446: Nick Searcy—Justify This

You are about to hear another episode of The Way I Heard It with me, Mike Rowe, and the one and only Chuck Klausmeyer.

Yes, hello.

Yes.

Yes, to what?

Yes, you'll hear me, but you'll basically hear Nick Cersei more than me.

That's true.

That's true.

Of the three of us, you will be heard very little.

The least.

The least.

But still, you do chime in with a couple of interesting points.

Very important stuff.

Earth-shattering, really, when you think about about it.

Nick Cersei is our friend.

Well, he's your friend.

You've known him for a long time.

You introduced us virtually about a year and a half ago after he did a movie that damn near got him canceled and caused me no amount of grief either.

Capital Punishment was the film Nick did in the aftermath of January 6th.

And you know what?

I just thought it was worth talking about.

And it wasn't a big political conversation, but I was glad to have it.

I've always liked the guy.

You know him from Justified.

You might know him from Fried Green Tomatoes or maybe 40 other films that he's done.

He's a terrific character actor.

He's written his first book.

It's called Justify This.

It is funny.

It is smart.

I mean, if you know Nick, you're going to get this great blend of

honesty.

I mean, he's very much like Art Mullen in Justified.

Yes.

And he said that that character is based on his father.

So he's really kind of sort of playing his father, it seems.

Yeah.

So that's a plug for Justified.

If you haven't seen every season of it, you really should.

It's terrific.

His book is great.

He's got a new project that he's working on as well called Where I'm Bound, which we get into.

And he's got a follow-up to Capital Punishment because he's a glutton.

For punishment.

For punishment, right.

Yeah.

That's called The War on Truth.

And it's a four-part series, which is available online.

I admire him.

I admire him because he has plenty to lose and he simply doesn't want to spend the rest of his life doing anything that doesn't matter to him.

And you know when you find people like that in this industry, you might not agree with them but you'd be foolish to ignore them.

You can just learn so much I think from people who take real risks and big swings

in this place we call Sodom and Gomorrah.

Indeed.

Justify This is the name of the book.

It's also the name of this episode.

Nick Searcy is the name of my guest if you don't already like him.

You're about to, right after this.

Dumb.

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I can't believe we've never never met in person.

I know, it is funny.

Even when you walked in, I'm like, oh, hey, Nick.

And I just realized I should be saying, well, it's nice to finally meet you.

Yeah, well, it's funny.

Nice to meet you, too.

I'll tell you now.

The shirt did throw me for a loop, but then I looked in the mirror and I realized I'm sporting some colors that don't occur in nature either.

So here we sit.

This is a shirt that my wife picked out for me, and I just don't question it.

I just go, oh, you think that?

Okay.

I'll wear that.

So did you evolve into that level of perpetual acquiescence, or was this just good instincts from the beginning?

It It took me a long time to learn that.

Yeah, it took a while and I just went about five years ago, I think, I just went, oh, this isn't worth fighting about.

Right.

Because I never win.

What a silly hill to die on or even get wounded on.

Yeah, I'm not going to fight anymore.

Speaking of which, Chuck told me a funny story about you.

I think that the day you guys met,

how long ago would that have been?

10 years?

At least, yeah, I would say.

Maybe 15.

Yeah, something probably more like 15.

It was a while ago.

Yeah.

I don't even know if you remember, but I don't know why I offered you a cigar.

I don't have any cigars.

But then I realized there was like

a memory artifact, and Chuck had told me that the day you guys met, you came over to this apartment.

Yeah.

And I said, can I smoke a cigar here?

And he said, no.

And I said, well, let's go to my house then.

I've got a room that you can smoke a cigar in.

I mean,

you've got rooms where you have to smoke cigars.

That's right.

It's required.

I was fresh out of those kinds of rooms.

So did you hesitate, Chuck, for a moment knowing that an actor you admired a great deal and had watched over the years was suddenly in your home making an indecent proposal and you had to give him the bad news?

Like, did you think about saying, yep, screw it?

Not even for a second.

Really?

And it was immediate.

It was like, no.

I think I said it just like that.

I think he did.

I think it was.

It's high-pitched and wonderful.

I didn't remember that tone.

It was kind of whiny.

No.

Here, wear this shirt.

It was like,

it sounded more like, ooh, than no.

I don't have much of a cigar story, but something deeply humiliating happened to me about four months ago.

I did Joe Rogan's podcast.

You know, we sat down and got everything squared away, and you kind of hunker in because you know you're going to be there for three hours.

Right, you got to relax.

It's a commitment.

And so he's like, hey, you want a cigar?

And unlike Chuck, Like the honest answer was without the high-pitched part, which is like, no, man, I'm not going to smoke a cigar.

I'm going to sit down and talk talk with you for a while.

And it's a small room, like all the smoke.

What are we doing?

You know, I mean, is there going to be whiskey too?

If so, maybe.

But of course, I said, oh, yeah, that'd be great.

So he hands me a cigar and then he rolls this device from the future across the desk,

which, of course, is just a lighter.

But there have been so, like the last time I smoked a cigar, I struck a match on a brick.

Big match.

Yes.

This thing has got like rocket fuel in it, and it's like air-fed.

And it took me like two minutes to figure out how to operate it.

And then, of course, I'm just,

you know, it's the first big drag I took.

And I was right in the middle of telling some story.

Like the part of my brain that I wanted to work tried to say, it's like that scene in Young Frankenstein when Gene Hackman

offers cigars to the creature.

Right.

But I conflated it with blazing saddles.

And I got everything all wrong.

I'm like high from the cigar.

I'm high from the cigar, embarrassed because I can't operate the lighter.

And Joe's like, no, man, I didn't see that scene.

So I really came out of the gate weak.

Weak and all.

Well, those torches, I think they're basically those cigar torches.

It's for golf courses.

They came up because you can do that in the wind.

In the high wind.

So you can also burn your eyebrows off if you're not careful.

Have you done that before?

Well, almost.

Because I got that too.

I had a portable little stove working with a farrier down in Kentucky, I think.

And we were making horseshoes out in the middle of nowhere, and the gas built up, and I got too close.

And suddenly

I'm picking pieces of contact lens out of my eye.

Oh, my God.

Just thinking I dodged a bullet there.

You've been dodging bullets your whole life, brother.

Fake ones.

Fake bullets.

Yeah, but they leave a mark too, man.

They leave a mark.

They leave a mark on your soul.

What's the latest bullet that you've dodged, or did you just take one for the team?

Like what are you in the midst of right now?

I got so many things I want to talk to you about, but capital punishment, obviously, and everything that's happened since then and what a strange time it must be for you to see the headlines.

Yeah.

I mean, are you feeling

vindicated at all?

Yeah, I mean, more and more.

I'm beginning to feel vindicated.

I mean, the truth is coming out.

And,

you know, we were kind of ahead of the game, even though we weren't sure about exactly what we were finding when we made the documentaries.

We made the first documentary, Capital Punishment, in 2021.

Like November, we released it, same year of January 6th.

So we were kind of like piecing it together and hinting at things.

But no, it's been, I mean, I was overjoyed when Trump pardoned.

the January 6th people because by this point I'd interviewed 65 or 70 of them and I'd gotten to know them and some of them had become friends And I knew what kind of people they were.

And I was just, there's that pins and needles kind of thing leading up to it after he got elected.

It's like, is he really going to do it?

Because so many people,

John Strand, Brandon Stracha, Colton McAbee, all these people that I knew, that I knew their stories, and I knew that what had happened to them was not fair.

But I didn't know if Trump was really going to go through with it, if he was really going to pardon them.

Well, we talked to you about this.

It's been over a year, right?

Yeah, I think so.

Easily.

And Chuck was nervous.

I was a little nervous.

I mean, there was a lot of blood in the water.

I was more interested, not from a political point of view, but just from this idea that so many people there seemed to experience such a different thing at the same time.

That level of ambiguity and experiential difference seemed undeniable, and yet there was so much certainty in the narrative.

That's what freaked me out, Nick, honestly.

And that's why I kind of wound up going down that road, because I was there that day.

I was there on January 6th, and what I saw was people praying and singing hymns, and people were joyful,

pretty much.

And I really didn't see any of the violence.

You know, I didn't see...

what they were showing me on television and I was there.

So that was sort of what sent us down the road of like, let's figure this out.

Somebody said, would you like to make a documentary about that?

And I said, sure, I would like to.

And I remember, too, after talking to you, thinking, boy, somebody's going to pick this up in a hurry.

This is going to go tearing through the corridors at Fox.

It's going to go tearing through.

And man, nobody touched it.

No.

They were scared.

The people were straight up, flat out scared.

Yeah, Fox wouldn't even let us buy advertisements for the movie because I think they were in the midst of of that whole you know election, they were being sued and you know, whatever.

Over 980 million among friends, but whatever.

Yeah, but they were afraid to have anything on that might jeopardize that, I guess.

And so, but yeah, it wasn't just Fox.

I mean,

everybody was kind of nervous about it.

And we were coming out strong saying, this is all a lie.

They're lying to you.

Listen to us.

And nobody really wanted to jump in and go endorse that, you know, because we were kind of, of, we were pushing it pretty hard.

So what am I looking at here?

Is this a sequel of sorts?

We made a sequel to Capital Punishment called The War on Truth, which is now

the first edit of it was four and a half hours long.

We cut it down to two.

And then we decided to release it in four parts.

So now it's a four-part miniseries.

And it basically, mostly what The War on Truth is about is revealing who these people are that the government has been telling you are domestic terrorists and white supremacists and violent, hateful people.

And they're nothing of the sort.

And that should give you some idea of how deep the lie goes.

Because they have to demonize these people in order to preserve the narrative.

If they can't keep the idea going that January 6th was a violent uprising by people who wanted to overthrow the government, then everything crumbles around them.

What do you think?

I know you don't have a crystal ball, but institutions are still,

I think, operating at all-time low levels of trust in general.

Certainly, the media has got an awful lot on them right now.

Can the Democratic Party recover?

Do you think the current, as people are grappling to get up to speed with the fact that there really and truly was a cover-up,

is that going to break what you would call the spell surrounding this day?

I don't know.

I keep telling, people ask me that, and I say, I don't know what they do if they give up the lie.

It's like, if they admit that they lied that profoundly for that long,

the only consequences for them have to be legal.

They have to go to jail.

So I think their only chance is to try to continue to push the lie.

And that's why we're still getting pushback on our movie and on the things that we're saying.

There's still a lot of fear about coming out and saying exactly what happened.

So, I mean, just to remind people, though, the movie, it didn't leave me feeling like you were denying any of what we saw on TV.

It was more like the blind guy.

grabbing the tusk on the elephant and concluding that he was holding on to an ivory statue.

Right.

You just didn't see enough to understand in context the totality of what happened.

But also, I mean, what we did see, what we found out later, even after we made the first film, we had hints of it.

It's like we had footage of people changing clothes in the bushes and changing out of their gear into Trump gear.

And we were going, what is that about?

These people are obviously not actual sincere Trump supporters.

These are people that were sent there to do some damage, to cause some ruckus.

And that is coming out more and more.

That's being shown to be true.

And

we hinted in the first movies like, there's a lot of reports that there were people from the government that infiltrated the crowd that caused a lot of the vandalism, that incited the crowd to do some things.

Yeah, some of the people did some bad things, but

what caused them to do it?

And in the War on Truth, you see more...

more and more that the Capitol police were actually the aggressors in the situation.

You had a huge crowd outside the Capitol that was out there just singing songs and doing nothing, and the Capitol Police began firing munitions into the middle of the crowd.

What kind of munitions?

Flashbangs, tear gas canisters, rubber bullets in many cases.

There's one guy that got hit by the rubber bullet in the cheek.

And when it happened, the people in the crowd were screaming, what are you doing?

Why are you firing at us?

So that kind of thing is, that's not come out yet as clearly as it should because the Capitol Police were the aggressors.

And in War on Truth, we interviewed Tarek Johnson, who was a Capitol policeman that day, who testified that this was all a setup, that the Capitol Police were set up just as much as the crowd was.

And

Tarek Johnson is the one who cleared the House and Senate.

before the crowd got to them because he knew that if the crowd had breached the House and Senate while the senators or the representatives were still in there, that would have been a situation where the Capitol Police would have had to open fire because they're not allowed to do that.

He was radioing his superior officers saying, let me clear the House and Senate, let me clear the chambers, and they, no response.

He never got an okay.

And then he did it on his own.

He did it of his own volition.

He cleared the house.

He cleared the chambers, and he probably saved hundreds of lives.

And then the next day after that, because he did that on his own, he was suspended for 17 months and on house arrest.

So it's a big, big, big deal.

It's a much bigger conspiracy than I can explain.

Dumb.

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Well, you know, as a storyteller, and forgive me, I know that sounds awfully precious, but it's really tempting when you know a thing is a big deal to talk about it in big terms.

You want to try and match the moment.

But what I like what you've done with this film, and to some degree with the previous one, is you tell the small stories too.

And

those, I think, are the ones that most people will be most horrified by and the ones that are going to resonate.

So we don't have to make a meal out of this, this, but I would like to hear briefly some of, I mean, people who've spent eight, nine months in jail for essentially being

pushed into the Capitol with their cell phones on or something.

Well, there's a lot of stories I could tell, but I mean, the one story that I do like to tell is because it's not just the jail time.

I mean, so many of these people

Like Colton Maccabee was in jail for four years.

He was in there for the whole time.

And three three and a half of those years, he wasn't even charged.

He couldn't even get bond.

He couldn't get bonded out because he was classified as a domestic terrorist.

And when you hear his story of what he actually did that day, he basically tried to save Roseanne Boylan's life and tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

He fell down on top of a police officer.

He was pushed in by the crowd.

And in the audio, you can hear him saying, I'm trying to help.

And the police officer goes, I know you are.

I know you are.

And he helps him up, and the the police officer says, thank you.

In the trial, the judge wouldn't allow them to play the audio so that you could hear the police officer thanking Colton for helping him up.

So if you just don't play the audio, it looks like Colton threw the guy down on the ground and then jerked him around, you know.

And that's the impression they were trying to give.

And another story is my friend.

Sorry, Nick.

Go ahead.

Are you naming names?

Like, what judge did that?

Who decided decided to take the audio out of the tape?

These things are outrageous to the point where you just, it feels like they're coming out of a real thriller, a fictitious

who done it.

You've got to be kidding me.

They did this right in front of us.

Well, I don't know the exact judge that that was, but there's about nine or ten.

All these cases went before D.C.

judges because that was another thing they did, was they made it so that you could not get a change of venue.

So every one of these cases had to be tried before a DC jury, which is 99% Democrat.

And

most of the people in the District of Columbia think that everybody who went to January 6th that day needs to go to jail.

And the judges are in the same boat.

So you have judges like Royce Lamberth,

Colleen Collar-Cottelli.

These are just the names I can remember.

off the top of my head, but none of these people could get a fair trial with these judges.

And in fact, Collar Cottelli is probably the worst one.

She would call people insurrectionists in her summation, even though no one was ever charged with insurrection.

I don't have the name of that judge off the top of my head, but I will say that

a lot of the damage that was done to these people was in their communities, their reputations.

They lost their businesses because the government put out this idea that everybody who went there was some sort of racist terrorist.

So everybody, they're demonized in their communities, their sandwich shops, their coffee shops, all these things that they owned are now getting terrible Yelp reviews and don't go eat at this place.

It's a Scarlet Letter.

Yeah.

And my friend Jay Johnston, who was an actor like me, he was trapped in the tunnel fracas.

And during that, you know, it was a lot of pushing and shoving.

During that

whole melee, a police shield was passed back through the crowd.

And Jay's a pretty big guy.

And Jay, you know, the shield was passed back to him.

He took it and he just passed it on to somebody else.

Well, that was characterized as attacking with a deadly weapon because he put his hands on the police shield.

Jay

was completely ostracized in Hollywood.

At the time he did that, he was on a show called Bill's Burgers or some animated show.

Yeah.

I can't remember what it was.

But anyway, lost his job.

All of his Hollywood friends turned their back on him.

You know, he comes out of the comedy community.

All those comedians just vilified him.

We're never working with him again.

So it's not just what the government did.

It's what the government narrative caused the community to do.

Which they enabled.

I mean,

I remember as a kid reading about,

oh, in the...

you know, the old Puritan days,

the hardest thing that could happen to a person was to be excommunicated, to be banished.

Yeah.

And

you don't think about that much.

It just feels like an artifact of some old thing, but to not be able to go into your favorite diner, your sandwich shop, your church, the school.

Yeah.

You know,

it's like, where do I go to get my reputation back?

Even though they've been pardoned, even though they, yes, the legal trouble is over.

But they're all like, where do I go to get

my standing in the community back?

Well, look, that's the oldest dodge in journalism.

You know, when the headline's dead wrong, the correction shows up on the back of the bottom

of the last page.

Nobody sees it.

Hey, there's one part I think you failed to mention was that Colton McAbee was a police officer.

Oh, that's right.

A sheriff or something like that.

Do you remember?

Colton McCabe was a...

No, he was Tennessee.

He was Williamson County where I live.

He was a deputy there at the time that he went to Washington that day.

And he even had police on his clothes that day, showing that he was, you know, he wasn't on duty, but he was.

And he was immediately, the sheriff's department there, they couldn't speak about him.

They couldn't talk to his wife.

And the way I wound up making the War on Truth, by the way, is because I was in a butcher shop right before Christmas.

And Leslie and I are going, you know, the kids are coming over.

Let's go order a roast.

And so we go into this butcher shop.

I look up on the internet this is the best one in Franklin I go in I order the steak from or the roast from this nice young lady I get home I get a text from her Mr.

Cersei could you give me a call I helped you with your roast today so I thought okay they run out of meat or something I don't know so I call this lady back and she said I thought you sounded your name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place you.

But then I talked to my husband and he said that you were the guy that made Capital Punishment, the first movie about January 6th.

I go, oh, that's great.

Your husband's one of the 10 people that saw it.

Can I speak to him?

And she said, no, he's in the D.C.

Gulag.

He's been there for two years.

And it was like, it was Sarah Maccabee.

It was Colton Maccabee's wife

with roast.

And I just went, because up to that point, I've been resisting.

It's like.

No, it's real.

Real, like real, real, real.

Yeah.

I was like, I didn't want to make a sequel, but then I was like, okay, I think God's telling me I need to make the sequel.

You typically listen when you're pretty sure the

suggestion is coming from on high?

I try to.

I try to.

Sometimes it's not what you want to hear, you know, but I try to.

How hard was it for you and Leslie when you, I mean, I'm sure you wrestled with it, prayed about it, and so forth, but when you decided to make capital punishment, People got to remember that you did this right on the heels of this thing.

I mean, you just literally walked up to the wood stove that you were absolutely conscious was roaring.

And you just put your hand on it as if to say, is this thing hot?

Right.

Was it?

You know, I think in that, for that first one,

I didn't really question it.

It was sort of like, okay, I've got to do this.

There was never really a doubt in my mind.

I said, I knew that, you know, there were going to be some repercussions from it, but I had already directed Gosnell, the abortion movie.

Dodge that bullet.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, I was kind of already exposed as one of those people anyway

in Hollywood.

So I figure how much worse could it get.

But why are you still standing?

I mean, if you think about the guy you just described, Jay.

Was it Jay?

Yeah.

Right.

And so many others.

You're a clear and present danger.

You're a threat.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, I'm sure that there have been jobs that I haven't gotten because of it, but I've continued to work enough.

You're too busy to miss the jobs you didn't get.

You don't even have an agent, do you?

No, I don't have one anymore.

And the reason I don't have an agent is because I was talking to him.

It was right when Capital Punishment came out.

I said, what did you think of it?

And he goes, I'm not going to watch that.

I go, you're not even going to watch it?

He said, I'm not watching that.

That was an insurrection, full stop, and I'm not going to watch that propaganda.

He wouldn't even watch 10% of it.

I said, well,

right.

Exactly.

Jesus, you should have used that line.

That's kidding.

But I said, I guess you don't want to be my agent then.

Why do you want to represent some insurrectionist?

So I fired him.

And ever since then, I've been some agents that have come sniffing around saying, you know, I'd like to represent you.

And I'd go, okay, run it by everybody else in your office.

And then I never heard from him again.

Yep.

Because it goes that way too.

Like the same way you get excommunicated in your neighborhood for being on the wrong side of that argument.

Can you imagine working in the 10 percentery in this town?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, there must be some, but I don't.

I know it's a good friend of mine who got run out of being an agent for the same reasons.

He was too open about what he thought.

And I do know some other agents that are, you know, at least a little bit on the right side of things.

They can't really expose themselves to the rest of their agency because they would just be excommunicated.

What about the persuadables who are on the other side of the aisle?

Your friend Graham.

I love your book, by the way.

The book is called Justify This, and here we'll shamelessly pivot to this for a moment.

But

it has two forwards.

Yeah.

One from the right and one to the left.

Which I think is terrific.

It's great that you would do that.

And talk about Graham, if you would.

Well, Graham.

Graham's Canadian, so that explains a lot.

What can you do?

But Graham and I have been friends for a long time.

I met Graham on From the Earth of the Moon.

He was one of the supervising producers.

And the story I always tell is like for 15 years after From the Earth of the Moon, Graham was writing all these movies.

He wrote Speed.

He did Boomtown.

He was doing all this stuff.

And I'd be emailing him going, I thought we were friends.

What?

You don't ever have anything for me?

And so he said when he read the pilot for Justified, he said, finally, I've got something for Nick.

I can shut him up.

So that's kind of how I got into Justified.

Now, did you guys

ever talk politically?

Were you aware from whence the other was coming?

Well, Graham is very, very funny.

He has a great sense of humor.

And

we joke about it.

You know, he knows that I think he's a communist and whatever.

But, you know, it's never been like we don't have arguments because we know there's no point.

You know, I like Graham.

He likes me.

You know, I like him as an artist.

He liked me as an actor.

So we never really had some big powwow about politics.

But look, I think that there was a time, and we're both old enough to remember, where that was the default.

Yeah.

It was simply, it's like, okay, we're not going to be singing together out of that hymn book, but look at all the other things we can do in life.

And that to me is the great tragedy of the times that we're in now.

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slash

When I was coming up, you know, I got my career started in North Carolina in a regional market.

And I knew people that were, you know, we would have discussions in the waiting room for auditions, and it was never contentious.

You know, there were some guys that were Clinton people or whatever.

You know, we just talked about it.

But then when I got to, by the time I got my career going, I moved to L.A., I was like, I didn't realize that that wasn't the same in Los Angeles that it it was in North Carolina.

It was a bad thing if you really came out.

And by the time I realized that, it was too late.

So I just had to roll with it.

So when you read The Pilot, I assume Graham sent it to you.

I'm curious to the extent that he and you both were already familiar with Elmore Leonard and what, if anything, what kind of impression that guy had already made on you?

I had read a couple of his books.

I mean, I wasn't like a big avid Elmore Leonard fan, but I kind of read a couple of his books, and so I sort of got the tone of it.

You know, I got the snappy dialogue and the, you know, the crispness of it.

Yeah.

You know.

And Graham, I think, really, I don't know if Graham had really read Elmore Leonard before, but he certainly steeped himself in it after he got this assignment.

Had Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writing posted up.

I got him too.

Yeah.

I literally have him on my wall.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My favorite is,

I think it's dispense with the hoop-de-doodle.

Yeah.

Right?

Just get all the stuff out of the way.

And it's funny.

You know, David Mamet was sitting right where you are, you know, yesterday.

Well, that's an honor.

Boy.

Well, I mean, I didn't connect the dots then, but there are very few guys he reminds me of as a writer, but Elmore Leonard's one of them.

You know, and Hemingway to an extent, too.

Yeah.

Sparse.

Cleanness of it.

Yeah.

Like, don't say anything but he said.

You know,

that's right.

The attributions.

Yeah, right.

Never, yeah.

And not replied.

Not yet.

Or sighed.

Intoned.

Yeah.

Not even asked.

Right.

You know, it's all the attributions are he said and she said.

Yeah.

And at first it feels,

it's a little awkward at first because you're not used to reading that way.

But then later it's, it's actually very comforting.

Yeah, because you don't spend any time.

You just write through it.

He's not selling you.

And like or adverbs, anything that ends with L-Y, I think he was firmly against, or against firmly.

There's another writer I love, Lawrence Block.

His style is a bit like Elmore's, I think.

So was Art Mullen?

Stupid question.

You've had it a thousand times, but I think I know the answer.

That had to be

a hinge in your curriculum viote.

It was a great gift for that to come along at that point in my life.

You know, I was in my 50s, and it's like, you know, you're kind of facing the over-the-hill gang.

You know, I'm getting ready to ride with those old men.

But to get a part like that at that stage in my life was just a great gift.

And

when did you know it?

Like, when did you know?

I mean, obviously the offer was kind, and the fact that Chuck has yet to see the program is unforgivable.

What?

What are you talking about?

You know, I don't believe you're familiar with Justified at this point.

Every single episode I have seen.

Not one.

Right.

Not one.

Every single one.

He's just saying that to make me feel better?

Is that what it is?

His wife Leslie is in it?

Yeah, I watched the whole thing.

I binged it before we had him on the first time.

Oh, that's right, because you hadn't seen any of it.

I hadn't seen it up until then, but you had been telling me about it for years.

For years.

Yeah.

See,

I am an Elmworth.

I feel like I knew...

the Harlan story and I knew everything that came out in that first thing.

And I didn't see it promoted.

I didn't see it advertised, which is almost impossible to do anymore.

I just found it.

It was just one of those things where it's like reaching in your pocket of your old tuxedo and finding $200 in a money clip you didn't even know you had.

Like going, wow, I'm so happy to find this.

It was just terrific, man.

Yeah.

Just terrific.

It's a really good show.

And for me personally, it's a tribute to my own father.

You know, it's like the way I played that character was like, I just played him like my dad because my dad was always a boss.

He ran a restaurant and he just had this really acerbic sense of humor and this really cutting way of keeping people in line, but in a way that was pleasant and funny.

Tough, kind,

with just a little, just enough world weary on you,

but not bitter.

Right.

Right.

I mean, it was, it was just terrific to watch.

Yeah.

I'm very grateful for that.

When people stop you in airports, et cetera, it's usually for that?

Well, since I moved to Kentucky,

I'm a huge star in Kentucky.

Yeah.

Like, I don't get recognized that much, but in Kentucky, I walk into a restaurant and they go, Art Mullen.

Yeah.

They know.

Have you been following Walton Goggins?

Yeah, he's done great.

But again, we were just talking earlier.

It's like, well, I've been following that guy for years.

And then all of a sudden the White Lotus thing.

Yeah.

And now the country's like discovered him.

Yeah.

What's blowing up?

Yeah.

What a ride.

Yeah.

No, he's done really well.

I'm happy for him.

Well, I'm happy for you, man.

I love that you don't have an agent.

I love that somehow you're still standing.

This is your first book.

Yeah.

What do I need?

I mean, is it, it's not really about justified.

No, it's just sort of a summation, kind of a autobiography, you know, and it

just came about because

this company approached me and said, we think you should write a book.

I said, I'm just some character actor.

You think anybody's going to buy that?

And they gave me a guy to work with to help me write it or whatever.

Johnny Russo.

Yeah.

And so I would tell him these stories.

And, you know, I just started talking to him.

He said, I'll just record you and then we'll put it together.

Well, after about, I don't know, 16, 17 hours.

He sent me an email one day and said, well, I turned the book in.

I go, what are you talking about?

I haven't even seen it yet.

And he said, no, no.

I said, send me what you sent in.

And

I looked at it and it was like, I sound like an idiot.

You can't send that in.

And so I called the company.

I said, look, you've got to let me rewrite this.

Because he had kind of just transcribed what I said.

And

you sound like an idiot if somebody just, you know,

it's every uh and every well and dot dot dot.

And then I, you know, so I kind of rewrote it all.

And then, you know, added some things that he hadn't written about, that we hadn't gotten to yet.

So it started out as something I was going to go, oh, that won't be much work.

And then it turned into like, okay,

I really kind of had to write that book.

Yeah, well, same thing happened to me.

And I realized it really was the frog in the boiling water where all of a sudden, I don't know when it became so precious, but it did.

And I was agonizing in ways that I normally wouldn't.

I just think, you know, there's something about writing,

the business of writing a thing down

that obviously amplifies it in some way.

And there's a permanence to it.

You know, this is going to be around.

I have to make sure that this is

embarrassing.

You know, it's going to live for a while.

What about this thing, man?

Where I'm going to go.

Oh, yeah.

Well, that's the movie I'm trying to put together.

A friend of mine wrote this movie.

His father, who is now a minister,

sang in gospel quartets in the 60s.

And most of, a lot of my cousins were preachers, and my first cousin was a gospel singer.

So he started telling, we were doing a play together, this guy and I, and he started telling me the story about his father.

And I said, that sounds like a movie, because the whole thing was about him going into the gospel music world and finding out that it was

much more of a business than he thought it was.

You know, he thought it was just, I'm going to be spreading the gospel, but he finds out that it's a little darkness there and a little bit more, you know, what's the word,

calculated than he thought.

It is an extraordinarily deliberate world.

I don't know a ton about it, but I

I know enough.

I got hooked on the cathedrals

one night.

Yeah.

And actually, it's funny.

We have a friend.

You remember Steve Lajan from the old days?

Sure.

He wound up working

at a Christian radio station, WRBS.

And I introduced him to a quartet called The Haven of Rest.

And he introduced me to the cathedrals.

And then we just went down this rabbit hole.

There are hundreds of famous southern gospel quartets.

It's not barbershop,

but it's those same power harmonies.

Yeah.

And there's always a tenor with no top and a bass with no bottom.

Right.

And just the idea that there's, here's this world where these musicians, many times without instruments, but sometimes with,

are like on the circuit.

You know, making the rounds.

It's like a, I don't know, oh brother, where art thou kind of vibe over the whole thing.

Yeah, the Blackwood brothers, the Inspirations.

I grew up with the Inspirations because they were from Western North Carolina where I grew up.

And actually, my mother was a biology teacher.

And the chemistry teacher was Martin Cook.

And he left teaching to become the piano player for the Inspirations when I was about six years old.

And he kind of, I think

his son or his grandson is now running the Inspirations.

So it's a long-standing,

I mean, they've been around for 50 years.

Yeah.

But the originals?

Well, there's a whole young, it's the new inspirations now.

Right.

But there's a, you know, vestiges of the old guard.

They're still, they're like the, you know, Leonard Skynyrd.

There's one guy left that's still alive.

Right.

What is it about that form of music, in your view, that resonates so profoundly

with some people,

but is so just completely alien to others?

It's so specific.

It is.

It's a real interesting subculture.

And that's kind of why I wanted to do the movie.

There's never been anything about it.

You know, very little.

The Righteous Gemstones thing, that's a parody.

I think it's the, like you said, it's the power of the harmonies.

And it's that fascinating sort of mixture between

sincere religious belief and showmanship.

That's it.

There it is.

Because they are putting on a show and they are selling something to the audience, you know, above and beyond the sincerity of the message they're trying to deliver.

Do you remember?

So the inspirations were your inspiration, I suppose.

But were you in a church the first time you heard that kind of music come at you with all the stenturian force that men in harmony can muster?

Yeah, well, my uncle was an evangelist.

He was a traveling preacher.

And so I ended up going to a lot of revivals.

And he played the guitar and sang.

And his daughter and his son sang with him sometimes.

And his son is the one who became like a lead singer in a gospel quartet.

So I just remember, I think my first memory of it is seeing my uncle sing harmony with his son and daughter.

That was my introduction to it.

And then, you know, I would go to these.

gospel sings where there'd be five groups or something and they'd all you know sing for an hour and

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Have you talked to Nick before about barbershop and the weird thing we brought?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I told him that, you know, that we sang together and we do it on the podcast all the time as well.

Well, I'm thinking more of the, like the first time we were 17, maybe 18 years old, and our music teacher was a big deal in that world.

And he directed an international world champion men's chorus that sang the old songs.

Now, this was not a religious group, although

they really could tear up near my God to thee.

I mean, like,

in a way that would make you cry, regardless of what you believed in or didn't believe in.

Right.

It's that.

It's that kind of magic that's baked into this.

It was the first time in my life.

I saw 120 men, many of whom had fought in the Korean War and the Second World War, shoulder to shoulder, singing about

the pals that would never let you down, and the sweetheart, Sigma Kai,

and a mother's love.

Tough men, hard men,

weeping as they sang.

And I remember just, I was just a boy sitting there next to Chuck, and we, it got us

like in this, like it it was the combination of unapologetic sentimentality

with actual talent and

a wall of sound.

And that too.

You know how on a hot day you can like see the heat coming up off the macadam?

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

You could see the sound waves in the air.

It just hit you.

And it knocked the moisture out of your eyes.

Right.

I don't know.

There's just something,

there's an alchemy in that.

I remember

my best agent, Joe Rice, who passed away, sadly, about a few years ago.

I've never gotten another one as good as him, but

when I played him the music that we had written this show, and we had links to some of the music that was in it.

And Joe Rice said to me, I love that music.

I don't even believe in Jesus.

It made me cry.

It was great.

He chased a dream.

He found a calling.

Yeah, you got to have a deck, don't you?

Yeah,

anymore, yeah.

And we're pretty far down the road.

I mean, we have a company out of Nashville called Third Coast Film, and they're putting the deals together.

Patricia Heaton and her husband are helping David Hunt.

They're going to be involved.

Patricia's going to be in the cast.

You got Sam Rockwell?

It's coming together.

Well, that's...

That's who I want.

Oh, I got you.

I'm like, wow, this is an amazing cast.

I did a movie with Sam.

I know Lori.

I mean, you know, these are the people that I want.

But I keep telling these guys, you've got to get the money together because, you know, these guys have schedules.

I've got to be able to tell them when they're going to work.

It's like, so you're in the midst, like all these projects have just life cycles that.

A lot of people probably don't understand.

But it's kind of like being a farmer, I guess.

You're either reaping or you're sowing or planning or doing a rain dance and hoping for the best.

Yeah, people don't really, and I didn't know before I started doing this, but how long it takes to put together a movie like this.

I mean, we're going on seven years.

We wrote the script seven years ago and then rewrote it and rewrote it and changed, you know, different companies get involved and then they fall away or whatever.

Yeah.

But it's a long road.

That's so funny.

I'm thinking of Jack Teeter now, who was here three hours ago.

You'd love this guy.

His great uncle

was blind

from the age of five on.

And

in spite of that, was determined to become an engineer, which he did, and then went on to

invent the automatic transmission.

Oh, wow.

And then cruise control.

He changed the automotive industry, ran a company out of Hagerstown, Indiana for years called Perfect Circle, which made the...

Point is, you know,

this guy decides I have an extraordinary relative and a movie needs to be made.

And I wind up narrating this documentary, and we just had him in here to talk about it.

And my point is, you know, if you don't have an agent and if you're not playing the Hollywood game, then

all of these projects become very personal, whether it's January 6th or whether it's where I'm bound, right?

And so something is certainly guiding you.

Well,

you know, something happened this year.

I lost two of my best friends in the same week, right, in the first week of January this year.

My wife lost one of her best friends.

And

Chuck knows one of them, Loy, our friend Loy, who I think was there the night.

Oh, Lloyd wanted to smoke cigars.

That's right.

Yeah, you were coming to see Loy.

He was staying with me.

He was visiting from Kansas City.

Voiceover guy.

Yeah.

That's correct.

Yeah.

Loy Edge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very funny guy.

I think I sent you.

Wonderful guy.

Yeah.

I sent you the audio of him singing a very funny song.

That song,

I can't play any of it.

That's correct.

I would like to play all of it, but that was the filthiest song I've ever heard.

It's pretty dirty, yeah.

It's pretty awful.

It's pretty funny, yeah.

It's like pretty dirty.

That's like saying

there are a lot of people in China.

Well, my buddy Rodney Carrington, who makes a living singing dirty songs.

Yeah.

Lloyd and I played it for him, and he's like, that's too dirty.

I can't do it.

I can't record that.

True story.

True story.

Oh, my God.

Well, I'm sorry for your loss.

But what I was saying is, like,

those losses really brought something home to me, which is like,

I don't want to spend my, what time I have left doing something that I don't care about.

You know, I don't want to, I'm not, like, looking for a job anymore.

I don't, you know, I'm not rich, but I've got, I'm not going to starve.

And I would rather spend my time doing things that it's worth taking me away from my home, from my family, from it's worth me spending the time to make that movie.

Yeah.

So like when the manager calls and goes, we got this thing,

it's three and a half months, you'll be in Vancouver.

I go,

how much?

Yeah, right, right.

I just don't want to, I don't want to waste any more time.

It's funny.

And by funny, I don't mean funny at all, but I mean human, how sometimes it's like something has to grab you by the lapels and shake you yeah you know I just

it forces you to go okay realistically I probably don't have 30 years

maybe I've got 20 maybe it's in the teens you know right

do I want to you know and I think of Ray Liota Ray Lioda who I never worked with him, but I always looked up to him.

And

he dies in the Dominican Republic at 63,

doing a little independent film and

I just go I don't I don't want to go that way no it's the big chill yeah you're right in that neighborhood too right yeah I'm 63 now yeah yeah

man he was something in Field of Dreams oh

it really snuck up on you that performance you know and good fellas and you know all well good fellas didn't sneak up on me that hit me like a yeah I mean but the subtlety that he brought to that yeah just those couple of scenes is they're crazy how that like what you do what you've done those little moments that get

just embedded in your crawl yeah

i've had a few of those you know not many but

you know i've been a character actor you know and i've had a few little brushes at sort of doing something really memorable fried green tomatoes maybe

that was the first

sure yeah Yeah.

I mean,

you were the bad guy.

I was the bad guy.

I was the wife beating husband.

But the funny thing is, whenever I meet a young lady that's in their 30s and she goes, you look really familiar, I'll start rattling things off.

No, I never saw that.

I go, did you have the Disney channel when you were a kid?

And she goes, yes.

And I go, Do you remember the movie Double Teamed?

And they were like, you were the dad.

It was like this movie, this TV movie about these two tall girls and their mean dad made them play basketball, and then they wound up in the WNBA.

Every woman, 35 to 40 right now,

had the Disney Channel.

They saw that movie 50 times.

So that's what I'm most famous for.

What are you most proud of?

Well, outside of

my personal life, outside of being...

putting up with Leslie for 38 years.

Yes.

It's been tough.

Who I just met on the telephone, by the way.

She sounds delightful.

She is.

I don't know.

I wouldn't be anything without her.

Probably

the thing I'm most proud of is

Justified's up there.

Fried Green Tomatoes is up there.

But the documentaries, you know, I think they're going to,

you know, they'll be out there.

There's still haven't wound up on Amazon or, you know, where I would like for them to be seen by people who didn't know know it was coming.

But I think those are going to be an important piece of history.

I think of you know, I was able to chronicle something that most people ignored or didn't didn't want to look at

or

didn't have the guts to do themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know if it's bravery or stupidity.

Well,

I'm not sure, like, what's really the difference other than, I guess, motive.

Stupid doesn't have a motive.

Right.

You know, it's back to touching the wood stove that you know is hot.

If you do it stupidly, well, then, you know, that scar is probably remembered differently.

But if you lurch for it to get the baby off of it,

because somehow or another a baby is on the hot stove, don't unpack the metaphor too deeply, but right, you

something pushed or pulled or kicked or prodded.

And you know, whether you're around another 10, 20, 30, 40 years or whatever, it's not up to you anymore, man.

Right.

You're the pitcher who let the ball go and now it's out there.

Yeah.

And we'll see where it goes.

I think that's part of why I decided to make those movies because when I would hear these people's stories,

I would think back to where I was on that day.

And like, if I had been where Colton was or where Jay Johnstone was, I might have done exactly what they did.

And it would be me there instead of them.

So I think in some ways I'd look at that and I go, I think I was being protected that day so that I could tell the story, so that I would be able to make these films and tell these stories.

Is the wall of resistance coming down?

Do you feel like you're going to be able

to get more,

I hate to, it's just promotion.

Is anybody going to help you tell these stories?

Well, I don't know about that.

I mean, I've had a little bit of a struggle with the producers of the movie, the people who funded it.

You know, they have a certain way that they want to do things, and I haven't been able to convince them otherwise.

I've certainly reached out to Amazon and to companies to try to help me.

get these things.

You know, I want to just give it away at this point.

I just want it to be on Amazon so that somebody could just go, what's this about?

You know,

because I'm tired of preaching to the choir.

The only people that watch it are the people that already agree with me.

You know, I want to show it to some people, the persuadable people.

Yeah.

But I haven't figured it out yet.

I've got to

turning it over in my mind.

You know,

I don't have an agent, so.

You keep saying that.

Careful.

You want one?

I want a good one.

I'd like to have one like Joe Rice, but, you know.

Yeah.

You just kind of glossed over it before, but you said when you were a boy, there were these tent revivals in your world.

And again,

that's a thing I think most people kind of know about, but very few have experienced.

What was it like?

And what kind of impact did it have?

And to what extent are these things

moral circuses?

Yeah, well, it's that blend.

It's that blend of showmanship and sincere belief.

And

I did a one-man show about a preacher when I was a struggling actor in New York for about three years.

And that was what was fascinating to me about it because

I never doubted these people's sincerity.

But I would often marvel at, like, okay,

the showmanship is going a little bit far now,

the dramatic nature of their presentation.

And the tent revivals,

you know, it was always always like we've we got to take up a collection we got to make enough money to make this so that we can get to the next town to spread the gospel you know so it's that sort of

that's the tension it's like how much of this is commerce and how much of this is spreading menu

yeah

and i like i said

It fascinated me because I never really doubted their sincerity.

I never like, you know, I never thought I was being, you know, watching somebody being a shyster or being, you know, trying to screw people out of their money.

But the showmanship was always fascinated me.

And I think that's part of why I became an actor.

I think for a while I wanted to be a preacher, and then I realized, no, it's the acting that I like.

It's the acting that I like.

Right.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny.

You know, if it goes too far, it's P.T.

Barnum.

in that direction.

Yeah.

Too far in the other direction, we fall asleep.

Yeah.

And that's what I I think a lot of movies have all, you know, leap of faith, that Steve Martin movie a long time ago.

They've always gone for the, you know, the dark side of it.

They sort of assume that the preacher is lying.

And it's like, I always, that's what Where I'm Bound is about.

It's like, no, they mean it.

You know, I want it to be sincere, what they're trying to do, but there is also this, you know, we got to make a living here.

Right.

You know, where'd where'd the title come from

uh

there's a song that um the man's father wrote that called heavens where i'm bound that is the sort of closing song of the movie i was just thinking it's a phrase from that uh

Peter Paul and Mary sang it.

I don't know who wrote it.

Maybe Dylan.

I'm walking down that long, lonesome road, babe.

Where I'm bound.

Yeah, I can't tell.

And there's a Nancy Griffith song, too, that has that phrase in it.

Where I'm bound, where I'm bound.

I can't remember the song right now, but yeah, it was always a phrase in my head.

And then when he played me this, there's four original songs that my writing partner's father wrote back in the day that were never recorded or published.

And Heaven's Where I'm Bound is one of them.

It's the last great movie you saw.

Wow.

It's going to be really old.

That says plenty.

Yeah.

Ah, gosh, that's a tough question.

Actually, does it mean you don't watch movies anymore or you just haven't seen a great one in a while?

I don't watch very many.

You know, I watch a lot of documentaries and wrestling.

I watch a lot of professional wrestling.

Do you really?

I do.

I love it.

I'm hooked on it.

Now, that actually makes an incredible amount of sense,

juxtaposed with...

the showmanship that attracted you to a tent revival.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

We're still on that same

sliding scale.

Well, just like two weeks, not even a week ago, there was a local wrestling show in Owensboro, Kentucky.

And those are my favorite.

I like the local wrestling more than I like the WWE.

Yeah.

Because you go there and those guys are trying to establish themselves and they have to sell their characters the minute they come out.

Yeah.

And so they have to establish: is this the heel or is this the good guy or whatever?

I love it.

And the crowd, there's usually 300, 250, 300 people in the crowd.

And

they are real fans.

What's going on with this?

Let's unpack it.

And maybe that's, because it's like, it's not, never mind the tent revival, but that, it's like a monster truck pull.

Yeah.

There's something completely without guile.

or pretense.

Right.

Like there's a bargain.

Like we all know you're playing a character and we all know that everything is an exaggerated version of something real, but we still go along for the ride.

We willingly spend disbelief.

And that's what I love so much about the wrestlers is that they have to be so good at acting that they make the crowd want to pay money to see them pretend to get the hell beaten out of.

Right.

Because wrestling is always about the bad guy.

Right.

It's always about the heel making everybody so mad they're going, I'm going to go see that guy get killed because I don't like him.

Right.

So that's what?

Catharsis.

That's some

Aristotle or Plato would have something to say about that.

Well, it's it's protagonist and antagonist.

Right.

I remember when we, my, when Leslie and I first met, we were living in New York City and we were talking and she was like, I've never been to a wrestling match.

I'm like, what?

You've never been to a wrestling.

So like our second or third date was like I said,

we're going to Madison Square Garden and you're going to watch Hulk Hogan wrestle.

Chuck, just for grins, I don't know if there's a picture out there, but Google my name next to WWE and Halloween Havoc.

Oh, yeah, I remember.

You remember Halloween Havoc?

I remember you were on it.

That must have been 25 years ago.

1999 or something, probably.

Oh, yeah.

That was, I was in a very, very different part of my life

where I was just, I would take any gig anywhere for it.

I didn't care.

But somehow or another, I got pulled into that world and I started doing these like ringside interviews.

and I didn't know the world Nick I didn't know the world like my and I didn't appreciate it at the time but I was I was an actor then I was just acting like a host right so I'm there in my stupid you know turtleneck my big stick mic interviewing these people who ever like there must have been 30,000 people in this stadium and I didn't I didn't know who the hell they were.

They were all just dressed up, beating the hell out of each other.

That's hilarious.

And I felt like

such a fraud, but I was so interested.

Again, it's a world, man.

It is a world.

Oh, yeah.

No, that's always been, I've always wanted to get on a WWE broadcast or something, or just even be in the crowd and they cut to me, but I'm not a big enough star for that.

But I did get to do one wrestling match as a manager with Matt Hardy,

one of the Hardy boys.

Really?

Yeah.

He and I got to be friends, and he said, I'm doing a match.

He was wrestling with a group called Ring of Honor.

He said, I'm doing a match in Nashville.

Do you want to come be my manager?

Sure.

You know, and this was when Justified was still going on.

So I get there two, three hours early.

It was a tag team match.

Matt Hardy and Mike Bennett versus the Briscoe brothers.

And I'm the manager.

So I had like a black coat and, you know.

glasses and I brought my Peabody Award that I won on Justified.

So I was going out to the crowd going, this is an award for excellence in television, something you losers will never understand.

And so they set up this gag that I'm going to throw my Peabody award into the ring and Matt's going to catch it and hit the guy with it and then try to pin him and he kicks out.

And so then I'm supposed to crawl into the ring and get my Peabody.

You'll get your Peabody.

Well, I get in the ring and Risco brother grabs my Peabody and won't give it to me and I'm going, you get your filthy hands off that award.

And he said, and we set it up so that he would kick me in the stomach and hit me on the back, and I'd lay down.

And his brother would jump off the top rope and drop the elbow on me, like an elbow drop off the top rope.

And when we're setting this up, I'm like, going, that sounds like it's going to be really funny.

Yeah.

Won't that hurt?

It could hurt a lot.

And Jay Briscoe says, oh, yeah, you'll feel it, but it's not going to hurt you.

Yeah.

Oh, there it is.

Yeah.

I can't believe you actually saw that.

I've seen, I've never missed one.

My God.

My wife can vouch for that.

I've never missed one.

Unbelievable.

That's the only picture I could find.

Well, this is as good as it gets, man.

Look at that hair.

That's a deep cut, Chuck.

That really is amazing.

Those were the days.

But that was WCW.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But look at the size of my head.

I don't have a thought in there, Nick.

All I know is there's some guy dressed up like a vampire on my right who I'm about to interview.

Yeah.

And some other gladiator type dude.

Vampyra.

Vampire.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about

what about the UFC?

Does that appeal?

I used to watch it with a friend of mine, but it makes me uncomfortable because they're really hitting each other.

They're beating the absolute snot out of each other.

I like the fake stuff better because I know at least they're trying to not hurt each other.

It's a show.

You know, I've forest gumped my way into that too.

I was in an office with Dana White and the guy that used to produce Dirty Jobs, Jobs, and he was pitching the Ultimate Fighter, the show.

Yeah.

And I walked in just in time to hear

Craig Peligian go, well, that's Mike.

You know, he's doing the dirty jobs.

He does voiceover stuff.

And Dana's like, yeah, I've seen you.

Say something.

And I said,

previously, on the ultimate fighter.

And he said, yeah, fine.

You're hired.

Did 13 seasons.

Genius.

13 seasons.

You're a genius.

You're hired.

But I mean, who knew that the ultimate fighter would go on to eclipse really all of it?

All of it.

Yeah.

It's still going, isn't it?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

It's huge.

But it just goes back to whether it's a tent revival or professional wrestling, ultimate fighting, boxing.

It's gladiators.

It's Are You Not Entertained?

Yeah.

And this whole quest to try and figure out what the hell does the audience want.

It's all Halloween havoc.

It is.

One way or another.

When Leslie was at the wrestling match watching Hulk Hogan, she looked around, and we were doing a play together at the time.

And one night we had one person in the audience, and she's like looking around.

There's 25,000 people there, and go, just think if this many people came to the theater.

And I'm going, this is theater.

This is the theater.

This is it.

What's it feel like to do a play with one person in the audience?

It was, well, in that situation, you know, equity says that you can vote.

If the cast outnumbers the audience, the cat has to vote

about whether they're not going to do it.

True, they're going to do it or not.

So we all voted, yeah, let's do it.

What the hell?

Call it a rehearsal.

Yeah.

And so we did it.

And like at intermission, we're like going, I think he likes it.

We're all peeking through the curtain.

You know,

he's still there.

He's going to stay.

I think he likes it.

He laughed once.

Oh, man.

God, I mean, how demoralizing if the guy has to go up to

go to the can.

Oh yeah.

Like, we'll wait.

Yeah.

We'll wait.

Should we pause?

We'll just pause.

Should we just pause here for a minute?

Let's take a yellow flag on this one.

Good God.

What was the play?

Do you remember?

Yeah.

It was called the Kennedy Play.

Comedy?

It was like a Pirandello six characters in search of an author kind of play where we were all playing actors trying to put together a play about the Kennedy family.

Six actors in search of an audience.

Yeah.

And that's why there was one person in the crowd.

It was not a good play, but

we also had to improvise the relationships between the actors, and I improvised that I was in love with Leslie and she bought it.

So that's how we got married.

We met in that play.

You and your wife met during a production of a play with one person in the audience.

Well, some nights we had nine or ten, you know.

How many were at your wedding?

Oh, gosh, I think about 65, 75.

Oh, see, now that's a performance.

Yeah.

And they had to come to North Carolina.

We got married at my parents' house in North Carolina.

Nice.

Yeah.

Speaking of which, what the hell is going on in your state right now?

I've got some friends there.

I'm trying, if I can, to take this project I'm working on now to that area because the recovery.

It just seems to be interminable.

It is.

And I don't know how they're going to get out of this.

It's also, it's like, I don't know how you rebuild, like, whole towns are gone.

Yeah.

You know, just wiped away Banner Elk and Blowing Rock and some other towns that are just not there anymore.

And so I think that's part of the problem is like, how do you rebuild an entire town that's just not there?

And I, you know, I think that land has some value for some mining.

And I think think there may be some of that going on that

they don't want to rebuild it because they want to get the get the minerals out of the ground.

It's amazing how the rebirth of a town.

I mean, when I look at what's going on in Lahaina, which I don't understand, it's been two years now.

Yeah.

And they're not building anything.

And I wonder about the Palisades and Al Tadena.

And you just, you look around and you see these geographical do-overs,

you know, and what's going to happen to our cities, Nick?

Just real quick, as we start to land the plane, what's going to happen to the species and the future of mankind as we understand it?

If you could just very quickly

well, I think what we're seeing happen is there's a real exit from the cities.

The cities are becoming more

concentrated and people are fleeing.

So I think what you're going to see is more more and more people flooding the countryside and getting away from the cities because Pacific Palisades is gone.

Like you said, who knows how long that's going to take to be rebuilt and how expensive it's going to be to live there.

So I think we're headed for back to nature kind of thing.

I think

we're going to have to learn how to grow tomatoes and raise chickens again.

You know, it's interesting.

Conversely,

I heard a guy not long ago from the Brookings Institute holding forth, and somebody asked a question about China and

the degree to the existential threat vis-a-vis the military, of course.

And this guy, who wrote a couple books on the thing,

just kind of said, look, I don't think it's a thing.

What China's dealing with right now that people don't understand is the exact opposite.

Everybody's coming to the cities.

And by everybody, he said 400 million people are leaving the countryside and coming into the city.

They want their industrial revolution.

And so you're talking about a population 20% larger than everybody in this country all running to towns.

And

his point was, you just can't imagine

what kind of pressure that's putting on a country.

Yeah.

And I don't know, maybe there is...

Maybe the good news is that this is the opposite of that.

Maybe the cities here have gotten too big.

You know, I fly a lot and I spend a lot of time looking out the window and I don't see anything, man.

There's a lot of open room.

There is.

There's a lot of open highway except in Nashville.

Maybe everybody's moving to Nashville.

Are you in Franklin?

Yeah.

I have a place in Franklin, but

we have a place about two hours and 45 minutes north of Nashville that is kind of our dream home kind of thing.

We got a hold of this a little over a year ago, and it's 1875 house on 16 acres with five outbuildings and end of a road.

I mean, it's totally silent at night.

You can't hear a thing.

And you can actually see the stars in a way that almost makes your eyes water.

And on one side, we've got the river.

We've got barges going up and down the river.

And on one of our borders, we've got a railroad track.

So every once in a while,

a train comes through.

I just said that to somebody the other day.

I think the sound of a train in the distance is, I don't know if there's a better, more evocative

way to make your imagination go, man, where's that going?

Yeah.

Or who's coming.

Yeah.

And what's it got on it?

You know, what's on the train?

No, it's a magical place.

And

we bought it from a friend of ours that we've been visiting for 30 years.

And for 30 years, I've been saying, if you ever want to sell this place, let me know.

And he'd let you know.

Yeah, he finally did.

My whiskey's made down at Columbia.

Yeah.

Actually, we were talking about that earlier.

Are you actually going to dabble in that in that world?

Well, I got to figure out how to do it.

I mean, I might want to talk to you off the air about how you set that up because these guys are making whiskey all the time.

It's like, okay, what do I do?

Do I just do a single barrel that's like, you know, one batch that's the Nick Searcy brand, you know?

And do I sort of come up with the mixture?

I mean, I don't know.

I'm just thinking about it.

They mentioned it to me, so I'm trying to figure it out.

It's fun, but it's a knife fight in the phone booth, too.

I mean, like, well, if you look around, you know, you know what the world needs, Chuck, really right now more than anything?

What's that?

Another celebrity with a bourbon brand.

That's what we need.

Well, that's what I've been thinking.

Yeah.

With cigars.

I'm trying to fill a need here.

I'm so glad you came.

Thank you for making the time.

Mike, it's been a pleasure.

Yeah.

Anything I forgot to ask you?

Anything we want to drill down on a little harder?

I don't think so.

I'm happy doing what I'm doing now, and I'm really excited to see what happens to me now that I'm not really acting anymore.

It's like you're watching your life from an elevated height.

Like you're the one guy in the audience looking at the Nick Cersei

revival going, huh, I wonder how this is going to play.

And I think I'm the only guy interested.

I promise promise you, man, that's not true.

Hey, I want to say something.

First of all, the book is called Justify This, and it is very funny.

I listen to the book.

Yeah.

And

Nick reads it, and it's a great performance.

And like God, man.

Yeah, I know.

We appreciate when authors actually read their books.

Yeah.

I tried to get a really good actor to do it, but they're too expensive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not with your age.

You did pretty good.

You did pretty good.

Yeah.

And the dream project currently in the works is called called Where I'm Bound.

And

what is it called?

The War on Truthmovie.com.

Is that correct?

Yes.

And how do you see Capital Punishment?

It's on Rumble.

If you do a search for Capital Punishment and Nick Cersei, you can watch it for free on Rumble.

It's quite a palette, folks.

You know, and for a guy without an agent who's being guided by apparently things that matter to him, you know, good good on you, man.

I really wish more people had that

compass.

Well, thanks, Mike.

Thank you.

Best of Leslie.

Thank you.

And I'll switch shirts with you if you want.

She's a big fan of yours, by the way.

Well, that's nice.

Yeah.

I'm a big fan of hers.

She's read your books and

told me how good they were.

Tell her I think she's a woman of exceeding taste and sophistication.

I appreciate it.

Obviously.

Clearly.

Nick Cersei, everybody.

Thanks.

Talk to you next week.

When you leave a a review, only five stars will do, not just one or just two, or just three.

We were hoping

four

more.

As in a one more

than a four,

oh, please, one more than four.

Just a quick review with five stars too

from the you five stars will do

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