Obviously, Sam Richardson is a Capricorn. When I sit down with the charming actor for the Tomorrow War press junket, he’s spent hours answering many of the same questions for local markets all around the country. It can be a slog, but Richardson’s found the silver lining.
“I like to try and challenge myself to answer each time differently, as if I’ve never heard it before,” he explains. “Each time I’m trying to perfect my answer for myself. Then I want them to talk to each other, and figure out who’s got the right information,” he adds with a laugh.
Richardson’s best known for his role in the later seasons of HBO’s Emmy powerhouse Veep, where he played the disarmingly sincere Richard Splett—a marginal Iowan who gently and goofily becomes more powerful than anyone else on the show. He’s also known to alt-comedy fans as one half of Detroiters, a special guest in I Think You Should Leave, and the voice of Doctor Champ in BoJack Horseman.
Now he’s debuting in what he calls the biggest movie he’s been a part of: Amazon’s The Tomorrow War, a solemn action-drama out July 2 starring Chris Pratt as one of many soldiers sent to the future to combat an awful foe, with Betty Gilpin and Yvonne Strahovski in supporting roles. Richardson plays another soldier, one that Pratt meets on his first day of what I guess you could call future-soldier orientation. “We’re going to be best friends,” Richardson says to Pratt, with a sincerity so thick it elicits a laugh. In a movie that is not built to deliver jokes, Richardson’s the sporadic comic relief.
That’s not even the only movie he’s starring in right now; also available to stream on Friday is Werewolves Within, a droll supernatural mystery set in a small town where every actor seems in on the joke (the cast includes Michaela Watkins, Sarah Burns, and Michael Chernus). Here, Richardson’s the lead, an earnest, direct forest ranger. Then there’s I Think You Should Leave, returning for a second season July 6—where Richardson dons a jacket and grabs a microphone once more—and The Afterparty, an Apple TV+ comedic murder mystery starring Tiffany Haddish, set at a high school reunion.
Richardson confirms that he likes to be busy. The pandemic slowed him down, but only a little: He took stay-at-home orders as an opportunity to do a lot of voiceover work, including Harley Quinn’s third season and Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. He has a little trouble relaxing, he says. “I feel bad for my girlfriend. But I’ll go on vacation and I’ll be like, ‘Let me just keep my email on.’” He does sometimes pass on work, but mostly because he can’t do two things at the same time.
Action movies are where this comedy favorite has now set his sights. There’s a commonality between the genres, he points out: “Truly, both of those things are timing things. You watch a Jackie Chan movie; they’re comedy movies and they’re all about timing, the pattern of movement versus the pattern of speaking. These things are all coordinated.”
Plus, he notes, comedy movies haven’t been performing well at the box office, fueling speculation that the big studio comedy, à la The Hangover, is a thing of the past. “I’m like, ‘Did I make my way all the way up here and now the well is dry?’” Richardson laughs a little ruefully. “I hope not. Let me go on ahead and put on my action cap, then. And I’ll just do jokes in action movies.”
In May, Richardson told Variety that he’d love to play Beast, the X-Men character previously portrayed by Kelsey Grammer and Nicholas Hoult. (“I think Beast is like a big blue-haired Richard Splett,” he told Variety.) It seems like Richardson’s trying to manifest his desired reality.
“My biggest fear is that by saying that, [Marvel czar] Kevin Feige is going to be like, ‘Oh yeah? Not on my watch, pal. You don’t tell me what to do,’” Richardson jokes. But if Feige is considering the idea, Richardson’s role as forest ranger Finn in Werewolves Within has a droll, Hank McCoy–like quality; he’s mannered, intelligent, and charmingly awkward.
Indeed, this is the Richardson type—a persona he’s called on for Splett, I Think You Should Leave, and Detroiters, his series with friend and collaborator Tim Robinson. There’s a hint of it in Tomorrow War and a lot of it in Werewolves Within: a relentlessly upbeat and somewhat clueless charmer, often with a big smile plastered on his face. “Sometimes I worry that it’s the only thing people see that I can do,” he says.
He took a turn away from the type in Promising Young Woman, where he played a smarmy friend to one of Carey Mulligan’s hapless targets. “He thinks he’s slick, he thinks he’s cool,” Richardson says of the character. “People were very like, ‘No, I don’t like this.’ And I’m like, well, this is a guy who lives in the world. Hopefully I did a good job if you hate this person.”
That said, he admits, “I am very optimistic. I like to have fun. And I do make friends pretty easily and quickly.” Overall, Richardson prefers this form of typecasting to one that happened earlier in his career, where he kept getting roles as TSA agents. “But certainly, when I find something, I want to do it a bunch. I hope I can do a bunch of action movies.”
It helps that Richardson loves both comic books and martial arts. He’s amassed a lot of memorabilia, including a Captain America massage chair and a Batman pinball machine. He has his sights set on a bigger prize, though: “As soon as I can, I’m buying the 1989 Batmobile. That’s a fact. So, world, give me enough money so I can buy a Batmobile. But not the one from Batman & Robin. That’s a go-kart.”
Growing up, Richardson dressed as Batman every year for Halloween. “My dad would play the Batman theme driving me to school. Because I would make him,” he says. The Batman Returns cassette tape was the perfect accompaniment, because steam rises from the manholes in Detroit.
Richardson’s love for his hometown is palpable. But the actor also spent a few years as a kid in Ghana, where his mother’s family was. It was a formative, if somewhat isolating, experience. “I’m my mom’s only child,” he says. “Growing up, I’d wish I had a sibling who I could check in with and be like, ‘Is this insane?’”
Abroad, he was in the land of his ancestors. But the importance of that was lost on him, he says with a laugh. What really seduced Richardson at the time was American television. “Being in Ghana, I was just inundated with American propaganda. I’m watching Hulk Hogan swinging an American flag around. I’m watching G.I. Joe, I’m watching Ninja Turtles. I’m like, I want to be there. I want to be in America. Like, I’m watching a bunch of Captain Planet reruns because that’s the only thing that would play on Ghanian television.”
Richardson doesn’t call himself an immigrant; his dad’s from Detroit too. But his mom immigrated to Detroit after meeting Richardson’s dad in Ghana. “My mom being from a very like, affluent, Ghanian, African family, I think it was a heavy culture shock. But Detroit has such a spirit and appeal that any person who goes to that city will be affected by it and you can’t help but love it. So I think that’s what happened with my mom. She never said exactly what her feelings were then of Detroit, but now she’s like, ‘I gotta get back home.’”
Richardson’s mother and her sister were the first audiences for his comedy. They’d get excited about his “little plays”—which, he confides, were merely him watching Forrest Gump, memorizing the lines, and then quoting them. Other than that, he had no interest in acting until learning that his all-boys high school would put on a play with a girls school. “The first inkling I had of girls coming to school, I was like, ‘Must investigate.’ Like a hound dog.”
As a teenager, he started taking classes at Second City with Tim Robinson, who was then about 21. Eventually, both were hired for the Second City Chicago mainstage. The two, already pals, became inseparable—“interlocked,” to use Richardson’s word. “We were working six nights a week, eight shows a week, Tuesday through Sunday. And on Monday we’d go out.” The two would crack each other up at Corcoran’s, a pub across the street from Second City, by ordering a “turf and turf”—that’s wings and a burger, and the burgers sliced in half.
The closeness didn’t end when Robinson moved to New York to star on and write for Saturday Night Live. Richardson would fly in and sleep on the couch at Robinson and his wife Heather’s place. “Then when Heather would get up to work, we would switch places,” Richardson says. “I would take her spot in the bed. And then we’d sleep, and then we’d start our day.”
Robinson and Richardson’s fruitful friendship is on display in the underrated Detroiters, where the pair play local ad men in the Motor City, and in sketches on Robinson’s cult fave I Think You Should Leave, in which Richardson plays a few choice roles. In the first season, he plays a host at a pageant determining which baby will be “baby of the year”—a derangedly upbeat figure, part cabaret singer, part auctioneer, part wrestling referee.
Richardson says Robinson and his writing partner Zach Kanin came up with a “best baby” competition at SNL, then retooled it for their Netflix sketch show. The bonkers three minutes that result pivots from the absurd premise of a baby competition to an “expert” doctor, a mystery judge, and a violent audience member. It’s freeing, working with Robinson and Kanin, because even if there are lines and cue cards, Richardson knows he can improvise however he wants to. “That’s the thing about good comedy: There’s a lot of zigs,” Richardson says. “It’s like riding waves.”
Richardson thinks he’s currently in a dues-paying phase; before becoming a film star, he says, “You have to convince the audience that they can see you” as characters like the Beast, or a sidekick in Tomorrow War, or a lead in Werewolves Within. It may sound like drudgery, but he’s enjoying the chance to perfect his skills. (I told you, he’s a Capricorn.) “I love the technical aspect of [filmmaking],” he says. “This will never be something that I’m perfect at, but I feel like I get better at it each time…like, hitting marks without looking at them.”
“I want to get so good at knowing when that camera is coming behind me,” he says. “I want to get good at the technical. I want to become a better actor. The more I do it, I feel the better I become.”
Of course, nothing compares to getting laughs from a live crowd. He recalls the first time he heard the audience roar—in high school, when a theater friend brought him to Second City Detroit. A 14- or 15-year-old Richardson went up to participate in the aftershow comedy jam. “I had a slam-dunk line…I got a huge laugh. And I was like, ‘This will be forever.’”
— An Exclusive Deep Dive Into Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back
— Joseph Fiennes on His Handmaid’s Tale Fate
— The 10 Best Movies of 2021 (So Far)
— Jane Levy on the Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist Cancellation
— Is Luca Pixar’s First Gay Movie?
— How Physical Got Under Rose Byrne’s Skin
— What Is Bo Burnham’s Inside Really Trying to Say?
— Simu Liu Is Ready to Take On Marvel
— From the Archive: Jackie and Joan Collins, Queens of the Road
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of “Awards Insider.”
