Smarmy charmer Joel McHale spills on B-list fame, on- and off-set Chevy Chase feuds in ‘Thanks for the Money’
Sherryl Connelly
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, October 15, 2016, 5:35 PM
In a tell-all memoir, Joel McHale reveals in stunning detail just how great life is as a celebrity — even if you’re still on the B-list.
In “Thanks for the Money,” McHale — the star of two canceled television shows,
“Community” and
“The Soup” — expounds in obnoxious detail about how fabulous his life is today.
Still, for some desperate reason, the actor needed to open up another revenue stream. McHale was so embarrassingly eager to get a memoir into stores that he considered other formats such as a bro guide to parenting.
“Thanks for the Money,” as it turns out, is right in McHale's wheelhouse. He offers tips on how to be famous — and how to take advantage of being famous.
One handy chart matches the level of crime you can get away with depending on your degree of fame.
But McHale, now 44, also tells his own story. He writes about growing up the son of two parents somewhere in the Northwest, about getting married and fathering a couple of kids he’s too busy to see.
The tale only grows interesting, though, after McHale reaches Hollywood. At first, he did a ton of lucrative work in commercials. McHale describes himself as shameless and happy.
But in 2004, he received the casting call he knew would change his life. The E! channel was looking to hire a “smarmy d--k.”
McHale knew he was their man.
As host of “The Soup,” he skewered reality television and its stars throughout the golden era of true-TV expansion. Then, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” premiered. After that epic moment in time, McHale was never short on material.
It seemed life couldn’t get better — until it did.
In 2009, McHale scored a starring role in a sitcom that captured the imagination of both the public and the leader of the free world.
When McHale was introduced to President Obama at the
2014 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, there was only one thing on the commander-in-chief’s mind:
“Community,” about misfits bonding at a community college, had a rabid fan base and a fractious run.
The show’s creator, Dan Harmon, continually warred with the network. One of the stars, Chevy Chase, fought with everyone else.
While McHale says nothing about the controversies his good friend Harmon ignited, he eagerly details Chase’s weird and sometimes appalling behavior.
McHale played Jeff, a smarmy law student who forms a study group bringing the show’s characters to the table. Chase’s role was as an older student, an eccentric millionaire.
McHale says a big part of Chase’s problem was that the former “Saturday Night Live” star was jealous of him.
“On ‘Community,’ I was the tall, sarcastic, and — OK, I’ll say it — stunningly good-looking guy. Let’s face it: I had been cast in the classic ‘Chevy Chase’ role,” McHale wrote.
“This was probably very difficult for Chevy to come to grips with.”
McHale says Chase was always trying to roughhouse with him off-camera, but what he really wanted was a fight. One day, while filming a mock scuffle, Chase kept demanding that McHale hit him harder.
To shut him up, McHale delivered a left jab. Chase ended up in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder. He was, after all, close to 70 years old.
(In the book, McHale provides an illustrated guide to bringing Chevy Chase down should he attack.)
Sometimes Chase was just weird, as when he’d bellow out of nowhere, “I can still get erections!” He wouldn’t dance on-camera because he didn’t want to “look gay."
But Chase, according to the book, could turn ugly, as he did when he told one of the actresses, “I want to kill you and then rape you.”
McHale thinks he meant it as a joke, “but everything he said had a weird sense of menace.”
Chase infamously used the N-word referring to two black cast members, Yvette Nicole Brown and Donald Glover, McHale wrote. He was balking at a scene where his character was accused of racism.
“Well if my character is this much of a racist, then why don’t I just put Donald and Yvette on my knees and call them n-----s?”
Chase then put an even stranger twist on the event by storming around the set shouting, “I’m not a racist!” He claimed the story was all over the internet, ruining his career. But there wasn’t a word of it on the Web. So that was odd.
While McHale is willing to go in deep on Chase, he stays mum about Harmon.
The notoriously difficult Harmon was fired after three seasons to howls of outrage from fans. The network caved and brought Harmon back for season five, the last to air on NBC.
The beloved “Community” finished its six-season run on Yahoo! Screen last year.
A footnote is that McHale
will be seen playing Chevy Chase next year in “A Futile & Stupid Gesture,” a movie about the early years of the National Lampoon media empire.
One of McHale’s earliest roles was on the 2009 Steven Soderbergh movie, “The Informant,” starring “Chubby Matt Damon.” It was just unfortunate timing that he and his buddy, Adam Carolla, trash-talked “Ocean’s Thirteen” on the latter’s radio show.
McHale couldn’t help but notice that on his first day on set, both the director and the star were quite chilly. Naturally, McHale worried it was something he’d said. He approached Damon nervously.
Well, it turns out that they had heard “The Adam Carolla Show” and were just having their fun torturing McHale. Oh, those movie folk!
Filming “What’s Your Number?” in 2011, McHale had the pleasure of touching Anna Faris’ breasts — only over her T-shirt, though.
McHale also got to choose a butt-double for the scene where his character’s backside got a closeup. Dutifully, he thumbed through hundreds of Polaroids of naked bums looking for perfection in what he calls the “Joel McHale Ass Rodeo.”
When McHale reached Hollywood as a youngish man, he yearned for two things: A celebrity feud and a pack, as in Rat or Brat, to run with.
McHale didn’t consider the thing he had with Chase a feud, so he decided to punch up and picked on Robert De Niro.
The night McHale hosted the White House Correspondents' Dinner, he took a shot at the legendary actor from the podium. It was an elaborate joke, and not all that funny, about how De Niro hadn’t turned down a paying role since 2002.
Sadly, De Niro wouldn’t give McHale what he wanted, probably because there was no money in it. At the after-party, the actor shrugged off the insult, saying, “Hey, you had to do it.”
Still, hope came alive a few months later in an interview with Katie Couric. De Niro seemed to feel differently.
“It hurt my feelings a li’l bit. A li’l bit,” the actor confessed.
De Niro then invited McHale to a dinner in the actor’s honor. The evening passed without incident, but it seems something went down — likely a back-room negotiation.
De Niro was finally willing to give McHale what he wanted: A Make-A-Wish gift for a middle-aged actor whose career might be flickering.
Soon enough, McHale was the emcee for a black-tie evening staged by a luxury watch company. Just another perk of being a celebrity, he points out. You get free stuff all the time.
During his routine, McHale merely observed that De Niro was in the audience. That’s when the magic happened. De Niro, transformed into Travis Bickle, leaped to his feet and started heckling McHale.
Finally McHale had his feud, and, yes, it was staged. Still, it was something and led to one of the coolest moments ever.
Afterward, when the two posed as the photographers snapped away, De Niro kept up a little chant, “F--k you, f--k you, and f--k you.”
“You simply haven’t lived until you’ve heard Robert De Niro cheerfully tell someone to f--k off in person,” McHale boasts.
“It’s one of my most cherished career moments.”
Unfortunately, McHale hasn’t been able to assemble a pack of celebrity-running buddies.
Whenever he asks Jimmy Kimmel, Dax Shepard or Nathan Fillion if they know of anyone cool or successful enough to hang out with him, they all end the conversation abruptly.
Still, McHale gets to hang out with people more famous than he is — only on set, of course. Last year, he was shooting the 10th season of “The X-Files” with David Duchovny when the star made a request.
“Please, can we just talk about sports?” Duchovny politely asked him. “You’re a very strange person, and I don’t want to accidentally learn anything about you.”
