The Daily Show correspondent discusses life in (fake) news and his dramatic debut in the new film Medicine for Melancholy.
Since joining The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in mid-’08, Wyatt Cenac has emerged as one of the program’s most reliably hilarious correspondents. It’s also given the Dallas-born comic a great way to see the country; his job has taken him to both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Colorado and Minnesota respectively, as well as an old-age home in Florida and other stops along the campaign trail. Before landing his current gig, Cenac spent a month in San Francisco filming the indie drama Medicine for Melancholy, in which he plays Micah, a perpetually pissed-off Bay Area resident who tries to turn his one-night stand with the beautiful Jo (Tracey Heggens) into a real romance. Here, Cenac talks about taking on his first dramatic role, the appeal of his “hobo” lifestyle and which classic Nintendo game he’s obsessed with.
GIANT: You shot Medicine for Melancholy before you joined The Daily Show, right? How did the role come your way?
Wyatt Cenac: Yeah, we shot it in November of 2007. I wasn’t on The Daily Show at that point, I was just living in Los Angeles doing stand-up and stuff with the Upright Citizens Brigade. This came together in a really odd way. Justin Barber, a producer on the movie, saw a clip of me in an online video called “My Black Friend” that was on the website Acceptable.TV. It was this fake reality show where this guy tries to find a black friend and I was one of the contestants. At that time, Justin and Barry [Jenkins, the film's director] had been looking at people for awhile and Justin remembered me and found a way to get in touch. It wasn’t a traditional way to get a job as far as I could tell.
GIANT: Had you been looking to flex your dramatic muscles after being a comedian for so long?
Cenac: No, I never really planned for the movie to be my first dramatic thing. When I agreed to do the movie it was essentially, “Hey, we want you to be in this movie.” And I was like “Oh, cool, I need a place to stay for three weeks.” So it just sort of worked out that my homelessness coincided with their shooting schedule. That’s actually how I work a lot of times—it’s always “Does your schedule fit with my hobo lifestyle?” And usually it does.
GIANT: San Francisco is a major character in the film and a recurring theme is the radical changes that are going on in terms of the city’s racial and class demographics. Were you able to relate to that as a non-Bay Area native?
Cenac: I definitely felt like I could relate to that aspect of the movie—that’s going on everywhere, definitely in Los Angeles when I was living there. So there was a relatability there that made sense for me. And that’s something that other people who’ve seen the film tell me about; they share their personal stories about watching their cities change before them. It’ll be interesting to see what San Francisco will be like in five or ten years. Will everybody be living in Oakland? And San Francisco will just be where they come to work? Only Robin Williams will have a house because he’s the only one who can afford to still live there.
GIANT: Your character Micah isn’t exactly the most likable guy at times. Did you approach the character as a misunderstood hero or did you want the audience to see his flaws?
Cenac: Wow. You’ve given me much more credit as an actor than I probably deserve. [Laughs] You know, going through the film and talking to Barry and being in the city, it just seemed like he was a frustrated guy. He was frustrated about a lot of things and seemed to be looking for a proper way to channel all that. Tat was the thing that kind of carried me through the film, that frustration of losing everything that you feel like you hold dear and how do you express that? If it came off as mean that was hopefully what Barry was going for at that particular point and time. But my performance was based first of all on that frustration and then the mantra: “Remember my lines, don’t fuck up anything, and don’t look in the camera.”
GIANT: You’ve filed some great pieces for The Daily Show since you joined the cast last year. Has the experience been fun for you?
Cenac: Oh yeah. I’ve learned so much and being able to do field piece and in the studio stuff has been really great. There are definitely those moments that are hard too, though. I did a piece last year where I had to interview some old people in Florida about the Obama getting the Democratic nomination. That was my first week on the job and I had to deal with eight old people yelling and arguing with each other while I’m trying to get them back on topic. I was like, “I don’t know if this is gonna work out, because I can’t even hear everything that’s going on.”
GIANT: As the show’s only full-time black correspondent, are you expected to focus primarily on black issues?
Cenac: Actually, Larry Wilmore is the official Black Issues correspondent—he pokes fun at the idea that all of these news networks have their own black correspondents. When they hired me, I was brought on to be both a writer and a correspondent so I’m in the writers’ room just throwing out ideas for anything, not just myself, but for day-to-day stuff on the show. They’ve always seen me not as “the black correspondent” just a correspondent. And I appreciate that. A lot of shows would say, “Let’s just keep you on black issues.” But here I deal with everything and anything. I think that’s what diversity is about or something. I don’t know. [Laughs]
GIANT: Is the “Wyatt Cenac” that’s on The Daily Show a character like “Stephen Colbert” on The Colbert Report or just yourself with better punchlines?
Cenac: So you’re saying that I don’t have enough punchlines in regular conversation. Wow. That hurts. [Laughs] No, I feel like it’s pretty close to me. The piece I auditioned with—and the first thing I did on the show—was about how sick I was of the Democratic primaries and how Lost was much more interesting so the primaries should be more like Lost. That came from a real place of frustration and thankfully we have a talented group of people who were able to recognize my frustration and help me channel it into something that hopefully other people found funny and that maybe they could relate to.
GIANT: How do you respond to those folks who wonder whether The Daily Show will still be funny now that Bush is gone and Obama’s in office?
Cenac: You know, I fell like we’re still doing everything the same way. The characters may have changed, but the goal is still the same: to poke fun at politicians and the 24-hour media coverage of all this stuff. From a historical standpoint, it’s great that Obama was elected President, but remember that he’s also been elected President of a giant turd! And now he has to dig us out of this turd that just seems to be growing and growing. It’s become sentient! If we lived in a utopian society, coming up with material may be difficult, but there’s still a lot of stuff in this world for us to deal with.
GIANT: Forget what I implied about not putting enough punchlines in your regular conversation! Now that you’ve had your dramatic film debut, do you view yourself as a comedian who acts or an actor who tells jokes?
Cenac: I dunno, I guess I’ve always sort of looked at myself as somebody who can hopefully continue to pay his bills in ways that he’s proud of and in ways that he wants to. I guess I’m a comedian first; I don’t know if I necessarily have the acting chops to measure up to whoever the greater actors are. That’s probably a sign right there—I don’t even know who the great actors are so, I’m probably not an actor first.
GIANT: Well, Brad Pitt is among the Oscar nominees for Best Actor. Think your chops probably measure up to his?
Cenac: Is he on a Best Actors list? I seriously didn’t know. I haven’t even seen Benjamin Button. I’m sure it’s great and I’m sure he’s wonderful in it, but I have Nintendo Wii to play. If they could make a Benjamin Button video game, that would be great. They’d have to make it for Xbox though, because honestly the only thing I play on the Wii is old Nintendo games. Over the holidays, I downloaded the original Legend of Zelda and I beat it for the first time! It took me 15 years to beat it. When I played it as a kid, I remember getting like five pieces of the Triforce and saying “Ah, I can’t do this anymore.” So to go back as an adult man and save all of Hyrule and Princess Zelda was a great feeling of accomplishment. Of course, you probably don’t want to go around saying to people, “Yeah, I saved Hyrule.” [Laughs]
Read more about Wyatt Cenac on his official website wyattcenac.com Medicine for Melancholy opens in limited release tomorrow. See the trailer below:
