It seems we’re seeing more and more U.S. actors do series in other countries these days, trusting that the show will make its way to an international audience.
Yeah, I think Americans are so ethnocentric that it took a global pandemic for them to start watching more shows and go, “Oh, wait. They make things in other countries that aren’t bad.” I do think COVID did a lot of the heavy lifting as far as introducing us to entertainment outside of our borders, for better and for worse.
How is this show, fact-based though it may be, using the crime comedy genre to poke fun at small-town life?
This is not “based on,” but a “jumping-off point from.” There was a real town in the Outback where there was a murder mystery. It was with 11 people, and it was a zany town. The first time I read it was a New York Times article — and it was like, “Did they feed the body to a pet crocodile? Are they in the meat pies that the local baker is making?” . . . I think anybody can relate to a small town, even if you live in a big one. I mean, Hollywood feels like a small town to me. Everybody knows each other, everybody’s sleeping with each other or fighting with each other. Set it in a picturesque and bizarre place like the Outback, and it’s just making sexy or strange or scary or sticky whatever your idea of a small town is.
You’re juggling a lot of tones and genres here. How tough was that?
Tone was, in a lot of ways, our North Star. Because tone can screw a show like this up. I read the script and was like, “This is incredible.” But it’s incredible exactly the way I’m imagining it — and if I take a minute, I can picture 400 different ways this can be ruined . . . Every once in a while there would be one joke that I would fight desperately to lose or tweak, because in my opinion that joke pops the tonal bubble that we’ve created — maybe this is more sitcom-y, and it’s not based in a grounded reality. But the people who created this show are incredibly smart, creative, funny people, and they always, along with me, wanted to protect that. Even the music — we found that perfect balance of, “Hey, we’re joking, but we’re also dangerous.”
Who is Andy at the end of this show compared to who he was at the start?
Like a lot of us Americans when we travel, he felt above everybody and just wanted to get whatever he came to take and get out. By the end, he was what I strive to be whenever I’m travelling, which is someone who is “of the place” and felt comfortable just being there. He had a family. He had relationships. It went from this clunky, bumbling, cocky confusion to a more confident peace at the end.
Looking back on Mad Men, how did you feel about the end of Ginsberg’s arc? Driven insane by a computer and cutting off his own nipple — quite the exit.
I do remember when Matt Weiner [Mad Men creator] called me into his office to tell me, I think he was really, really nervous that I was going to be bummed because I was leaving earlier than some of the other exits. But when he told me how it was happening, I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is the coolest way to leave a show ever!” And then that just spawned years of people talking to me about my nipples . . . A lot of people come up to me and mistakenly say, “How’s your ear?” And I will be like, “It wasn’t my ear, it was my nipple.” What you’re doing is confusing me with van Gogh — which is such a smart mistake to make. It gives me faith in our culture.
Population 11, streaming on Paramount+
MEMORABLE ROLES:
A versatile character actor with leading man chops, Mr. Feldman broke into TV via AMC’s Mad Men, playing mad-genius copywriter Michael Ginsberg for the Emmy magnet’s final three seasons. From there, you saw him steal scenes as amusingly unflappable lawyer Ron LaFlamme on Silicon Valley and co-lead NBC sitcom Superstore as college dropout turned big-box sales associate Jonah Simms.
CURRENT GIG:
Feldman both heads the cast and exec-produces this 12-part crime comedy about a neurotic Ohio bank teller who journeys Down Under to find his missing, UFO conspiracist dad — only to wind up embroiled in a small-town murder mystery wherein all 11 quirky members of said town become suspects.