Tomorrow, get ready for a whole new kind of superhero adventure as DIsney+ launches its latest original film, Flora & Ulysses.
Based on the children's novel of the same name, the movie follows a young girl named Flora Buckman (Matilda Lawler), an avid comic book fan and self-avowed cynic dealing with her parents' separation, who adopts a superpowered pet squirrel named Ulysses.
Ahead of the film's release, we were able to sit down with star Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation; Sonic the Hedgehog), who plays Flora's father George, and spoke with him about the film and his career in general. In a very heartfelt response, he reflects on how he initially found his comedic voice and touched on the relentless amount of work he's put in in the twenty years since to earn the well-deserved success he's found today.
"Even though I wanted to desperately, I never auditioned for a musical in high school, I was too afraid that I wouldn’t get it and I was too afraid that people would make fun of me. I didn’t have confidence in myself and I wasn’t okay with failing, I don’t think, yet.
It took someone pushing me, a girlfriend in college, to force me to audition for the improv team and that’s what - I finally auditioned, I got on, and then I started building the confidence. It’s always about - there’s going to be so much failure in anyone’s career and in the beginning, I was really scared of, because, amongst my friends, people thought I was the funny guy, but to audition for the comedy group, those guys are considered funny, they made a group together being funny in college, and I don’t want to find out that I’m not funny and people think I’m not funny. So, I was too afraid to fail and it took a bit for me to mature enough to be like ‘Alright, let’s try it, let’s see what happens.’
So, it was in college that I started doing improv, my first time doing improv was in 2002, so it’s almost been twenty years of me doing comedy. That’s insane. I’m so old! It took me going to UCB - Upright Citizens Brigade in New York - and really playing with my guys Adam Pally and Gil Ozeri and finding my voice. Failing over and over and over again. The thing they usually say to improvisers or comedians is ‘You go out there, first step is you gotta get out there, take a risk, fail, learn from those mistakes, get back up, do the same thing, repeat, repeat, repeat’ and I think that’s where you learn your voice. You keep finding out what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, you start to figure out how to really maneuver your comedic voice and I think it takes - I can’t tell you how many shows I was terrible at before I started having good ones."
From breaking on the scene as Jean-Ralphio in NBC's Parks and Recreation to his career-redefining role as the titular speedster in Paramount's Sonic the Hedgehog, Schwartz has worked with some incredible talent throughout his career - Amy Poehler, Don Cheadle, and Jim Carrey, to name just a few - and he tells us how he's taken a little bit of something from each of them to make himself a better performer and coworker.
"It’s different from different people, watching Amy Poehler... a lot of people talk about, on a call sheet, people have numbers, which is silly, but #1 is usually the lead of your show, so Amy, they would say number one on the call sheet usually, the way that they act toward people really sets the tone of how that thing is and I’ve always been lucky . Amy Poehler, nicest person to everybody, inclusive with everybody, wants the crew happy. Cheadle was an incredible leader, for me, to watch him do his thing, be so good at acting and treat everybody with respect, you just start watch his process and you start learning. Then, I did a movie with Billy Crystal and got to watch him, I did a movie with Jeremy Irons too and got to watch him.
So, my goal is to learn as much as I can and try to get better and better and better at everything. Even though I’ve done probably two-thousand improv shows now, I still feel like each one you can still try to learn something new and get better, because with improv, you never know what’s going to happen. So, I always try to use that. I kind of learn a little bit of this, a little bit of that, from each person that I work with and then when younger people come around me, I try to impart that wisdom on them."
Check out our full video interview with Ben Schwartz below and don't forget to like and subscribe!
Flora & Ulysses is based on the Newbery Award-winning book about 10-year-old Flora, an avid comic book fan and a self-avowed cynic, whose parents have recently separated. After rescuing a squirrel she names Ulysses, Flora is amazed to discover he possesses unique superhero powers, which take them on an adventure of humorous complications that ultimately change Flora's life--and her outlook--forever.
Flora & Ulysses premieres exclusively on Disney+ on February 19