PERFORMER OF THE YEAR WILL ARNETT

FIRST, Of course, is the voice: Will Arnett's raspy baritone carrying across tables and chairs and through a dining room wall at this Hollywood hotel, the voice of Gob Bluth and BoJack Horseman and Batman in the Lego movies and commercials for every 21st-century product from peanut butter cups to pickup trucks, and, of course, for the past five years, one third of SmartLess, the weekly audio-only-no-video podcast that has at times been among the most popular podcasts on the planet.

- BY DANIEL RILEY

shirt Merz b. Schwanen vintage jeans from Gator's Vintage belt Artemas Quibble

That's the voice mixing it up with Hollywood executives, somewhere over there, expressing incredulous due at Disney putting Jimmy Kimmel in the penalty box, a temporary banishment that transpired just hours ago.

The voice, notably, is the instrument by which Will Arnett seems to most readily travel between his various roles as a performer—an actor, a comedian, a pitchman, a talk show host, of sorts. And it is the instrument that delivers the vulnerability, pathos, and gravity of the man-in-midlife-crisis at the center of Is This Thing On?—the comic drama Arnett cowrote with Mark Chappell and Bradley Cooper about a guy who secretly stumbles into stand-up comedy when his marriage falls apart. Arnett’s is a performance, he’s perfectly willing to admit, that is really the first of its kind in a career filled with steady voiceover work and some occasionally great comedic walk-ons.

“Other than the podcast, certainly, I wasn’t doing the stuff that I wanted to do. Which was leaning on....”

Acting.

“Yes. Acting. I'd done lots of other stuff, but nothing...,” he says, settling into the truth of it. “I used to make the joke on the podcast that if it wasn’t for bad movies, I wouldn't have made any movies at all. I made some choices early on coming off of Arrested Development that I might not make again.” (Blades of Glory was perhaps an exception, if that gives you a sense of things.) “At the same time, everything conspired to bring me to where I am today, so I can’t really question it.”