fashioned notion of the John Wayne masculine kind of guy who punches people and is mean and instead, I think it takes a lot more courage to be open about your emotions and to treat everybody with respect. It's something that, slowly but surely, we're sort of pulling our civilization out of the dark ages into a time where everybody gets the same rights afforded them.

Back in 2015, you told me “you have a ballet dancer’s grace inside a linebacker’s build,” and that you’re “also pretty handy with a sewing needle. That was 5 years ago — have you picked up any other handy talents since?

I've gotten better at the guitar since then. I do think it's important to have disciplines in your life, [and] that you are trying to improve something as we go forward. I think it just makes life more fruitful and it keeps us happy. If you think you're done learning, you're looking for diversions and bitterness can set in. 

I'll turn 50 this year, and my next sort of checklist thing is ... I can speak a little Spanish and a little French, but I live in Los Angeles and I think probably more people speak Spanish than English in L.A. And a lot of the people I deal with out in the world, like at my woodshop or at the lumberyard, a lot of them are Spanish language first … so that's on my list. To learn to speak Spanish fluently with them. And that, to me, it's an important part of continuing to grow so that I don't turn into more of an asshole.

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Sean Abrams, Khareem Sudlow