WTF with Marc Maron Podcast

Dennis Quaid believes in the benefits of familiarity. In fact, he attributes his career to it. Multiple generations of audiences know him for different films, be it Breaking Away or Dreamscape or The Parent Trap or The Rookie, but everyone has a sense of who he is. That’s because Dennis says he’s always playing a version of himself, even when he’s playing real people like Doc Holliday, astronaut G...

After fifty years in Hollywood producing some of the most popular movies of all time, Irwin Winkler says the question he still gets asked the most is, What does a producer do? To get the answer, Irwin tells Marc about his days running the bumper cars on Coney Island, his job as a self-described mediocre agent, and his success making movies as the studio system broke down, including culture-changin...

Jane Fonda is still acting and is still an activist, two constants in her entire adult life. But as she tells Marc, Jane spent a lot of her life thinking she was a worthless person. Carrying the twin burdens of her mother’s suicide and a strained relationship with her father, Jane talks about why she gravitated throughout her life toward strong men, how she struggled with her own compulsive behavi...

Bryan Callen always wished he could be a tough guy. Maybe it was the influence of his Marine father or maybe it was the snippets of American culture he was taking in as he grew up all over the world. Whatever it was, it caused a crisis of identity that pushed him toward acting and, ultimately, standup comedy. Bryan talks with Marc about where that identity crisis stands today, why he doesn’t buy i...

Brené Brown’s degree in social work and her research into conditions like empathy and vulnerability led to one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time, millions of readers of her books, and celebrity boosters like Oprah Winfrey. But it was her academic work on shame that started it all and is the aspect of her work that resonated strongly with Marc. Brené talks with Marc about the evolution of he...

Mark Arm was there at the beginning of a Seattle music scene that became a national phenomenon. But all Mark ever thought he and his bandmates were doing was entertaining themselves. Mark talks about how he grew up in Suburban Washington with pressure from his mom to be in the arts and how his outsider status led him to starting bands like Green River and Mudhoney, playing alongside contemporaries...

Christina Hendricks can relate if you had a lousy time in high school. Between moving around a lot to her goth fashion style and music choices to her time spent with the school theater crew, Christina was a target of bullies and wanted to get as far away from school as possible. She tells Marc how this alienation led to careers in modeling and acting, and how her agents dumped her when she insiste...

Bruce McCulloch’s characters and disposition on The Kids in the Hall would lead you to conclude he’s somewhat shy, sensitive and kind. And while that may be true now, Bruce says he was an angry young man, a drinker, a fighter. Growing up in Calgary, there didn’t seem to be much of a future for him, but improv comedy became the way out. Bruce talks with Marc about the darkness lurking beneath the K...

The last time Vincent D’Onofrio saw Marc it was at a standup show where Marc got tackled on stage by a disgruntled audience member. A lot has changed for both of them since then. You know Marc's story. But Vincent says in the decades since that night, he has improved his mental wellness and gotten his anger under control, two changes he thought would hurt his craft but wound up helping him become...

Growing up in Texas, young Joseph Henry Burnett first experienced musical transportation while listening to records of Cole Porter and Ella Fitzgerald. He developed into not just a versatile musician and producer, but an obsessive archivist and student of music history. T Bone tells Marc about his days traveling with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, his collaborations with the Coen Brothers for...

John Lithgow can go from playing the sweetest characters you’ll ever see to truly deranged psychopaths, sometimes within the same movie. He’s good at playing kind and evil in equal measure partly because he developed his acting range at a young age growing up around his dad’s traveling Shakespeare festivals. John talks with Marc about his many memorable roles and how working on 3rd Rock from the S...

Phoebe Robinson knows too well the feeling of being “the only one.” Whether it was being the only black person in her grade, the only woman or person of color on a standup show, or the only person being asked to step out of the line at the airport, the ongoing impact is exhausting. Which is why, as Phoebe tells Marc, she always wants to be doing her own thing on her own terms, from 2 Dope Queens t...

Rob Lowe had several revelations over the course of his life. One is that there’s more fun in sobriety than in being under the influence. Another is that he should have had a sex tape scandal later in life when it actually would have helped his career instead of nearly killing it. And the latest is that he needs to keep doing different things to keep from getting bored, including hosting a game sh...

The word prodigy gets thrown around a lot, but if Tal Wilkenfeld isn’t one then the word has no meaning. Tal tells Marc how she never even saw a person play guitar until she was 14 years old. Thanks to encouragement from her grandfather, she started playing as a teenager and immediately stunned professional musicians with her natural talents. Tal explains how her career took off in part because of...

Amy Sedaris had no plan of action for her career other than going to Chicago to do sketch comedy and going to New York to do plays with her brother David. And as she tells Marc, she still has no plan except for doing things that she finds fun. Amy and Marc talk about how that lack of planning  led to her early Comedy Central sketch show Exit 57, a collaborative partnership with Paul Dinello and St...

Aidy Bryant only recently felt like she could tap into her inner rage. She remains a wonderfully nice person and hilarious performer, but with things like her new show Shrill and other mental adjustments, Aidy feels like she’s taking ownership of some righteous anger. She has that in common with Marc, as well as the fact that they both cry while watching TV all the time. They talk about those shar...

To celebrate the milestone of 1000 episodes, Marc and WTF producer Brendan McDonald reflect on how they got here, why they created the show in the first place, and what the future holds for them and WTF. They answer listener questions and divulge some never-before-heard revelations, such as the time the show almost ended and how the White House reacted to President Obama's interview in the garage....

Media juggernauts Marc Maron and Tom Scharpling join forces once again, this time to save not only themselves but the world as well. Along the way, they talk about Howard Stern, movie theater food, falling for advertising, sweating, and Jonah Ray’s influence on Marc’s identity. Also, we get the story of Marc’s ill-fated music career and the reason Sausage Party led to a great awakening in Tom’s li...

Alfred Molina was told early on that he was a “dreadful actor but a marvelous show off.” Thankfully, he took that assessment as a positive and became one of our great actors, working in experimental British theater, BBC radio plays, and large-scale musicals like Oklahoma. Alfred tells Marc how he transitioned to movies, with his first film being a small trifle called Raiders of the Lost Ark, and h...

Gary Clark Jr. tries not to put too much pressure on himself. That’s not surprising since outside forces seem to put a lot of pressure on Gary, with guys like Eric Clapton asking him to go on tour and outlets like Rolling Stone calling him The Chosen One. The truth is, Gary was just a kid who wanted to be an R&B singer and taught himself how to play guitar. He tells Marc what he learned about the...

Andrea Savage didn't really know Marc but thought he was a little scary. Marc didn't know Andrea but found her to be intimidating. What was it about these two funny people that had them keeping a distance from each other? Perhaps it was because of what they have in common, like the broken homes they came from, the disdain they share for the inner workings of show business, and their histories of m...

Jon Bernthal’s path to becoming an actor was less about following a dream than about getting out of a nightmare. Before he was The Punisher or other streetwise characters in The Wolf of Wall Street and The Walking Dead, Jon was a kid with a nose for trouble and a rebelliousness that pulled toward violence. It was heading in a bad direction but thanks to an acting teacher, a journey to Russia and C...

Mandy Moore has already gone through several career phases in her young life, from teenage pop star to animated voice artist to dramatic actress. But her latest phase, as matriarch Rebecca Pearson on This Is Us, came after a long period in which she put her career on hold and lost her sense of self. Mandy explains to Marc what it meant to be emotionally locked into a relationship, how that tumultu...

Yeardley Smith knows that Lisa Simpson gets people through tough times. She knows because strangers come up to her in public and tell her how much Lisa helped them. And yet, despite portraying this iconic character for 30 years, Yeardley struggled for a long time to see her own life and career as a success. She and Marc talk about her journey, which includes Broadway roles as a teenager, stumbling...

Tony Shalhoub grew up with nine siblings so it’s no surprise he developed a way to stand out. Tony and Marc talk about his upbringing in Green Bay, Wisconsin, worshiping at the Church of Lombardi, aka Lambeau Field, and eventually leaving town to become an actor. Tony explains how tricky it is to separate himself from popular characters, like Antonio from Wings and Detective Monk, how his genealog...