“It’s Been Cathartic”: How Tom Green Found Peace by Revisiting His Wild Ride
Tom Green recently found himself letting go of his past by plunging headfirst into it.
The star — known for his 1990s sketch series The Tom Green Show, roles in films like Road Trip and touring as a stand-up — has launched three projects in the past few weeks. After buying a farm in his native Canada, his new lifestyle is documented in Tom Green Country; additionally, he stars in the comedy special Tom Green: I Got A Mule! and directed the feature documentary This Is the Tom Green Documentary about his life and career. (All three are currently streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video.)
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As he continues to look to the future, having recently established his production company to develop other new ventures, Green has found some solace in reflecting on his past. After all, the star is known for ruffling feathers, with The Tom Green Show landing a high-profile MTV platform thanks in part to his confrontational man-on-the-street bits, and Green later stirring up debate with the 2021 film Freddy Got Fingered, his polarizing feature directorial debut in which he also starred.
During a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter from his home outside of Ottawa, Green opens up about his recent focus on stand-up and his move from Los Angeles, his plans to release original music, reconnecting with ex-wife Drew Barrymore, whether he has resolved his previous beefs with such stars as Eminem and Martin Short, his kinship for Joker: Folie à Deux, Joe Rogan praising him as an influence and coming to terms with possible regrets about his career path.
How did these three new projects all end up coming out at the same time?
This all kicked off during the COVID pandemic. I was at my house in Los Angeles and had just canceled my stand-up tour. For almost the last 20 years now, I’ve been touring quite extensively around the U.S. and Canada and the world, and all of a sudden, I had a year off. I’ve always enjoyed filmmaking and video, of course, and I was getting into some new cameras, and I got this camper van and my dog, Charlie. We did a bunch of fun stuff for my YouTube channel out in the desert, and I loved it out there in nature so much. Everything was just changing in the world, and I wanted to be closer to my family. So I sold my house that I’d owned for 18 years in the Hollywood Hills, just up off Mulholland over Universal Studios, and moved back to Canada.
I found this farm, and I’ve got this completely different lifestyle up here. Basically, I was ready for a change. But I loved L.A., and I have so many friends there. Tom Green Country is not a leaving-Los Angeles show as much as a coming-home show. When I got back to Canada, Prime actually immediately asked me to be in their show called LOL Canada, where they get a bunch of comedians. After we taped that episode, I started chatting with people from Prime and built my new production company. We’re doing the documentary and the show Tom Green Country, but then I was ready to film another special. In the standup special, I talk about my life a lot, and so they do all go well together.
Why did this feel like a good time in your life to look back at your journey?
I’ve had opportunities over the years to do a documentary about The Tom Green Show and all the wild and crazy adventures through that era. I’ve always kept all my footage in storage for the last 30 years. It’s an odd thing to direct a documentary about yourself, and I would not recommend it to anybody, but when you’re going through literally 10,000 hours of video tapes that I’ve kept, it would be virtually impossible for anybody else to be able to piece it all together. With my production company up and running, I have new shows in development, and we’re already looking at doing lots of more stuff.
For anyone whose only awareness of your musical side is “The Bum Bum Song,” it might be surprising that your comedy special involves you performing original songs in a serious way.
Actually, I was just in the Bathouse [Recording] Studio this week, in the town of Bath, Ontario — it’s the studio for the Tragically Hip, a legendary Canadian band. I composed and recorded the soundtracks in that studio for all the projects. I’ve always been passionate about music. It’s been accentuated by moving to the country and having a mule — I have really started focusing a lot more on learning to play my piano better and practicing my guitar and writing songs for these shows. The title of the show, Tom Green Country, has a few meanings to it: I’m recording some country music, and I’m also living in the country, and I’m moving back to my native land of Canada. We’re going to be releasing some music digitally in the next few weeks as a digital album, and then I’ll probably put it out on vinyl soon.
Do the audiences at your shows tend to be people who have been fans throughout your career?
That’s one thing that’s really amazing about the shows that I do. I really have done lots of different things that draw different people from different eras, which is fun. There’s definitely a pretty broad audience of people that have grown up with me. There’s people that know me from just from stand-up, too, or from the Webovision internet show in the early 2000s. After I did Big Brother, I’ve noticed a lot of women would start coming to the shows, bringing their husbands. Before that, it was a lot of husbands bringing their wives. But it’s a lot of couples, for sure.
In the doc, Joe Rogan praises you for paving the way for his podcast’s success. Would you want a platform like his and all that comes with it, including the polarizing nature of the content?
I have made a conscious choice with my work over the last few years to attempt to not polarize my audience. I’ve made polarizing work before — Freddy Got Fingered was polarizing. It wasn’t polarizing politically; it was just polarizing because it was nuts. There are people that want to see a movie that’s completely crazy, and then there are people that don’t, and that’s polarizing. When I started doing stand-up again 20 years ago, I found a new balance for that where I don’t really want to divide the viewers, whether it’s politically or just trying to create a broader type of comedy that everybody can have a lot of fun with. Johnny Carson never talked politics. He made fun of the president, but he’d make fun of both sides of the political spectrum. I’m trying to make my show as edgy as possible, but also not just doing it in a way where half the world is suddenly left out on either side of the aisle.
I miss those times [when the MTV show started in 1999] because it was just more of an inclusive, fun environment for all people coming out to the show to feel that they could come together and have a big laugh. There wasn’t this division. I’m socially conscious, and I feel very strongly about issues, but I just felt over the last few years that maybe I would like to try to take a role in this comedy landscape where I’m trying to bring people together.
Speaking of Freddy Got Fingered, do you feel at peace now when thinking back on that experience?
If you didn’t know it was true, you might not even believe it, but I haven’t had a day in my life in the last 20 years where, if I’m out in public, somebody doesn’t come up to me and say, “Daddy, would you like some sausage?” I could be in Australia or England or Tokyo, and somebody will reference that movie. After the initial hump of the way an opening weekend works, and you’ve got critics and people saying what they feel they have to say about it, it then finds its real audience. So it’s been very rewarding in a lot of ways to realize that it was not as bad as it was made out to be in the beginning.
I’m sure a lot of people still feel that the criticism was warranted, but so many people love the movie that it’s become a mischievous thing that I think about with a little bit of hilarity. Obviously, I was in my 20s when I directed that movie; I’d never directed a movie before. I was very hell-bent on the idea of, “We’re not going to sell out and make some soft movie!” Somehow, when you’re in your 20s, you can actually convince yourself that’s possible: “We’re going to make the craziest movie ever.” There were definitely a lot of moments when the movie came out where I was thinking, “Oh, boy, that was maybe a mistake to make that movie that crazy or silly.”
A mistake career-wise?
Yeah. You definitely knew right away, “Maybe that was a little bit too far.” I’d never set out to make movies. It’s only in the last maybe 15 years where I’ve come to really love acting. But at that time, I was making television and [like,] “Let’s make this movie that’s disrupting the idea of a mainstream comedy movie.” So at the time, I was surprised that the adults that were reviewing it weren’t able to step back and say, “We don’t like this movie, but it’s clearly a unique expression of something that a lot of intent has gone into, and maybe it’s just not for me.” I thought that more people would get the joke, and the joke was, “We’re a bunch of kids making a crazy movie, and it’s going to really piss some people off, and they’re going to walk out of the theater, and the rest of the theater can laugh and enjoy it.”
We just were in a bit of a bubble at the time. There was a lot of stuff happening in my life that was really thrusting me into the consciousness of mainstream America, even where they weren’t expecting it, with me being sick [with testicular cancer] and the show being big, and then all of a sudden I’m on Saturday Night Live, and stuff with Drew [Barrymore]. It was just too much “Who’s this Tom Green guy?” every day, and I was oversaturated. It was almost like we were just lobbing them up something to spike. Everything was happening so fast, and I don’t think anybody really knew how to advise me on what I should be doing. I don’t say I regret it because it’s amusing to me now, and everything has worked out. But I do think there were times I’ve regretted it, where I thought, “Maybe when I went on Jay Leno, I shouldn’t have cracked an ostrich egg over my head and gone completely ballistic.” In hindsight, I realize maybe that was just a little bit too much energy that I was bringing to the table. But you can overthink this stuff — which, believe me, I have. I decided that I want to use this release of this documentary as an opportunity to allow myself to stop thinking about it now for the rest of my life and stop worrying about it. It’s been very cathartic, actually.
You talk about previous romances, and there was so much positive public response when you and Drew Barrymore reconnected on her show. What was it like to reflect on this part of your past?
That was somewhat recent history. We were already making the documentary when that appearance on her show happened. I’m all about keeping things positive, just in my life in general. When she asked me to do her show, I was happy to support it. I’m happy she’s continuing to be at the top of her game and doing amazing things. And of course, I’m thrilled because I’ve found Amanda, this incredible woman who took me a long time to find, and we got engaged just before Christmas and are getting married. Moving back to Canada was a really beautiful thing for me on so many levels because I ended up meeting my fiancée. [Like me,] she grew up in a small town in a military family just near Ottawa, and we went to the same elementary school.
We see Martin Short in the doc. Does that mean you two have made peace [after a tense exchange on Short’s series Primetime Glick in the early 2000s]?
Yeah, we have. I contacted him after I moved to Canada. That was just a moment in time. Martin Short is one of my favorite heroes of mine growing up, watching SCTV. [In the doc,] you see the first time I was on his show, the appearance with him and Steve Martin, and they couldn’t have been more kind to me. So that was great.
Have you ever talked with Eminem about him calling you out in “The Real Slim Shady”?
I’ve never gotten the opportunity to just sit down with him and talk about it because he’s famously hard to reach. But when I made Freddy Got Fingered, we used that song in the soundtrack at the end of the movie over the credit roll, and through channels, we reached out to him, and he licensed it to us. Very rarely, if almost never, does he license his music to movies. And you see in the documentary how he dressed up as me on MTV and did some funny things on Total Request Live where he impersonated me. I’ve heard through the grapevine that he was a fan of the show back in the day, so I always thought that was pretty cool.
The doc shows you working with Todd Phillips on your Pepsi ads. I had forgotten that you two collaborated prior to him directing you in Road Trip.
Todd’s amazing, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. The show had just been picked up by MTV, and we were just on the air, and then he approached me about doing the Pepsi ads. Those ads ran during the Final Four, which was a massive audience, and I was doing similar things to what I was doing on the show — going around and messing with people. That alone was something that really brought the show into the mainstream. When Road Trip came out a year later, and it did the numbers that it did, that really was a life-changing thing for me. I got to go make Freddy Got Fingered and Stealing Harvard, and those were good gigs. In a lot of ways, it was set off by Todd Phillips, so I always will be grateful for that.
It seems that both of you have a bit of a rebellious spirit, with him making an unconventional sequel in Joker 2.
I loved Joker 2. I just thought it was so cool — the cinematography; the performances; just the fact that it was unlike a movie I’d ever seen before. I’m sure the last thing that Todd would ever want to hear me do is somewhat compare it to Freddy Got Fingered. But it’s fair to say there was a little bit of a backlash against [the Joker sequel], and it may even be for some of the same reasons. When Freddy Got Fingered came out, my life had gotten so larger-than-life that this was maybe time to bring me back to Earth. And maybe the original Joker was so massive that, how do you possibly top that — and then to make a choice that is aggressively unique and potentially polarizing. But honestly, I feel the criticism of that film was unfair. The criticism of Freddy Got Fingered was fair. But that’s a beautiful film, and a tip of the hat to Todd Phillips for just continuing to be a visionary.
What will the next few years hold for you?
I just took off on tour, and I’m going to be all throughout the U.S. Hopefully, people come out and see my stand-up, and I can then continue and do another show and another tour. That’s the idea, is just continue doing what I love to do. Come have some fun, and we will yuck it up together out there on the road.
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