subscribe<\/a> <\/p>\nMy thirteen-year-old daughter <\/strong>is still at home. It\u2019s going to be tough when she moves out.<\/p>\nYou\u2019ve got a daughter<\/strong> that\u2019s a Jason Bateman fan? She\u2019ll grow out of that.<\/p>\nMy twenties were very confusing<\/strong> and challenging. There was therapy, there was seeking advice, there was a lot of self-doubt, and that was happening at the same time that I was doing a lot of partying. All those worries go away at night, but they come back the next day. I was getting a lot of stuff out of my system knowing that at thirty you got to get your shit together and try to execute the plan. I didn\u2019t want to be fifty-six and think, God, I\u2019ve never really been hungover.<\/em> <\/p>\nIn my early thirties,<\/strong> I stopped drinking, married my girlfriend, who\u2019s still my wife, and got Arrested Development<\/em>.<\/p>\nI married a friend<\/strong> as opposed to a girlfriend. Since I only wanted to get married once, I thought, Find someone I\u2019m sexually attracted to that\u2019s also a friend.<\/em> That\u2019s the bull\u2019s-eye.<\/p>\n\n\n
![\"jason](\"https:\/\/hips.hearstapps.com\/hmg-prod\/images\/esq120125wilcoversubjectdig-001-6931b53ba78cd.jpg?resize=980:*\" "\\"jason")
<\/p>\n
Mark Seliger<\/span><\/figcaption>Leather jacket by Dolce & Gabbana. Denim jacket by Dior Men. Glasses by Jacques Marie Mage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
What\u2019s the difference between<\/strong> sex and love? I recommend them both if you\u2019ve got free time this afternoon.<\/p>\nThe first scene we shot on <\/strong>Arrested Development<\/em> was a monologue that Jeffrey Tambor\u2019s character was doing. He set a tone for the show, comedically. I was like, Oh, there\u2019s not going to be any winking on this show.<\/em> It\u2019s going to be fucking serious. If any of these characters knew that anyone was laughing at them, they\u2019d be deeply offended and might get violent. So to me, that was like, Oh, great, this is the kind of comedy I\u2019ve wanted to do.<\/em><\/p>\nMy mother is British. <\/strong>She had a very dry sense of humor. She never felt the need to laugh off something sarcastic. There was no winking with her. <\/p>\nI like playing the part that is your proxy. <\/strong>The person who\u2019s ingesting this stuff, the person that the camera cuts to, to show the reaction to it. I like being that person.<\/p>\nI do play asshole well,<\/strong> and I apologize for that.<\/p>\n\n<\/p>\n
One of my early lessons came in traffic on the Ventura Freeway. You can\u2019t move, the AC\u2019s not working, and the infant in the back is screaming. You just have to deal with it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n
When you\u2019re doing a public job,<\/strong> people are going to want to say hi. To feel inconvenienced by that is natural, but you need to develop a set of coping skills that enables you to not make them feel like jerks for saying, Hi, I recognize you because you\u2019re on my TV. That\u2019s the math of it.<\/p>\nI like my candles. <\/strong>I like my soap. I like my towels and sheets. I like my socks. I\u2019m very soft. I love a fireplace. I love nesting. I love being with my family.<\/p>\nAny parent learns a deeper level of<\/strong> patience, compromise, understanding, and empathy. One of my early lessons came in traffic on the Ventura Freeway. You can\u2019t move, the air-conditioning\u2019s not working, and the infant in the backseat is screaming their head off. You can\u2019t negotiate with them. You just have to deal with it, like many things in life.<\/p>\nGun to my head, <\/strong>if I have to cook something, it would be scrambled eggs. My secret is putting in a spoonful of cottage cheese. Makes it a little fluffier and gives it a little cheesiness. Try it. It\u2019s pretty good, and that\u2019s added protein, I guess. <\/p>\nI am a people pleaser. <\/strong>I care about what people think about me. I read all the reviews. I am doing these projects for public consumption, so it matters to me what the public thinks about them. It matters to me what critics think about them. But what\u2019s most important is that the weather inside is 72 and breezy. It takes a lot of work to stay happy, to stay clear, and to be proud of yourself. You can try to drink through it, but you\u2019re sober in the morning and you got to live in those hours too. <\/p>\n\n\n
![\"jason](\"https:\/\/hips.hearstapps.com\/hmg-prod\/images\/esq120125wilcoversubjectdig-002-6931b59503290.jpg?resize=2048:*\" "\\"jason")
<\/p>\n
Mark Seliger<\/span><\/figcaption>Sweater by Loro Piana.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
I got a terrible review from<\/strong> The New York Times<\/em> on the pilot of Ozark<\/em>. Mike Hale basically said I was so boring to watch, it reminded him of the person that he buys a ticket from in the airport. I laughed my ass off. I appreciate those that get creative with it.<\/p>\nPeople ask me: <\/strong>\u201cI want my kid to go into the business. What do you recommend?\u201d And I don\u2019t recommend kids going into it for two reasons. Number one, you teach yourself schizophrenia at an age when you should be allowing for all the clues and signals of who you are to come in. You\u2019re trying to figure out who you are at that age, not trying to develop believable other versions of yourself. The other thing is you could be spending all those years training for an occupation where you can come out of college credentialed and say, I\u2019ve got a base salary. I\u2019ve got some job security. I feel like I can ask my girlfriend to marry me. I can provide. You don\u2019t have that ever in this business. <\/p>\nIf you\u2019re a .300 hitter in baseball, <\/strong>you\u2019ll play for twenty years because numbers don\u2019t lie. But if you\u2019re a .300 hitter as an actor, it\u2019s like, \u201cWho says you got a hit on the last job? That last job didn\u2019t work for me. I didn\u2019t like that film.\u201d It\u2019s all subjective.<\/p>\nI feel so grateful<\/strong> and fortunate to be where I am and who I am. I\u2019m this close to being crazy, but I\u2019m also this far into sanity. I\u2019m proud of that because it\u2019s a daily job, for all of us. Anybody who\u2019s halfway intelligent can talk themselves into an unmanageable way to live a dysfunctional life. The phrase \u201cIgnorance is bliss\u201d is there for a reason. Dummies don\u2019t get confused.<\/p>\nOn SmartLess,<\/em> <\/strong>I\u2019m often playing the dummy because Will or Sean is playing the person that really knows what the fuck they\u2019re talking about, and you can tell they\u2019re not going to move off it. I\u2019m like, \u201cAll right, well, we\u2019re not going to have a fight here, so I\u2019ll just play dumb.\u201d<\/p>\nThose two guys are two of my best friends,<\/strong> if not my best friends, and they\u2019re two of the funniest people I\u2019ve ever met or worked with. There\u2019s no way anyone would listen to something that was just hosted by me. It is whatever the three of us have stirred up in the pot and created together. We just love doing it.<\/p>\n\n\n
![\"a](\"https:\/\/hips.hearstapps.com\/hmg-prod\/images\/esq120125wilcoversubjectdig-004-6931b5c237a61.jpg?resize=2048:*\" "\\"a")
<\/p>\n
Mark Seliger<\/span><\/figcaption>Vintage leather jacket. T-Shirt by Louis Vuitton Men\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
I\u2019m at my house;<\/strong> they\u2019re at their houses. I am in my pajamas nine out of ten episodes, and I go to this one room that\u2019s set up in the house that\u2019s got a shitty table and a shitty chair and a microphone from Amazon that screws into the table. I open the laptop sixty seconds before we\u2019re set to go and click \u201cJoin Zoom.\u201d The moment that we come up on the screen, we\u2019re recording. So there\u2019s no prep involved. Zero.<\/p>\nThom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood<\/strong> from Radiohead were the big white whales for me. When they said yes, I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about it until the day we recorded.<\/p>\nI am passionate about baseball, <\/strong>specifically the Dodgers. We didn\u2019t have a football team in L.\u2009A. for a long time, so I\u2019m a whore when it comes to football teams. I had a bit of a gambling problem with football for a while there, so I started to just fall in love with whoever had the best spread.<\/p>\nThe Dodgers are going to win<\/strong> a third World Series next year. And then we\u2019re going for a fourth after that. I\u2019m calling it right now.<\/p>\nMy sister and I don\u2019t see each other a ton.<\/strong> There isn\u2019t the typical \u201cWe see each other every Thanksgiving or every Christmas and our kids want to be together.\u201d There isn\u2019t that. In a great way. Our conversations are the rich conversations you would have with an adult friend, not the kind of petulant back-and-forth you might have with your adult sibling. We hang out, and we\u2019re nice to each other because we respect one another as individuals regardless of the blood thing. I\u2019m seeing her for lunch next week.<\/p>\nThe first line of my obituary?<\/strong> I\u2019m not answering that fucking question.<\/p>\nI know when I\u2019m a pain<\/strong> in the ass to my wife or to my kids, and I try not to do that. It\u2019s lazy to do that. It takes a little bit more effort to be the best version of yourself, and I try to get that done each day. So hopefully that\u2019s the takeaway from my life\u2014people say thanks for trying.<\/p>\n
\nAs seen on the opening image: Coat, shirt, trousers, and boots by Prada.<\/em><\/p>\nPhotographed by Mark Seliger<\/em>
Styled by Mark Holmes<\/em>
Grooming by Ericka Verrett<\/em>
Set Design by Lux Wright @luxalot<\/em>
Backdrops by Katherine Aungier<\/em>
Tailoring by Suzy Yun<\/em>
Production by Jill Roy at 3Star Productions<\/em>
Special thanks to Ruth Levy at Seliger Studio<\/em>
Editor in Chief: Michael Sebastian<\/em>
Esquire Executive Design Director: Martin Hoops<\/em>
Esquire Visual Director: James Morris<\/em>
Esquire Entertainment Director: Andrea Cuttler<\/em>
Director of Video: Kathryn Rice<\/em>
Director of Photography: Darren Kho<\/em>
Senior Producer: Rae Medina<\/em>
Producer: Ali Buchalter<\/em>
Associate Producer: Jordan Abt<\/em>
Editor: Greg Promani<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.esquire.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jason Bateman has been famous for nearly 50 years. Now 56, the former child star has transformed himself into a Golden Globe\u2013winning actor, an Emmy-winning director, and one third of the incredibly popular podcast Smartless. (His latest projects, Black Rabbit and Zootopia 2, are out now.) With his wife of 24 years, Bateman has two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2190987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[310910,422911,310911,285684,422910],"class_list":["post-2190986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-content-type-feature","tag-contentid-81e41116-7f94-4c5b-ad70-5a3631aae466","tag-displaytype-long-form-article","tag-locale-us","tag-shorttitle-what-ive-learned-jason-bateman"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Jason-Bateman-on-Arrested-Development-Ozark-Smartless-Success-and-What.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2190986"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2190988,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190986\/revisions\/2190988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2190987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2190986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2190986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2190986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}