Over the course of his 15-year career, Paul Walter Hauser has demonstrated his command over myriad styles of comedy, in projects ranging from Cruella, to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. But in Paramount’s legacy sequel The Naked Gun, out in theaters tomorrow, the actor found what he considers to be “the best” of the bunch.
Starring alongside Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson — who surprise with their own ability to nail a very specific comedic tone — Hauser plays Capt. Ed Hocken Jr., who like Neeson with his Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., takes a knee early in the film to honor the legacy of a dead father, his having been played in the franchise’s earlier iterations by Oscar winner George Kennedy.
To Hauser, the film offers an opportunity for a dialogue on comedy today — about the place it occupies in our culture, and the “nuance” that’s missing in the conversation. It’s a silly, joke-a-minute romp demonstrating the value in comedy for comedy’s sake — a film that is confident in pushing boundaries with some edgy jokes without ever being mean-spirited.
One of today’s most versatile actors, Hauser doesn’t limit himself to comedy in 2025, with multiple films already released and a couple still to come. Just recently seen playing the villainous Harvey Elder (aka) Mole Man in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, he’ll next be seen starring opposite Sydney Sweeney in Americana, a crime thriller that garnered solid reviews in its SXSW premiere and is slated for release via Lionsgate on August 15. Two months later, on October 24, he’ll be seen playing Mike Batlan, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska guitar tech, in Deliver Me from Nowhere — an awards prospect from 20th starring The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White as The Boss.
Below, Hauser lays out his personal philosophy on comedy, talking about the way his heroes in the genre led him down the path toward acting, and his desire to “take a big Nick Cage” swing with most everything he does — even in a year like this, where he’s primarily playing supporting roles.
In a refreshingly honest conversation, he also dishes on the thinking that went into choosing a Marvel role to commit to, lessons learned from witnessing good (and not-so-good) behavior on set, an action-comedy he co-wrote for himself as a starring vehicle, and how even after winning some of the industry’s top accolades, he still feels like he’s “fighting for every single bite of food” on his plate.
DEADLINE: Tell me about the person you were when you first discovered the Naked Gun movies. When was that?
PAUL WALTER HAUSER: I was in São Paulo, working a temp job, doing a lot of drugs. I was 45; the year was 1991. [Laughs] No, I was a seven- or eight-year-old kid watching it on TBS or Comedy Central, and it was the kind of thing where it made my dad laugh. When you’re a little kid, dad could sometimes be very serious. So to see your dad laugh at something, whether it was Naked Gun or Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Monty Python, you grew to like that. You were curious about it.
DEADLINE: I was interested to learn in recent interviews that comedy means enough to you that you have the names of some of your comedy idols tattooed on your arm. And that comedy was one of the things that pushed you toward acting. Is there more to the story there?
HAUSER: You know, unless you’re Haley Joel Osment and you’re nine years old doing a monologue with Bruce Willis in a horror film, I think most kids start off in a comedic musical sense. It’s like, what can you do? You can do a little dance number, you can tell a joke, or you can do a funny voice or whatever. I was doing all the bible plays and stuff you do when you’re in school, and we had a Christmas pageant, and I’d always ham it up during the Christmas pageant. I did impersonations of Jimmy Stewart and Jack Nicholson and family members, educators at my school. I just was very much taken in on mimicry and entertainment, whatever that looked like. But it was the guys on my arm that I purposely put there.
There’s more. You know, I love Adam Sandler, I love Steve Martin. But the six that are on my arm are the ones that as a child, they made me curious. They motivated me to want to be funny, and I thought they did something extraordinary.
They each have their own skillset, in my opinion, then and now. Like, a guy like Daniel Stern is what I wanted to be. He could be in Diner and Breaking Away, and be in Oscar nominated movies, and do an amazing dramatic job. Or he could just as easily be in Home Alone or City Flickers or Rookie of the Year. So, a guy like him was super important to me, and still is. And the more I learn about a guy like him, too, he really put his family first. Daniel worked and made as much money as he could, but he also cut it off when it was time to show up for his kids’ extracurricular activities or whatever.
DEADLINE: Do you have a favorite bit from the old Naked Gun films?
HAUSER: The one I always go back to is from the first movie in 1988 when Leslie Nielsen is doing a bit with the street informant. They’re just exchanging money and he’s like, “Maybe this will refresh your memory,” and then [the informant] does the same cop tactic to the cop, to Leslie, and ends up giving him the money back to try to get answers from him. That humor is so singular to the Zucker Brothers and Leslie Nielsen, but it’s also not brand new. That type of a bit originated with people who did vaudeville, or people who did silent films. It was the idea of, how do you get a joke across very quickly and universally? And so even though I loved that in the Naked Gun movie, I also recognized that that’s the kind of bit that would’ve been done in a Marx Brothers movie, or Laurel and Hardy, or Abbott Castello doing Who’s On First?.
DEADLINE: Has your personal approach to comedy been informed simply by what you’ve absorbed from other movies and TV series? Or is there a sense of comedic timing that just feels natural to you?
HAUSER: Whatever comedy I’ve done, from Cruella to I Think You Should Leave to Reno 911! to Naked Gun, it’s always just an unconscious amalgam of different things I’ve picked up over the years, whether it’s somebody else’s performance or just somebody I met at a cafe or a church or a movie premiere. I’m always stealing sh*t from a bunch of different people and then making it my own. Nicolas Cage does the exact same thing; he’s constantly taking stuff from a silent-era monster movie or something he saw last week, and I would rather take a big Nick Cage swing on something than be ambiguous. So hopefully people see that in my work. But if I’m going to point out actual moments where I’m like, that’s me doing so and so, I definitely put some Chris Farley into my character Stingray [in Cobra Kai]. When I do something like Fantastic Four, I’m definitely stealing a little bit from Jack Nicholson. I improvised three or four of my lines in the movie that they kept in the final cut, and it’s sort of a snide, curmudgeonly tonality that I am so attracted to in some of his work.
DEADLINE: When it came to The Naked Gun, was the idea of rebooting the property enough to get you excited? Or was it the creative team that made you want to sign on?
HAUSER: It was a thousand percent the creative team. It was the executive Jon Gonda, who I’ve become so fond of. It was Akiva [Schaffer], who I’ve been a fan of for almost 20 years, before he was even on Saturday Night Live, and it was Liam Neeson. I just saw that package and thought, this feels like if you’re going to do it, this is the thing to do it with. Had it been a different combination of people, I don’t know if I would’ve signed on.
DEADLINE: Is this typical of your approach in deciding on whether to take on a big franchise movie?
HAUSER: [It’s] the people involved, the script, the quality of life for my family, if they’re coming with me or not on the movie. A good example was I did a movie called Balls Up with Mark Wahlberg and Pete Farrelly over at Amazon and Skydance, and they flew my family out first class and put us up in a nice home for the three months I shot a co-lead with Mark Wahlberg, and they paid me well and took care of me. The script was hysterical, and I got to work with Mark Wahlberg and Sacha Baron Cohen and Molly Shannon. It’s like selfishly, you’ve looked for all of the boxes you would love to tick. More often than not, you don’t tick all of them because life’s not perfect. But Naked Gun was another one where I was ticking most of the boxes and felt really good about it. And now having seen the film, I think it’s the best comedy I’ve been a part of.
DEADLINE: It was a great experience to be back in a theater experiencing a comedy for comedy’s sake, something that’s a joke a minute…It’s not something you come across much anymore.
HAUSER: I’m very endeared to the idea of comedy for comedy sake. Have you seen the show of Tires? Tires doesn’t aspire to win 90 Emmy Awards. They’re just trying to make you laugh and give you a few people you connect with. I shot a movie in New York called The Very Best People; I played a really odious, ugly character, and it was very hard for me. It wasn’t fun. And at night, I would make myself a fruit and yogurt parfait and sit on the couch in my underwear and watch Tires for 40, 45 minutes.
DEADLINE: How many comedy scripts are you being sent these days? It seems like the studios are back to pursuing comedy again.
HAUSER: I get offered drama more than comedy. They usually want me to play a psycho or a weirdo in some indie movie that has no money, or they want me to do something I’ve already done before. Rarely do I get sent a real comedy. This was one of those exceptions, as was Balls Up. The studio wasn’t trying to cast me whatsoever [for that one]; It was Mark Wahlberg who FaceTimed me and said, “Do you want to play opposite me in this movie?” I said yeah, and like in a week, I was in the movie. Same thing with Jon Gonda. Jon Gonda was the guy saying, “Akiva, you’ve got to use this guy. He’s awesome.” So in a lot of these things, I just need a cheerleader. When I got Reno 911!, that was just Thomas Lennon hitting up Artists First, my management, and saying, “Yo, can we get Paul Hauser?” So I’m not the guy everybody wants on a movie, but I am the guy that if I get a cheerleader, I come in and I do my best. I selfishly try to pick projects I would be proud of, and go see in a theater with my own money, and Naked Gun and Fantastic Four, these are movies that I’d be excited about watching the trailer on my phone.
DEADLINE: Are there instances now — even as far as you’ve come in your career — where you’re still chasing something, rather than being approached?
HAUSER: I chase every day, man. Every day. I get approached randomly three to four times a year with a good opportunity. The rest of it is all a chase. You sign on to something and then you give notes on a draft, or you produce it, or you try to get other friends on board. You text your buddies and say, “You want to do this?” And they say no, for one reason or another. You’re mostly in development hell. Most of Hollywood is development hell, with the occasional break. For the record though, let’s keep it real here. There are guys ahead of me, like Paul Dano and Jesse Plemons: Those are the guys who are getting asked to do everything. I’m kind of in the middle, where I get asked to do some stuff, but I’m also fighting for every single bite of food on my plate.
DEADLINE: That’s interesting to hear, given that you’ve won some of this industry’s top honors, and have proven yourself quite versatile, including when it comes to comedy.
HAUSER: Listen, rarely does a really funny comedy come around. The fact that I get to be a part of it is an honor. I have seen Naked Gun three times now, and I stand by it, and we all hope we get to do another one. If it makes enough money, maybe Paramount and Skydance will let us do it again and we can make people laugh more. We’re in a weird place in history, which keep darker with great rapidity and frequency, and I just think nice music or nice silly comedies, these things are healthy bits of distraction and something to keep us going sometimes.
DEADLINE: You’ve said in the past that you think comedy should be dangerous, though not mean-spirited, and there is a difference. I feel like there’s been a fear at studios in recent years when it comes to letting comedies be dangerous…How do you think about toeing that line?
HAUSER: There’s a bit of nuance that’s so important to me that, if anyone would ever publish me saying this, it would mean a lot. Sometimes people’s ears get pricked up and their heart gets triggered by a word or a phrase, and so they don’t hear the joke, or they don’t see the context of the joke. They only know that one of their trigger things was said, and I would implore people to go rewatch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or South Park or whatever. The things that people say are edgy, oftentimes if you look beyond the shock value of the trigger words and imagery, there’s a bigger thing being said, and it’s often making fun of something that isn’t the part that you think it is. So if you hear a joke, you’ll go, “Wow, that’s racist.” And then it’s like, well, wait a minute. Did you even listen to what the joke was about? And the nuance of who is saying it and why? Because you might laugh at it, but you’re not laughing at the victim in that person’s joke. You’re laughing because the person saying the joke is an imbecile.
I think there’s also a lot of what Kendrick Lamar refers to as “overnight activists,” or people that act empowered in their disdain because they feel they need to or should. I would implore people to focus on the things that you actually care about. Don’t be a phony. If you don’t care about the environment, that’s okay. There’s a lot of people that do. There are people that care about the environment and raise money for whales and dogs and cats, but they could care less about human trafficking. You know what I mean?
We live in a world where it takes all kinds. We don’t all have to be identical, carbon-copy psychopaths. We can have different senses of humor and different desires and still coexist as long as we’re not being ugly and mean-spirited. I think we all know the difference between cracking a joke and trying to hurt someone’s feelings because you’re hurting. There’s a difference.
DEADLINE: You mentioned the possibility of doing more Naked Gun films. Are there other legacy titles from that era that you’d like to see rebooted?
HAUSER: I’d like smart, competent people to bring back the fake doc that Christopher Guest did. Not remaking them, but bringing back the subtlety and quiet brilliance of performers like Ed Begley Jr. and Catherine O’Hara and Parker Posey. It’s funny that Catherine O’Hara and Parker Posey are universally loved now, but me and my friends were obsessed with them 20 years ago. So I would love somebody to bring back those fake docs. That would be really cool.
There’s comedic people I would love to work with, too. There’s an edgy storyteller who uses comedy a lot named Martin McDonough. A guy like Martin McDonough or Trey [Parker] and Matt [Stone] from South Park, I would love to work with guys like that.
DEADLINE: You’re showcasing a real diversity of roles this year, The Fantastic Four‘s Mole Man being another. When it came to approaching the MCU, did you give a lot of thought to the way you’d want to show up? What kind of character you’d be interested in taking on in that universe?
HAUSER: Very surprisingly intuitive of you. No one’s ever brought that up yet, but that a hundred percent was across my purview and my thought process going in: Is this the one I want to play? And I look at what fans write about the upcoming movies. If there’s a DC Comics movie, it’s always like, “He could play Fatman.” It’s never something that you feel good about; it’s always something drastically offensive in its name alone. So I figured Harvey Elder, Mole Man — mad scientist, angry curmudgeon type with this kind of species that he defends — I was like, I can get on board with that.
Mole Man feels like something that could have been played by any actor. It didn’t have to be me. So then choosing me, knowing it could have been multiple, multiple people, that felt like something I should partake in. They also had Joseph [Quinn] and Ebon [Moss-Bachrach], Pedro [Pascal] and Vanessa [Kirby] attached. Those are all actors I respect. And Matt Shakman is an old friend from It’s Always Sunny. So there were enough things there that made me go, “Yeah, I doubt I’ll offered a million different Marvel roles. I should take this one and run because it feels like it’s going to be a good movie. Even if they never use me again and I peace out after one movie, I’ll know that I did a good job and that I was in one of the good ones.”
DEADLINE: What made you want to be in the Springsteen movie, Deliver Me from Nowhere? That seems to be a role of similar size for you…
HAUSER: This is definitely the year of supporting, supporting, supporting. If you look at all the movies I did this year, I guess other than Luckiest Man in America, it’s me doing a smaller, quieter supporting role to try to tell a great story with great people. So that’s kind of the headline there and the continuity of those roles. Scott Cooper had offered me a movie previous to Deliver Me from Nowhere. It never got made, but the script is amazing, and me and other actors I greatly admire were attached. And for one reason or another, it kind of fell apart. I was bummed because I was excited to work with Scott, and then he came to me and said, “Hey, I’m writing you a part in my Springsteen movie.” I said, “I’m in. Don’t even have to read it.” And I had a great time working with him. I think he’s a real artist. I got to hang out with Springsteen, which was surreal and insane. And I’m obsessed with The Bear. The Bear‘s like my favorite show on TV. So to get to work with Jeremy [Allen White] in close quarters, in any capacity, my wife and I and all our friends were so excited for that.
DEADLINE: You’ve worked with so many great artists at this point. Was there a note or particular piece of advice from any of them that’s stuck with you?
HAUSER: Honestly, I haven’t had that many teachable moments from co-stars or directors. I would say the best advice I’ve been given, just by way of watching how other people behave, would be making space for a lot of people on a movie set and trying to make everybody feel seen. I’ve seen certain actors or actresses, like Margot Robbie and Emma Stone, do that. More women than men, for whatever reason. I find that leading ladies like Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Margot Robbie, they just have a true sense of being capable, of caring a lot and making room for everybody, and making people feel seen, and not complaining. I think men complain more than women on a movie set; you’ll find a lot of people who might disagree, but I fully stand by that, that men are a bit more prickly and have bigger issues than women on sets.
DEADLINE: What’s the best script you’ve read recently?
HAUSER: I’m obsessed with a script called The Punishing by Chris Sparling. I’m obsessed with the screenplay I read for the Trey Parker-Matt Stone-Kendrick Lamar film that comes out next year. And I’m obsessed with a script that I wrote with my buddy, Julian Sergi. He’s a comedian and actor and a writer, and we wrote a movie called Let’s Not Die. It’s an action-comedy for me and two other guys that’s like a three-hander, but we’ve got Gene Stupnitsky producing it, and we’re looking for a director and actors opposite me.
The Punishing is amazing because it’s the type of movie I’m dying to do, which is a smart, classy horror movie with brains. The Trey Parker-Matt Stone-Kendrick Lamar project, I was dying to be in and it didn’t work out. And then this movie me and my buddy Julian wrote, it’s just me trying to exercise that other side of writing, producing.
DEADLINE: Are there any other bucket list items for you at the moment? Things you’d like to try?
HAUSER: I’d love to do a horror film. I’d love to do a thriller. I’d love to lose bunch weight and do some action movies. Would love to play dads and husbands, in the sense that I am one now, so maybe I can draw from real life and bring something to that. And at the end of the day, I just want to work with nice people. I’d rather work with slightly less talented people who are kind than work with really talented people who suck as human beings. So whoever that describes, that would be my bucket list. And Pete Farrelly would be one of those people. He’s a good human being; he’s very good at what he does. He directed the hell out of the movie and brought the best out of me, and I want to keep working with people like that.
