There is an atmosphere of embarkation and hangover at the Beverly Hills Hilton as the three-day junket for Vacation winds down. Suitcases are being hefted, cameras stowed and taxis are arriving outside in the hellish humidity. I’m Ed Helms’s last appointment of the day. He really should be in a much worse mood than he is.
So, I ask him, how many people have asked you about your worst-ever summer vacation? Eight? 18? “Try 80!” he laughs.
His latest movie is a reboot of the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise of the 1980s, and Helms plays Rusty, the grown-up son of the original Griswold family, now ready to embark on his own nightmarish family road-trip.
The new outing is a somewhat different beast from the original, with its jokes about swimming in raw sewage, exploding cows, the most foul-mouthed little brother in movie history, and a great deal of projectile-vomiting. I tell Helms that I saw a horrified-looking mother escorting two six-year-olds out of the screening. “But that’s crazy!” he guffaws, “this is an R-rated movie! What was she thinking?”
Both movies reflect the times in which they were made, he says. “In the original Vacation, Chevy Chase almost hooks up with Christie Brinkley. Audiences would turn on a character today for behaviour like that. Now, story arcs are about characters finding their mojo. In the 80s, they had it already: Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray – they were just cool guys who had it all going on. We’re maybe a little less cool.”
But there are cross-generational connections too. One of the writers of this movie, John Francis Daly, was a kid on Freaks and Geeks alongside Seth Rogen; whose father in Knocked Up was played by original Vacation director the late Harold Ramis; who also directed Helms in the American remake of The Office. And Helms, born in 1974, is of the generation raised on the movies of John Hughes, who wrote the first Vacation and the original National Lampoon story on which it was based, Vacation 57. It’s an intricate cats-cradle of two distinct sensibilities, one 60s, the other post-80s.
“For me the through line is unbroken,” Helms says, “Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Martin Short, John Landis, Dan Aykroyd, Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder – so many of those guys that I grew up madly in love with.”
Where does that glint of insanity come from that seems to link his characters – Andy Bernard from The Office, Stu from The Hangover and now Rusty, whose naivety and lack of self-awareness can verge on the near-psychotic? Looking at Helms’s almost parodically normal face today one feels a long way from Andy’s anger-mismanagement or Stu’s control-freak blow-ups.
“They all have something that I can really relate to but which I’m just a little bit better at hiding. It’s desperation. In Andy’s case it was the need for approval and friendship. With Rusty, it’s this desperation to have fun and to keep everybody’s spirits up. I might have more social grace than Rusty, but I do feel the way he feels quite often.”
And he’s repeatedly emasculated and humiliated – swimming in shit, covered in cow-guts. “Oh, there’s no room for dignity in a movie like this!” he laughs.
Filming took place mostly in Atlanta, where Helms grew up. How much of a southern boy is he? I only ask because, well, I know he has a banjo. “That is probably the most overtly southern thing about me! But I’d like to think that I’m something of a gentleman, which is kind of a southern thing. I’m a little reserved, maybe a little repressed. There’s a very dark sense of humour in the south, that very gothic humour that I really cherish.”
Helms was 28 when he snagged his gig on The Daily Show in 2002, a job that he held for four and a half years. “I was hustling really hard as a standup in New York,” he remembers. “When I got the Daily Show audition I was really prepared for it because I watched the show religiously - I could have done that audition in my sleep!”
Helms’s essential niceness – very much in evidence today – must have made the snarky satirical field pieces he did for The Daily Show somewhat nerve-racking. “It was the most complicated part for me. I love good satire. I don’t like – or I’m not good at – let’s call it ‘duality’. For me, to be duplicitous is against my nature, it makes me feel bad. And a certain number of Daily Show field pieces required a certain amount of duplicity, if not outright messing with someone. I remember Stephen Colbert would always say, ‘Yeah, just hang your soul up in the closet. You can come back for it later.’ That was always a very emotionally taxing part of that job. But the thing that never ceased to amaze me was just how thrilled people always were to BE ON TELEVISION. Even when you completely undermined their entire world view or brutally pointed out their hypocrisy.”
We’re getting the wind-up signal, so I ask what happened to the massive penile prosthesis sported in one already notorious scene by Rusty’s brother-in-law, played Chris Hemsworth. Is that thing sitting on someone’s mantelpiece now?
Helms sits up straight, schoolmarmish all of a sudden: “It was handled with a great deal of sensitivity and respect, for the most part, though at one point the directors put it in a gift basket and left it in my trailer. Nestling in among the bananas! And Chris Hemsworth? If you look the way he looks and are as talented as him, then you really don’t need to be as cool as he actually is to be around. And there’s all these other handsome Hemsworth brothers, too – those guys could make millions just by selling their sperm!”
