There are plenty of famous quotations about last laughs – a notable one being “He who laughs last, laughs best” – but there aren’t nearly as many about first laughs. And there should be, because for some people – like Canadian actor Dustin Milligan – a first laugh changes everything.
Here’s the story of Milligan’s first laugh. The year: sometime in the early ’90s. The setting: somewhere in Yellowknife. The person who laughed: Milligan can’t remember. The cause of the laugh: see last answer. Okay, Milligan is hazy on the details, but what he will never, ever forget is how he felt the very first time he was funny enough to make someone laugh.
“As soon as I got my first laugh, I was always looking to make adults laugh, and then I did school plays and I started getting those laughs on a slightly larger scale,” says Milligan on the phone from LA, where he resides for half the year. He was seven-years-old when he realized that being on stage was inherent in his happiness. “I needed to have some kind of superficial validation from a group of strangers looking at me.” He chuckles. “I’m sure at the time I wouldn’t quite be able to articulate it like that, but in retrospect, I have the ability to see it for what it was: I like making people laugh.”
Over the last several years, Milligan has had audiences in stitches via a variety of screen projects. With Vancouver actor Aaron Brooks, he co-wrote and co-starred in the oddball 1970s “Canuxploitation” film Bad City, which premiered at the 2014 Whistler Film Festival and received nine Leo Award nominations (you can stream it online at BadCityMovie.com).
In 2015, Milligan booked a recurring role on CBC’s Schitt’s Creek, which is currently airing its third season on CBC. Schitt’s Creek stars Canadian comedy icons Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara as Johnny and Moira Rose, a once mega-wealthy couple rebuilding their lives in the rural town they own; Milligan appears as Ted, the hapless and hopeful vet who falls head over heels for the Roses’ debutante daughter, Alexis.
Milligan describes the experience of work with Levy and O’Hara as, 1) a dream, and, 2) an education. “I don’t usually have a lot of scenes with Eugene and Catherine, but we often do lunchtime table reads of the next couple of episodes, and just to be sitting there with them while they’re reading their lines, possibly for the first time, and seeing how instantly funny they make everything, and how they’re never pushing that hard for the comedy – it’s always, always so funny.” Milligan says the Second City alumni use a different tact than the one he employed when he first joined Schitt’s Creek. “In my own eagerness to get those laughs while surrounded by so many funny people, often, I’d push too hard. Now I see so clearly, after watching a couple of seasons and being around [Levy and O’Hara], the trick is don’t push, and just let it be funny. I’m a stronger actor because of them and the example that they set every day.”
Milligan has worked steadily since arriving in Vancouver straight outta Yellowknife, with little else but the money he’d saved sweeping up popcorn at a movie theatre and a dogged determination to act.
“I just started hitting the streets and, very luckily, things started happening right away,” recalls Milligan. “It was wild, because I look back now at that decision and I think me, today, I would be terrified to make that decision, but you’re just dumb enough when you’re 18 years old to believe that things are going to work out.”
Milligan loves making people laugh, but he’s no stranger to dramatic roles. He’s flexed his serious dramatic chops on 90210, Motive, Supernatural, and on CBC’s WWII spy thriller series X Company, where he appeared as Tom Cummings, a charismatic ad man turned field agent who (spoiler alert!) suffered a fatal fall from the cliffs of Dieppe at the end of season two.
Milligan will soon be back in Vancouver to film the second season of BBC America’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, on which he plays Sergeant Hugo Friedkin, a bungling military man who rises through season one to become the primary – and, given his lack of intelligence, unlikely – Big Bad.
“I really have to pinch myself and knock on wood and cross my fingers and throw salt over my shoulder because I’m working in such a way right now that half of the year, I’m on set in Canada, and the other half of the year, I get to sit around and write every day and grow a beard.” Cue the laughter.
Stream the first season of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency on Netflix. Schitt’s Creek airs Tuesdays at 9pm on CBC. Follow Dustin Milligan on Twitter @DustinWMilligan.
Web exclusive: More from our interview with Dustin Milligan
On the kind of role he yearns to play: “There is one type of role [I want to play], and it’s not a new type of role, but I love when actors are playing heightened actual versions of themselves – like Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Being able to play an insane, exaggerated version of yourself, to me, I cannot wait. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that opportunity, but I truly believe that that will be a bucket-list moment in my career. I want to mock myself to the point of making me a completely unlikable but ultimately still likeable character. There’s a lot of psychology behind that. I want to break all of the rules and be an obnoxious, dumb, proud, probably intoxicated, overweight version of myself. A really gross, bloated version of myself. It’s something I feel, as much as I love the comedic roles that I’ve gotten to play, a lot of them are nice guys. I want to go in the opposite direction of that. I’d love to be a real dickhead. That, or a kickass action movie. I’m a simple man with simple pleasures.”
On his first time on a film set: “It was The Long Weekend, with Brendan Fehr of Roswell fame and Chris Klein of American Pie fame. The movie was straight to video, nobody ever saw it, but I, at the time, had a gap in my teeth and Brendan Fehr famously had a gap in his teeth and I was playing a young Brendan Fehr in some kind of flashback intro sequence. I remember this weird thing where there’s this shot of me in this montage of him growing up, and in the very first shot I ever did in my life, they had me sitting at the end of this table as the camera slowly zooms in on my face. I remember in that moment – I know you can’t print this – thinking, ‘Fuck, yeah!’ I know it’s a horrible thing to say, As soon as the camera got close to my face, I knew this was what I wanted to do. But it’s true. I was happy, and I had thrown up all of the night before and was a bundle of nerves for the rest of the day after that, but it had been solidified for me: ‘I am doing the right thing, I made the right choice, and this is where I belong.’ I also learned on that day that they give you breakfast for free, so there were a lot of positives.”
On growing up in a funny family: “My parents were funny in the way that a lot of people’s parents were funny, which is inadvertently and groan-worthy every time they make a joke. My mom would make really cheesy, corny jokes that aren’t that funny and are weirdly specific to some sort of circumstance that only she knows about and nobody gets the joke ever, but she tells those jokes anyway. I love the idea of telling a joke that isn’t funny, and then even after everyone’s acknowledged that it’s not funny, you keep pushing the joke. I know it’s so annoying for a lot of people. That’s what Bad City was. We loved writing all of the dumbest, easiest jokes that we could think of, and then instead of shying away from them, doubling down on that type of humour. On my dad’s side, he would let us stay up late on a school night if Kids in the Hall or SCTV or Monty Python were on TV. There was always an actual emphasis on humour, on being weird and kind of different, that was always hanging in the air in our house. The irony of it all, too, is that that introduction to Canadian humour, specifically through SCTV – quite literally, though not directly – led me to actually working with some of those people down the line. It’s wild. It truly is. And it’s a dream come true.”
