After meeting on the prank show 'Punk’d,' B.J. Novak and Ashton Kutcher talk about reuniting on Novak’s directorial debut, the dark comedy 'Vengeance.'
In 2003, not long before he vaulted to fame as Ryan Howard on NBC’s “The Office,” a then-unknown B.J. Novak landed his first major break when Ashton Kutcher cast him on his MTV celebrity-prank show “Punk’d.”
A sharply comic neo-noir aimed squarely at the zeitgeist, “Vengeance,” which hits theaters Friday, stars Novak as Ben Manalowitz, a pretentious New York writer who travels to rural West Texas to make a true-crime podcast investigating the overdose death of a former romantic hookup.
Then I was ready to come and shoot the film, and I got sort of an early signal from Davos that this COVID thing was like a real thing.Listen to this secret agent.My friend at Davos was like, “Batten down the hatches. Go home. Don’t leave.” I called B.J. and I said, “Are you guys shutting down production?”We were in the middle of a red state. It was pretty far from Davos. I was like, “COVID-19? This guy spends too much time in tech. No, of course we’re still shooting.
B.J., you’ve talked about how writing this character was a way of calling yourself out for some of your flaws. How so?I had those blind spots and that shallowness and ambition. I was someone who wanted maybe to talk more than listen, who wanted to tell a great story more than he wanted to find a great story or tell someone else’s story that needed to be told. It was hard to show the sides of myself I don’t like. It’s also hard to be earnest about finding some good in people and even in yourself.
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