A few weeks ago, CharliXCX appeared on the SmartLess podcast, at Sean Hayes’ invitation. The interview was interesting up until Jason Bateman started pressing Charli on being an only child and whether she wants kids. She spoke about how she’s not going to have children and gave her reasons why, and Jason responded by telling her that she could change her mind when she meets someone (Charli got married last year). Jason came across as patronizing, to put it mildly. People yelled about him on the internet but he never said anything about it… until now. Jason chatted with the Hollywood Reporter to promote his latest TV project, DTF St. Louis, and they asked about that Charli moment and a lot more. Some highlights from his digital cover interview:
His career bottomed out in his 20s: “Were it not for some of that cliff-hanging earlier in my career, I don’t know if I’d be as good as I am at the caretaking of these opportunities. But I have seen and felt what it is like to really not have a lot of prospects, and it keeps you hungry.”
Whether anyone suggested that he take a break to go to college when he was young. “My parents were my manager at the time, so they kind of had a conflict of interest there. They’re not going to say, ‘Stop doing this and start studying something else,’ ” he says. In retrospect, Bateman, who never even graduated from high school, wishes that they had. “But I did Teen Wolf Too at 18, and it was like, ‘Well, it’s all up from here. Look at me, I’m starring in the movies!’ ”
He partied hard in his 20s: “Fortunately, I was living at a time without social media and camera phones, so I got away with a lot, but it was definitely close a few times.”
Arrested Development changed everything: “America didn’t watch, but the people that handed out jobs did, and you could just tell, like, oh, this is cool and us being a part of it actually makes us cool by association. And so it was that stink I could almost smell being washed off of me little bits at a time.”
His wife Amanda Anka asked him to stop partying: She’d been the breadwinner early in the relationship and continues to be a strong, steadying force. “Amanda and I definitely had a few negotiations about the point at which the [partying] spigot was going to completely turn off. She’d be like, ‘This drip, drip, drip is annoyingly unpredictable, Jason.’ She didn’t demand that I completely absolve, but that was sort of the back-and-forth, and I was like, well, I feel like my [sobriety] ETA is six months away, but if I could land this plane now, it would alleviate a lot of the tension, so let’s just f–king do it.” (While he’s abstained from booze and what he’s called “the Scarface stuff” for decades now, Bateman has joked that he is “California sober,” which is to say he’s not above a gummy.)
The Charli XCX mess on the podcast: He then stepped in it when he asked the 31-year-old how many children she wanted; and when she said none, suggesting her mind might change when she meets the right person, as his wife’s did when she met him. Of course, had Charli been Bateman’s guest, he would have known that she was, in fact, already married and that she’d mined her feelings around child-rearing in her music. The exchange itself was friendly, but the online response to Bateman’s line of questioning was decidedly less so. Asked for his thoughts on what transpired a week later, he offers this: “We were having a great conversation about her life growing up as an only child. It seemed like a very natural follow-up to that. That’s all it was. I don’t really have much [else] to say about it, except that it is always interesting and valuable and educational to hear people’s thoughts, reactions and feelings to anything I say or do.”
He loves being a quiet family man: “I’m a softie,” he says, proudly. “I like moving the Elf on the Shelf every day. In fact, we’ve got a new little thing, a troll, that I move around now in the offseason. But I love it all: the slippers, the fireplace, the nesting.”
Listening to that episode of SmartLess, it’s true that there was a natural progression to the conversation, which I said at the time. Charli spoke about being an only child, and the loneliness that comes with it and having to learn different social skills later in life because she didn’t have a sibling. Jason’s questions about whether she wanted kids flowed from there. And I do think the “do you want to have kids?” question is fair – it’s a podcast interview, and she was clearly fine with talking about it. That wasn’t the problem – the problem was that instead of accepting her answer about why she didn’t want kids, he patronized her and told her she would change her mind when she met the right guy. Jason’s answer here shows that he really doesn’t understand why he actually offended people. This would have been the right moment to just say something like “yeah, people had a point, I didn’t come across well in that moment and I shouldn’t have said it.” Is that so f–king difficult?
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
