Tender Greens

The last place I expected to find Eric Wareheim was in a garden in muted shades of beige. At least four dozen succulents and ferns and small trees, each lovingly potted and trimmed, stand at varying heights around a sitting area in front of the actor-comedian-director’s A-frame home. He has recently begun gardening, he says, “to bond with my mom.” The only thing lankier than Wareheim himself is a cactus at least 20 feet tall, careening like an inflatable car dealership tube-man over the stairs that lead up to the house from the street.

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Technically, he lives east of the clamor of Hollywood, and also spiritually, Wareheim, 48, lives very much like someone in some agrarian suburb, with his two cats Gino and Roman. One day 18 years ago, while riding his motorcycle through the hills with his then-girlfriend, he found the place that he lives in now. He loved it so much that he withdrew an offer he’d put on another spot to nab it. The house—far from the neighborhoods where most up-and-coming actors would have chosen to live at the time—was double his budget, but, “You should always be a little uncomfortable,” he says. “It lights a fire.” If it weren’t for the famous faces he posts drinking glasses of wine you or I wouldn’t even know to bid on in auction, a social media voyeur might think he lived in the Hudson Valley or Cuyahoga County. Or, really anywhere but the city where, hours later, a server informs me (unprompted and in lieu of taking my drink order) that the art on the restaurant’s walls—a Basquiat and a Warhol—are “both real.” In Wareheim’s front yard, wind chimes mete out a soft dreamlike melody—the only other sounds are splashes from a fish pond next to his pruning station—and he places a delivery order for an açaí bowl from his phone. It all strikes me as shockingly low-intensity for someone who has made a persona out of living like a modern member of the court of Burgundy by night (an earlier account of him detailed an “ass-focused party called Snow Booty” he’d recently thrown) and who is best known for being extremely unserious by day.

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When I get there to find Wareheim housing mashed frozen fruit and name-checking Ram Dass, I try to tell myself, at first, that it makes a weird kind of sense. Would you expect to find Simone Biles right in the middle of a full-twisting double tuck at any random hour? But after the third time I try to launch us into a breathless bit and he doesn’t break, I have to come to terms with a question: Is Eric Wareheim, formerly one of the more debauched guys in Los Angeles, serious now?

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“Life is a nightmare most of the time; it’s okay to laugh.”
— Eric Wareheim

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You probably remember him as Arnold (the tall, goofy one) in Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. Or, if you smoked weed in high school, you’ll hazily recall the cult show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, in which the actor and his comedy partner Tim Heidecker wrote and performed sketches all loosely bound by the feeling of an acid flashback in a rural strip mall. It would be hard to overstate the effect that the show had on my life; when I was working on Wall Street after college, a severe managing director called me into her office to warn me that my cell phone had been hacked. Her evidence was that my contact photo showed up as a demented baby with a mustache and thick eyebrows—I never admitted that the photo had been intentional, a Tim and Eric character named Chippy, a hairy baby who shrieked whenever he was spotted. One running chain of sketches featured usually malfunctioning or otherwise useless invented products from Cinco Corporation, like the Essence of Lamb Aerosol Spray, and Cigarette Juice (“hand squeezed to give it that thick, brown cigarette taste”). Wareheim and Heidecker regularly starred as the Beaver Boys, who ate so much shrimp and white wine that it sent them to the emergency room. Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, Jonah Hill, Ben Stiller, Elisha Cuthbert, Paul Rudd, and Ted Danson all made guest appearances. And when Wareheim launched his wine brand Las Jaras with winemaker Joel Burt in 2017, one of their first offerings was a Sweet Berry Wine with the face of Tim and Eric character Dr. Steve Brule (a public-access reporter, played by John C. Reilly, who was over-served in wine country) dripping down its front; it retailed for $35 and tasted elegantly jammy. More recently, Wareheim has produced shows like Nathan For You, directed various films and music videos, and assumed the mantle of running Top Food Blog TM️ (no qualifying “a” or “the”) from his Instagram. His first cookbook, FOODHEIM: A Culinary Adventure, 2021, has an entire chapter on “Juicy Foods,” which begins with an almost Baudelairean poem called The Joy of Juice. It randomly has the hand drawn phrase “Yum Yum” embedded within its pages in a psychedelic color palette. In one promotion for the book, which was a New York Times bestseller, its author performed a lengthy, unrelated bit involving a disrespectful fictional son named Bradley.

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Quite early in his career, Wareheim got a piece of advice from Bob Odenkirk, his comedy godfather: “‘Don’t work on anyone else’s show,’” Wareheim recalls being told. “‘You have this gift—someone’s giving you money to put out this freakish art that you make. Keep going with that, and don’t get distracted by LA.’” So he hasn’t. He hardly attends award shows or industry events. And he has this serious urge to balance the universe. Mostly, when he isn’t working, he tends to his tomato plants and makes chicken parm and pizza for his best friends. “I’ve had so much bestowed on me just because I’m a public person. I grew up with not a lot,” he says. He knows that he is profoundly lucky. He’s been obsessively scribbling things down: nice things, funny things, things he’d like to remember, ideas for the television show he’s working on. He’s also picked up his camera again. (At one point in his early adult life, Wareheim was a fine art photographer and at another he was a wedding photographer who had mastered a number of tricks to maximize the amount of shrimp he could eat from the hors d’oeuvres table while shooting.)

Wareheim has just returned home from acting in something in Mexico City, and he is off to Vancouver to direct something else in the next few days. (Two checks in the “serious” column.) He is also in the final push of finishing a new book called The Great American Steakhouse. He was asked to write about 10 joints, but instead, he hit three a day with friends—“I had to learn how to do nibbles... I’m on another level of meat right now”—and turned in a manuscript featuring 65, including the one that inspired the whole project, a steakhouse outside of Charlotte, North Carolina called Beef ‘N Bottle. Converting people to devotees of a steakhouse, or a certain dish or a particular winemaker, he says, gives him the same rush as making someone laugh. “The book is about this feeling of caring and warmth and having a place that feels like a sanctuary. Sometimes you look at steakhouses and you’re like, ‘It’s a casino, it’s dark energy’—but it’s not.” (Another check mark for “serious” materializes when I thumb through the early pages, and see recipes broken up by affectionate, perceptive stories about steakhouse owners, valet guys, dishwashers, and the like. A reader might even tear up.)

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Before that, Wareheim had been in Japan, where he’d gone deep—not just on “big boy broths,” he says—but on Japanese golf culture, and the gifts of the forest. From a friend there, he learned of shinrin-yoku in which people “go to the forest just to absorb what it does to you,” Wareheim tells me. I ask what he was washing off. He is coy:
“Whenever I feel stale in my environment or when I’m going through something, a trip like that reminds you how lucky you are to even travel.” For Wareheim, travel in an era when you can learn an entire language from your bed on a free app is most fruitful when it offers the opportunity to feel or taste something one couldn’t feel or taste at home, like the pasta at Seirinkan, which he hit twice on the trip. He’s over labeling things “the best,” though. He’s asked near-constantly for exemplary recommendations but his “best” is constantly changing, he says—and he is acutely aware that he hasn’t tried all there is to try.

A cultural historian might call Wareheim’s early work—especially the stuff with Heidecker—the precursor to today’s viral, cringe comedy. He probably wouldn’t. “To Tim and I, our ideas and sketches and shows are not absurd at all to us. We don’t even consider ourselves ‘anti-comedians,’” he tells me. “We got off on the grotesque—we would go to parties and freak people out, but never in a malicious way. Being mean or aggressive has never been funny to us.” A check in the unserious column, of course, could come from a film project he’s working on with Heidecker now, a dark horror-comedy that he says is as strange as ever: “Nothing we could do is ever normal.” Sometimes, he and Heidecker will try to make something more “palatable,” but they’ll just start laughing, and it will veer off course. Early in his career, he says he felt a kind of “artistic anger.”

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“Life is a nightmare most of the time; it’s okay to laugh,” he continues. I suppose that’s why his work resonates so deeply, because he always winks at the harrowing bits about being alive, even when he’s painted head-to-toe in fire engine red holding two lobsters filibustering to a live crowd about the meaning of surf ‘n’ turf at Red Lobster. It’s “unserious” with a side of extremely serious. That is Wareheim’s greatest strength as an artist: He welcomes you into his club by making you laugh, and so you wander in, and then he lets you be free to do (and feel) whatever you want inside. Serious, or otherwise.

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As the June gloom settles in around his hilltop retreat, our phones begin to buzz: Donald Trump had been convicted of falsifying business records on 34 counts. “Dude, I have major goosebumps,” Wareheim says. He finishes his acai bowl. He gives me a tour of his elegant, modern home. It’s filled with furniture that belies an impeccable eye; a three-dimensional psychedelic textured Jen Stark work—real—is inset into the wall that separates his kitchen from his living room. White bouclé and handmade forms abound.

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He sends me home with a bottle of his Las Jaras wine, which I drink later. It is the color of macerated strawberry juice and tastes almost like pink lemonade, with a barely perceptible fizz. Life is a nightmare most of the time, but for the length of that glass it is a delight.