T.J. Miller Loses His Senses

We attempt to shed some light on the multitalented comic's upcoming projects.

Here at GCD, we've occasionally had some strange requests from the people we've interviewed, but none quite as odd as comedian T.J. Miller's insistence that we interview him while he was in a sensory deprivation tank. We love his work so much that we agreed, but the result is certainly one of the strangest celebrity chats we've had. Herewith, an actual transcript of what went down when we sent one of our editors to talk turkey with T.J.

GeekChicDaily: Okay. Hi, T.J. It's GeekChicDaily.

T.J. Miller: Hi, thank you so much for meeting me in here. Can you hear me?

GCD: It's a little muffled, but I can hear you.

TJM: Well, it should be muffled, it's a sensory deprivation tank. Did you hear that?

GCD: Yeah, it's a sensory deprivation tank; that's what the memo said. I just...are you gonna come out for the interview, or...?

TJM: No, no, no, I don't have that kind of time. I do this for two or three hours a day. It'll be better if we can do it in here. Thank you for taking my memo, I know a lot of people don't send memos anymore, it's sort of an archaic practice, but I appreciate your receiving the memorandum and being attentive to it.

GCD:  Well, it's not every day you get the carbon copy of a memo.

TJM: Can you hear me?

GCD: Yes, I can hear you.

TJM: Memorandum. Memorandum.

GCD: Yeah, but you always send the carbon copies, so my fingers were black for a few hours. But it's okay.

TJM: Hey, my fingers have been black my entire life. I don't know what that means. Can you hear me?

GCD: Yeah, I gotcha. So, T.J., we want to talk to today: you have a big 2012 coming up, you had a great 2011; a lot of stuff going on.

TJM: I mean, career-wise I had a great 2011. Emotionally and personally, it was just a real disaster. I found out that I had been living as a woman for 12 years and no one had brought it up. All my girlfriends had been too polite to mention it, but I am a man. So I've been sort of doing comedy as a female and I really have to switch gears in 2012.

GCD: On the bright side of that, it does make most of the roles that you have tried to play as a man that much more impressive.

TJM: Well, exactly. A lot of people didn't even know that, I was coming into all these roles, I kept getting cast as a guy, and then, now of course it's obvious. Egg on my face. But literally and figuratively. I just ate an omelet, and I also felt embarrassed.

GCD: There is a sign right here that says "Please don't take food into the sensory deprivation tank."

TJM: Well, they know me here. You can't deprive your senses of an omelet. I have like five of these stories today. They said, 'your fingers are black, T.J.,' and I didn't understand either of them, but they both have come in handy, in this interview at least.

GCD: So, you have an album that is currently out that released late last year, The Extended Play EP. What made you want to make that?

TJM: Well, I just, you can hear me, right? I felt like so many artists were coming out with music CDs and so many musicians were trying to be actors. We all saw Ludacris with his turn in New Year's Eve - I didn't see it and I don't know anyone who did, but I think people did see that - and then Justin Timberlake has sort of ventured into comedy with his incredible performances in both the movie about the time that's on your arm, and also Bad Teacher, which ended up being a pretty bad lesson. I said, look, I'm not a musician, I don't have any aspirations to be a musician, I think music is weird and I don't really know anything about it, but I see these other people doing it. So I made a 41-track EP.

GCD: Now, that's a little longer than most EPs.

TJM: Yeah. Everyone's releasing singles right now, Ke$ha and Katy Perry and just the greatest artists of our generation, and I feel like if those two girls and L'il Wayne are doing that, I kind of feel like that's a ripoff for people. What happened to the album? So I did 41 singles and put them on one EP.

GCD: That's...I believe that's fair.

TJM: And also, part of it is just that I don't understand what is going on, I don't understand a lot of these guys. The whole album is sort of a comment on celebrity being this thing that is cross branding and as soon as you're good at one thing and well known, you expect everyone to just ingest whatever it is that you do. I'm a standup and an actor, now immediately take me seriously as a rapper. I'm a rapper, now I want you to take me seriously as an author and as an actor and a comedian. John Mayer was trying to do stand up. That guy is so unfunny, have you heard any of his songs? They're all serious! They're all about love and weird, sad s**t. It's strange to me that all that is going on. I wanted to release an album that sort of commented on the state of music and the music industry right now.

GCD: Alright.

TJM: I also really like certain words, you know, like tender hug, and elbows. So I put those on as sort of specific tracks. Everyone is releasing music that is hardly music, they're paying other people to make the beats and everything, so I bought beats from this guy who works at Second City. He's a music director there, I worked with him coming up, so I asked him if he wanted to write some ridiculous beats. Primarily it is a comedy album. The idea of it is not to actually do music, but to do a comedy music album. It's not very musical-comedy, but like a comedy music album, so people could listen to it over and over again. Because I think that even if you love No Real Reason, my hour special, you still can't stand to watch it more that three times. I mean, my face just looks so bizarre at certain points. It's nightmarish. I've heard people have been haunted by the images of my face and my driver's license.

GCD: Speaking of No Real Reason, that aired last year. Is that coming out on DVD, is it out on DVD now?

TJM:  It is out on DVD and thank you so much for doing research on my Wikipedia page before you came in. You can hear all this, right?

GCD: Yes, I can still hear you.

TJM: Great.

GCD: There's a weird echo, but I can hear you.

TJM: It is so cold in here. Usually the water is supposed to be the same temperature as your skin, but I can't feel any of my body. Maybe that's part of it, I don't know.

GCD: So it's not depriving one of your senses?

TJM: The whole thing is pretty senseless. I can't hear anything you're saying. Listen, I really do enjoy No Real Reason and I was happy with it. It's out on DVD and it's airing on Comedy Central, and I'm just hoping that more people see it and get into it.

GCD: So, you have a lot coming up. How to Train Your Dragon 2, you're returning to that. With voice work, do you find that you get into that a little bit more than...do you like just being able to go in and be lose and goof off a bit?

TJM: I kind of do that in everything that I do. I think it's gotten to the point now where if you hire me on something, you know that I'm going to riff, that I'm going to be improvising. Yeah, it's especially easy. I'm doing a movie with Nick Swardson called Hell and Back. It's from the production company that did Robot Chicken, and it's an R-rated stop-motion feature film. When you go into something like that, you can really say whatever the [hell] you want, which is really nice, in my opinion. So I'm a big fan of voice-over work and I love doing it. But I love doing all kinds, any kind of comedy, anything that is comedic in nature, I enjoy. And some things that aren't comedic in nature I try and make them me and then that's my music CD.

GCD: What's this about Charlie Brown?

TJM: Um, what do you mean?

GCD: On your Wikipedia page it says Charlie Brown...

TJM: He's a very popular cartoon character; is that what you're asking?

GCD: Are you in the Charlie Brown movie?

TJM: Oh no, did someone put that on Wikipedia? Someone's full of [crap] on that one. You can't trust the internet, I found that. I told the internet a couple of things that I didn't want anyone else to read or hear, and of course the internet has to just put it out there for everyone to find. So, don't trust the internet and certainly don't tell the internet that you had sex with a young Puerto Rican boy right after your girlfriend fell asleep on your third anniversary.

GCD: Is everything okay in there? There's a weird leak coming through the seam of the door.

TJM: No, no, I'm just urinating. You can't get out when you have to go to the wee, which is a sensory deprivation term. When you have to go you just go, and the urine separates itself from the Epsom Salt water.

GCD: That should explain...

TJM: Just don't get your feet in it, because I also take a similar vitamin regimen to Tom Cruise, and so my urine will burn you upon contact with your skin. Be wary of that.

GCD: Good tip, I'm glad I'm wearing rubber soled shoes. The smell is quite pungent.

TJM: That's the kale sperm.

GCD: Oh. Wow. I'm so scared.

TJM: Can you hear me?

GCD: Turn a little. I'm over here. Turn towards the door.

TJM: I can't see anything, I don't know where the door is. Okay? You're making this really difficult.

GCD: I'm speaking into an intercom. Does that not go...

TJM: I can hear it.

GCD: Sorry, I've just never interviewed someone in a sensory deprivation tank, it's very new.

TJM: And I've never had anyone interview me so poorly, in a sensory deprivation tank. So this is a new experience for both of us.

GCD: So, what else have you got coming up, with the standup? Are you doing a tour this year?

TJM: That last part wasn't really for you to hear, also. I hope you didn't hear that. I can't hear what's loud and what isn't in here. Other stuff coming up? Yeah, man, I'm doing a pilot for Fox called Little Brother, which is very funny. I have a podcast, called Cashing In with T.J. Miller, and it's an interview show my friend Cash Levy is doing, but he doesn't seem to get any other people to interview, or no one else wants to do it, so he's done twelve episodes, but I'm the only guest and I love him, so as long as he keeps inviting me onto the show, I'll be his guest. So that's the podcast, we're going to be releasing that hopefully at the end of the month. Then I'm doing a show for Comedy Central called Mash Up, which is based on an hour special that I did for them. So I'm hosting that and I co-created it and I'm writing on it and everything. That will be a lot of fun. Then I'm doing a sketch comedy record with my group Heavyweight, and then I'm releasing a couple of more music videos for this hip-hop, folk and pop album that I did. Illegal Art, which is the music label that represents Girl Talk and a bunch of great artists, they're doing a remix tape of the EP, so that's slated for release in June or July, probably.

GCD: That's a little meta.

TJM: Yeah, that will be...I mean, that was so amazing to me that they were into that. I was so pleased that they got the joke. I think that the album does two things. It alienates people, or if they get the joke, they kind of understand it and get into it. But it has alienated plenty of people, plenty more than it has latched onto. This label: I know Steinski, one of their main artists, from other stuff that I do, and I knew the Bran Flakes and the guy from the Bran Flakes said, "I think the guy who is in charge of this label..." - nobody really knows his real name or where he lives or anything - "...I think he'd get the joke," and he did. He heard the album and was like, this is ridiculous and something that Illegal Art is rallying against also, the branding of music celebrity is more important than the sort of progress of the music in the form.

GCD: I totally agree with you. I'm so glad my favorite artists don't do that. Because Selena Gomez, she's a true artist.

TJM: I love her! But Miley Cyrus is the worst. My thing is that Illegal Art is sort of talking about that music now can be mashing up audio, and they fight a lot against piracy stuff, because what is the next phase of electronic music? It is using actual songs as the instrumental building blocks of a new song. They have a lot of opposition with that, and a lot of their artists are really weird and fringe, so they got it, they understood that what I was doing was a big risk. And also my music album came out before my hour special, and that was a real ding-dong move on my part because a lot of people saw my music album and thought it was my stand up record, and they were like “exactly what the f*** are you doing, man?” I'm hoping now that people are catching up and understanding that I'm a comedian who did this music album just because I thought it would be funny to do.

GCD: It definitely comes through, to people who appreciate comedy and people who followed your act.

TJM: That's what I'm hoping. And I also hope there are like one or two people somewhere in Central Ohio who are saying, “This guy is the greatest musician of all time!”

GCD: Honestly, if we could get you on the Meeting of the Juggalos, that'd be...

TJM: Oh my God, I would do anything.

GCD: Alright, well, the lady at the front is waving at me that I've been here too long.

TJM: Oh, you're getting a massage? Well good for you! Don't put that in the interview. If you're going to have a massage, they don't even massage your body, it's just immediately a bad hand job. So just be aware of that. I also just want to say thank you for interviewing me if this is the end of it. And also, I couldn't hear anything you said, so basically whenever you stopped mumbling through it, I just answered what I thought would be an answer. Hopefully they match up.

GCD: Yeah, I'll rearrange things if they didn't quite sync up.

TJM: Of course, I'm still hanging out. I'm doing tectonic dancing.

GCD: Thanks so much, T.J.

TJM: Thank you so much, man. Can you hear me?

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