![]() ![]() “If there’s justice in the world, I’d probably be making $140,000 a year. “I’m a 53-year-old white guy, and it happened that I chose a profession that pays probably a hundred times more than it should,” McKay says. The towel is less a Hollywood affectation than a Linus-like security blanket.Īn avowed democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders stan, and longtime Twitter warrior, McKay might come off as a caricature of a Hollywood liberal if he wasn’t hyperaware of his own ripeness as comedy material. During interviews, he lies on his back to stabilize his tremor, giving the impression of a guy who’s more laid-back than his endless list of writing, directing, and producing credits would suggest. Twenty years ago, McKay was diagnosed with an essential tremor, which means his neck and head, and sometimes his voice, quaver involuntarily, not unlike Katharine Hepburn (“I call it ‘my friend Arnold’ and you never know when Arnold is going to visit”). For the next four hours he’ll keep a towel draped around his neck as if he just emerged from an NBA locker room. When McKay greets me at the door of his modest-for-Hollywood house in the leafy Hancock Park district of Los Angeles, he’s still in a T-shirt, gym shorts, and New Balance sneakers after working out with Darren, his trainer. “Hey!” he says when he lands, grabbing my arm in a Gladiator- style arm-clasp greeting. McKay comes zip-lining right at me at an incredible speed from the top of a 100-foot-tall sequoia. ![]() A 12-acre network of platforms, rooms, and even a hot tub are connected by rope swings, ladders, and tubes 80 feet off the ground. I had read about McKay’s treehouse but had no idea of just how massive and elaborate it is. “It combines a lot of my feelings over the past 10, 20, 30 years,” he says. McKay says it’s also the most personal movie he’s ever made. Two astronomers, played by DiCaprio and Lawrence, discover a world-destroying comet headed for earth and the political and media reaction to imminent doom is a hopeless farce of culture-war squabbling, narcissism, shallowness, and ignorance-in other words, pretty realistic. In a sense, that’s what McKay’s latest movie is about. It’s true that we live in an era of cultural deflation, when it’s hard for any one person, short of a would-be dictator, to claim the attention of the entire culture, which long ago fractured along internet-drawn lines. (He still sends me several fictional openers, just in case.) Later he proposes a one-on-one basketball game to see who gets to write the opener of this story, an idea the writer nixed given that Adam McKay is six feet five and a basketball fanatic. Remember when he rolled the ending credits halfway through Vice, a joke on the fairy tale version of Cheney’s story? Or when, in The Big Short, Margot Robbie breaks the fourth wall to explain mortgage-backed securities from a bubble bath? And so Adam McKay’s critique of the Vanity Fair profile is merely professional instinct. Then again, undermining the story is a very Adam McKay thing to do. Adam McKay’s publicist might not agree with this take since Adam McKay has a $100 million Netflix movie he’s promoting, Don’t Look Up (in theaters December 10 and streaming December 24), which stars highly bankable celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, and Jonah Hill.
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