ANDY SAMBERG IS FIRE
Hollywood's Hottest Commodity's Latest Projects
It’s about goddamn time the world starts taking Andy Samberg seriously. The 41-year-old actor has been recognized in comedy circles since his 2005 Saturday Night Live debut with The Lonely Island, a troupe he founded with two friends, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. Their breakout sketch was the music video “Lazy Sunday,” which boosted the young comedians’ stardom and then-obscure video-sharing website YouTube.
The Lonely Island followed this hit with a string of successful music videos and “digital shorts,” an SNL experiment that allowed content creators to film low budget segments for the show that wouldn’t need to be performed live. One such sketch, “Dear Sister,” a parody of an episode of FOX’s primetime drama The O.C., ended up becoming more well-known than the scene it was spoofing.
The Lonely Island became an overnight success, and after releasing their debut album Incredibad, featuring many songs that originally aired on SNL, it seemed like the sky was the limit for the trio. Of the three, one quickly emerged with the charisma, comedic timing and self-effacing awkwardness that makes a comedy star: Andy Samberg.
Samberg led the trio’s 2007 theatrical debut Hot Rod while Schaffer directed. The film, a passion project of Lorne Michaels himself, managed to avoid the pitfalls suffered by past SNL star vehicles; despite bombing at the box office, Hot Rod became a veritable cult classic thanks to Samberg’s likable protagonist and quotable character actors such as Chris Parnell. Its premise, a young man attempting daredevil stunts to pay his stepfather’s medical bills, is still cited in pop culture discourse as an indictment of the American healthcare system.
The Lonely Island followed up with a spiritual successor to Hot Rod in 2016. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, is a brilliant satire of the contemporary music business, targeting pop artists who achieve early success like Justin Bieber and rappers like Macklemore whose out-of-touch, “woke” anthems do more harm than good. Filming occurred alongside Samberg’s long-running FOX, now NBC sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
In 2020, Samberg faces a reckoning. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and renewed calls for defunding police departments across the country, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is re-examining its approach for the show’s next season. Despite covering police corruption and racism in the force, recurring themes that culminated in a heartbreaking stop-and-frisk episode, Nine-Nine has been consistently accused of being “copaganda” over its seven season run. Now, the writers and show runners have pledged to reassess their writing process moving forward.
Samberg’s newest film, Palm Springs, is now available on Hulu. It’s a time loop movie in the vein of Groundhog Day and currently sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. In a poignant scene, Samberg’s co-star, played to perfection by Cristin Milioti, reminds him that to know somebody is to know the good, the bad and how they got to where they are today. Following Samberg’s fifteen-year rise to stardom will tell you much of what you need to know about where he came from, but it’s anyone’s guess where he’s going next.
