Zootopia Star Talks Career Rise, SmartLess Success

There was a period, in his 20s, when Jason Bateman considered hanging it all up. 

He’d been acting since he was 10, landing one hit series after another. Little House on the Prairie. Silver Spoons. The Hogan Family. By the time he was old enough to drive, he was a fixture in magazines like Bop and Tiger Beat, and offers were being doled out like candy. 

But the thing about teen idoldom is it doesn’t last, which Bateman learned the hard way.

There was a critically savaged flop, then a string of quickly canceled sitcoms and a decade of debauchery. By the mid-1990s, Bateman was fantasizing about stuffing whatever money he had left in a duffle, heading to the international terminal at LAX and starting over. Had he gone another few months without work, he’s pretty sure he would have followed through with it, too.

“I would’ve bought a little coffee shop in some small town in Western Europe, learned the language and made local villager friends,” he says almost wistfully. “It sounds so stupid, but I would’ve walked around with a little apron on and sat at everyone’s table and just had a quaint, little life — and I bet I would have loved it.”

He never got the chance to find out. In 2003, Bateman landed the role of beleaguered straight man Michael Bluth on Arrested Development, an instant cult hit that thrust him back into the zeitgeist. He shrewdly parlayed that role into others, small ones at first (Juno) then larger ones (Ozark). From there, he inked a significant deal at Netflix, built out a legitimate production company, launched the $100 million podcast, SmartLess and continued lining up films and TV shows, including Zootopia 2, Black Rabbit and HBO’s upcoming DTF St. Louis. If it feels like Bateman, 57, is suddenly everywhere, it’s because, well, he is.

“Were it not for some of that cliff-hanging earlier in my career, I don’t know if I’d be as good as I am at the caretaking of these opportunities,” he says, seated in the busy West Hollywood headquarters of his Aggregate Films. “But I have seen and felt what it is like to really not have a lot of prospects, and it keeps you hungry.”

Ironically, his friends, a tight group that includes Will Arnett, Jennifer Aniston and Jimmy Kimmel, refer to him as “grandpa” — but that has more to do with Bateman’s lifestyle choices, a rotation of golf, the Dodgers and a steady drip of MSNBC, than his prolific output. Plus, as Kimmel notes, “He rarely makes it out past 10, and if he does, there’s a lot of, ‘Oh great job, Grandpa. Congratulations.’ ”

Fortunately, Bateman is as good at receiving the barbs as he is at slinging them, which is clear to anyone who’s listened to him, Arnett and Sean Hayes banter on SmartLess. “But the truth is, I look up to J.B. in so many ways,” says Arnett, who will mercilessly rib his pal for being “a dummy” on the podcast but, off of it, insists that Bateman is anything but. “I seek his counsel in virtually every area of my life, because the advice he gives comes from the perspective of a guy who’s really righted his own ship.”

***

For all of Bateman’s mid-career woes, his entry into the industry was remarkably smooth. It was his father who initially whet his appetite. Like Bateman, he had acting aspirations, though it was postproduction work that paid the bills, moving the family from New York to Boston to Salt Lake City all before Jason’s 8th birthday. The Batemans ultimately settled in Los Angeles, though little felt traditional as his dad was busy chasing freelance opportunities and his mother, a flight attendant for Pan Am, was gone two weeks out of every month. 

“My father and I wouldn’t go to the park to play catch, we’d go to the movies,” says Bateman, “and he’d explain to me what good acting is and what bad acting is.” 

One day, when he was 10, a neighbor and friend of his dad was heading to an audition for a short film and invited Bateman to tag along. He ended up reading for the part of his son, and though the neighbor didn’t book the role, Jason did. Commercials followed, then Little House on the Prairie; soon, his older sister, Justine, was eager to try her luck as well. Like her brother, she began booking commercials immediately, then nabbed a series-regular gig as Michael J. Fox’s sister, Mallory, on the 1980s hit Family Ties. 

“In retrospect, it’s really insane,” says Bateman. “The two of us both landed these NBC shows, and off we go.”

To this day, his buddies get a kick out of his showbiz upbringing, convinced he’s met everyone in his nearly 50 years in the business. In fact, Kimmel has made a game of just tossing out wild Hollywood names. “You can go, like, ‘Gary Coleman,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, Gary and I were friends. We played trains together on the set of Silver Spoons,’ ” says Kimmel. “Or you say, ‘Leif Garrett,’ and he’s like, ‘Leif! Yeah, he dated my sister. He’s a good friend, we traveled in an RV together from ski town to ski town.’ Or ‘Mr. T,’ and he’s like, ‘Bought me my first necklace.’ That one I may have made up, but that’s really what you get.”

That early success was not without complexity, however. His parents became his manager, as they later would for Justine, and suddenly he was a meaningful contributor to the family’s bottom line before he’d even entered high school. And in order for Bateman to retain his work permit, and the lifestyle it afforded his family, he had to maintain a C average, which added what he’s historically described as “earth-shattering” pressure to every major exam. When he’s discussed the complicated dynamic with other former child stars on the podcast, he’s been vocal about the significant challenges of being “the boss at an age when you need parental guidance.” 

On this day, he acknowledges that he also took no small amount of pride in it. “Maybe it was masochistic, but I really felt proud of myself that my parents and the crew were relying on me,” he says. “Yeah, I was overwhelmed at times with the pressure of it, but not nearly as much as I was feeling the attaboy wind on my back.” And there was cause for plenty of attaboys. In fact, by 15, Bateman was already invited to carry his own show. At 18, he became the youngest person ever admitted to the DGA. And if the press hits he did during that period were any indication, it went right to his head. A few, including the early Johnny Carson appearances, pop up in his feed periodically, and he cringes every time.

“Maybe if I was acting a little bit more like a guest as opposed to some sort of salty veteran, it would’ve been a little bit more palatable,” he offers. “But I certainly thought that I was incredible in my teens.” 

Back then, Bateman naively assumed the transition from teen idol to adult actor would be easy, which is why he never bothered with a backup plan. Asked whether anyone had advised him to at least consider college, he laughs. “My parents were my manager at the time, so they kind of had a conflict of interest there. They’re not going to say, ‘Stop doing this and start studying something else,’ ” he says. In retrospect, Bateman, who never even graduated from high school, wishes that they had. “But I did Teen Wolf Too at 18, and it was like, ‘Well, it’s all up from here. Look at me, I’m starring in the movies!’ ” 

That big-screen debut, which his dad produced, was savaged by critics and bombed at the box office. Not long after, he and his father parted ways professionally. Bateman likes to say that there was very little friction, simply that he, as he once explained to Howard Stern, “got old enough where Daddy shouldn’t be your manager.” But in a 2015 interview with Marc Maron, he revealed that he and his parents had had a “distant” relationship in the decades since. Today, he’s more measured: “I assume that our relationship is as normal as any other relationship between adult children and parents at this age.”

But by the time The Hogan Family wrapped its six-season run, Bateman was 22, and the offers were no longer flooding in. He’d still do a pilot a year, but of the few that actually went to series, none made it past a single season. Suddenly, his past success felt like baggage. “It was a big slap of humility,” he recalls, “and it was scary knowing that there was a lot of life ahead of me.” With time on his hands, Bateman decided to catch up on all of the partying that he hadn’t been able to do. He went hard — alcohol, cocaine, whatever he could get his hands on — though he’s always contended that he was more of a hedonist than an addict. His mentality was simple: If he wasn’t going to have fun acting, he’d find fun elsewhere.

“Fortunately, I was living at a time without social media and camera phones, so I got away with a lot, but it was definitely close a few times,” he says with a devilish smile. According to Kimmel, there were “some shenanigans” backstage with Andy Dick during Bateman’s first appearance on his show, but he leaves it there. (He and Bateman became friends much later. “After drugs,” jokes Kimmel.) Still, Bateman insists that he was always able to show up for work the next morning, should he have any. His parents may have taken 15 percent, but they did instill him with discipline. 

By the early aughts, Bateman was auditioning to be the “Can you hear me now?” guy on the Verizon commercials. His career was nowhere near where it had been, much less where he wanted it to be.

***

In spring 2003, Bateman read the pilot for Arrested Development and panicked. “It was amazing, and all I could think was, ‘Oh fuck, this sounds like the exact thing that they wouldn’t want my stink on,’” he says. “I was the traditional multicam, studio-audience guy, and there they were trying to do something kind of punk rock in this new single-camera comedy world.”

But he went to the audition and nailed the show’s irreverent comedic tone, which aligned squarely with his own very dry, very sarcastic sense of humor that he’d inherited from his British mom. The sitcom debuted on Fox later that fall, and, among critics and tastemakers, it hit immediately. “America didn’t watch, but the people that handed out jobs did, and you could just tell, like, oh, this is cool and us being a part of it actually makes us cool by association,” says Bateman. “And so it was that stink I could almost smell being washed off of me little bits at a time.”

A year or so in, he put an end to his drinking and partying, or whatever was left of the habit now that he had a steady day job. “I’ve got friends who had bottoms that were pretty chilling, but I was lucky enough to recognize, ‘This is probably as far as I should go if I still want to accomplish the things that I want to get to,’ ” says Bateman, who was disciplined even in his debauchery. “I was conscious the whole time of wanting to get a lot of these boxes checked before I became a father and a guy with a career that I not only wanted but had a feeling I might be able to get it if I just got the right job.”

By then, he’d married Amanda Anka, a voiceover actress and Paul Anka’s daughter, with whom he was eager to start a family. She’d been the breadwinner early in the relationship and continues to be a strong, steadying force. “Amanda and I definitely had a few negotiations about the point at which the [partying] spigot was going to completely turn off. She’d be like, ‘This drip, drip, drip is annoyingly unpredictable, Jason,’ ” he says, then clarifies: “She didn’t demand that I completely absolve, but that was sort of the back-and-forth, and I was like, well, I feel like my [sobriety] ETA is six months away, but if I could land this plane now, it would alleviate a lot of the tension, so let’s just fucking do it.” (While he’s abstained from booze and what he’s called “the Scarface stuff” for decades now, Bateman has joked that he is “California sober,” which is to say he’s not above a gummy.)

Like the accolades, which included a cadre of Emmy and SAG noms and a Golden Globe win, the opportunities began flowing in from there — though Bateman was much more discerning the second time around. “Having been on the outside looking in for so long, I’d gotten a real good sense of what it was that provided longevity,” he says, “and it wasn’t fame or money, it was respect.” So, he said yes to things that would put him in the company of actors and filmmakers whom he respected, regardless of how big or small the roles were and what genre or medium they were in.

For a good stretch, that included a slew of straight-man roles in big-screen comedies, including Couples Retreat, Game Night and Horrible Bosses. By 2013, the same year Netflix revived Arrested Development, he made his feature directorial debut with Bad Words, a black comedy about a spelling bee. He also starred, this time as another popular Bateman archetype, the asshole. Focus acquired the rights to the film for a reported $7 million, and Bateman’s priorities shifted almost overnight. “To have a job that asked me to bring everything I’d learned was really exciting to me,” he says. “And I got to see that I could be the guy that the old salty veterans on the set would come up to and say, ‘Hey, you’ve done good, kid.’ ”

But no project since Arrested Development had a more immediate and meaningful impact on Bateman’s career than Ozark, a Taylor Sheridan-style juggernaut before Sheridan had come on the scene. Initially, Bateman had to persuade the execs at Netflix and studio MRC to let him direct the 2017 pilot — and though they’d set their sights on an A-list director like David Fincher, they eventually caved, and by all accounts he became the creative engine of the crime drama, in front of and behind the camera. By year two, Bateman had won an Emmy for his directorial work on the series, which seemed to come as little surprise to those involved.

Julia Garner, his co-star, has said it’s his ability to “relax everybody and make it fun” that differentiates Bateman as a director; Laura Linney, who played his wife for four seasons, offers something similar of Bateman, the actor. “I’d get very mad scientist, reading the script a million times, breaking it down, doing research, all of these things to deal with my nerves, and then Jason would come on set, and he can learn his lines in five seconds, and he’s so present and it’s just fun,” she says, noting that it was also Bateman who perpetually prodded her to start directing, which she ultimately did with a pivotal episode of Ozark and, later, with two episodes of his Black Rabbit.

Bateman, who fastidiously studies the trades and his every review, was already tight with Netflix’s Ted Sarandos when the streamer signed him and his Aggregate Films to a sweeping first-look deal in 2018. By then, he’d recruited a seasoned executive in Michael Costigan, who did stints at Sony and Scott Free, to help him build out the company in the mold of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine. Before Costigan took the gig, he flew to Atlanta, where Ozark filmed, to sit with Bateman and make sure Aggregate wouldn’t be another vanity company. 

“Fortunately, that was his giant allergy, too,” says Costigan, “and if we were going to do this together, he also didn’t want it to feel like it was, ‘the world according to Jason Bateman.’ ” Instead, the duo assembled a team of 10 or so employees — a group of largely 20- and 30-somethings who are encouraged to challenge their boomer bosses — and got busy building a slate of high-profile projects that don’t all star Bateman. To date, the output has included hits like Brie Larson’s Emmy-nominated Lessons in Chemistry and Glen Powell’s buzzy Hit Man. Up next: a top-secret project with red-hot Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney.

As for Bateman, after nearly five decades in the business, he claims he’s laser-focused on taking roles that feel fresh and different and distance him from, as he puts it, “TV’s Jason Bateman.” The latter was certainly top of mind when Jude Law called about starring opposite him in Black Rabbit, which is why he took the “fucked-up brother” role as opposed to Law’s straitlaced one. Same for DTF St. Louis, a dark comedy/murder mystery where several of the characters, including Bateman’s, explore their sexual kinks. DTF writer-director Steve Conrad insists Bateman didn’t so much as flinch at the series’ provocative nature. In fact, he says, “If anybody was scared, I thought it was going to be me because Jason can do my job and I can’t do his, but there wasn’t a moment where he tried.”

***

The most successful thing on Bateman’s résumé was never intended to be a podcast. Sure, he’d always said he hoped his next act would include a Charlie Rose-style talk show, but SmartLess isn’t exactly that (though three former presidents have come on as guests). Instead, what started as a way for three buddies to stay in contact early in the pandemic morphed into something far more significant. Since 2020, there’s been a sold-out tour, an HBO docuseries and a succession of lucrative distribution deals, the latest one with Sirius XM valued at nine figures.

“The financial security of it is something I don’t take lightly, and it’s given me a healthy level of indifference when it comes to assessing other creative opportunities for myself,” says Bateman, as a smile curves his lips. “It’s also a good reminder that some of the greatest things in your life come when you’re not chasing them.”

For its listeners, SmartLess has offered an opportunity to get to know the real Bateman, after years of watching him play other people. “And what you hear is exactly what it’s like at dinner with all of them,” says Kimmel of the incessant ball-busting. “With Jason, he’ll wander from complete self-awareness to no self-awareness, and the moment that he wanders out of self-awareness is when Will fires a flaming arrow at him.” His extreme discipline, to the point of obsession, with things like food and exercise is a frequent target, too, as is his penchant for the good life. (Per multiple sources, he’s been known to negotiate private airfare to and from set and have rigid boundaries around how much time he’ll devote to a project.)

But the SmartLess format, where two of the three hosts have no idea who the guest is before the taping, has its drawbacks, which became evident earlier this month when Hayes invited Charli xcx on the show. As a listener, it was immediately clear that Bateman knew very little about the pop star, at one point acknowledging that the cultural phenomenon that was “Brat” had largely eluded him. He then stepped in it when he asked the 31-year-old how many children she wanted; and when she said none, suggesting her mind might change when she meets the right person, as his wife’s did when she met him. Of course, had Charli been Bateman’s guest, he would have known that she was, in fact, already married and that she’d mined her feelings around child-rearing in her music.

The exchange itself was friendly, but the online response to Bateman’s line of questioning was decidedly less so. Asked for his thoughts on what transpired a week later, he offers this: “We were having a great conversation about her life growing up as an only child. It seemed like a very natural follow-up to that. That’s all it was. I don’t really have much [else] to say about it, except that it is always interesting and valuable and educational to hear people’s thoughts, reactions and feelings to anything I say or do.”

The irony of the whole thing is that Bateman, for as long as he can remember, has wanted a traditional family — a chance to create the kind of “normalcy” that he didn’t have in his own home growing up. That “Grandpa” nickname isn’t just because he likes to turn in early; it’s because Bateman likes to be home with his wife and daughters. “I’m a softie,” he says, proudly. “I like moving the Elf on the Shelf every day. In fact, we’ve got a new little thing, a troll, that I move around now in the offseason. But I love it all: the slippers, the fireplace, the nesting.”

His oldest, an aspiring director, went off to college last year, and the transition has been considerably harder on him than it has been on her. Bateman still has his 14-year-old at home, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, she’s expressed interest in acting. And though he insists she’s “pretty damn good,” he’s been vehemently opposed to child stardom for his own offspring. Why put them through that, he reasons. At nearly 60, and with a pile of scripts stacked high on his desk, he’s still trying to shed his past. “I still feel like I’m trying not to be a child-actor failure,” he’s said. “I’m still trying to make it out.”

This story appears in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.