Nick Offerman's love affair with New Zealand is long-standing. Photo / Getty Images
When Nick Offerman’s wife, Will & Grace actress Megan Mullally, heard her husband was about to talk to a New Zealand journalist, she leapt at the opportunity to make one thing abundantly clear.
“Please let them know we’re in the market for a new country, and they’re at the top of the list,” Offerman tells me with a clean-shaven smile – sans his trademark Ron Swanson moustache.
The Parks and Recreation star (and Primetime Emmy winner for his heartbreaking role in The Last Of Us) is a man who, like many of his characters, loves the outdoors. So it’s no surprise New Zealand appeals.
“We were actually just visiting there in June. We had a gig in Sydney, and we came over and spent a month just taking it easy in New Zealand,“ the 55-year-old says.
“We’re just crazy about it, specifically, the respect that your population pays to your environment and to Mother Nature.”
Having toured here with his stand-up comedy shows in the past, the “Midwesterner from Illinois” says he was amazed by the regulations we have in place, from “all the different trained dogs in the airport” to having to wear different hiking boots to keep invasive species out.
“Coming from a country [US] that is pretty gross in terms of like, ‘do you have any invasive species?’ And you’re like, ‘yeah, how about this money?’ And they’re like, ‘great, please come on in’, [New Zealand] is so beautiful – and everybody seems to be in a really good mood because the food is so good.”
Offerman enjoys “how knowledgeable” Kiwi audiences are and admits it’s sometimes a far cry from what he experiences back home.
“It’s kind of embarrassing, but the audiences in New Zealand actually know more about the American political situation than most Americans, which is kind of our problem,” he says.
“We are such a wealthy nation that we’ve gotten so comfortable that people think they don’t have to pay attention. And then you can end up in a lot of trouble with the people in office.”
During his recent visit Offerman experienced a new side of New Zealand: fly fishing.
“I had never caught trout before. I love fishing in lakes in America, but I had never handled trout. They’re quite slippery,” he muses.
And it’s fitting we talk about fish, because that’s exactly what Offerman plays in his latest movie.
Based on the children’s book by Deborah Diesen, The Pout-Pout Fish follows Offerman’s prickly Mr Fish, who slowly learns to love the world around him despite his perceived permanent pout.
“The message of this movie is [that] we need a variety of people in a neighbourhood, and we all have to get along. We’re all sharing this coral reef, or this ocean, or this county, or this planet. And so, we should value the differences that we have,” he says of the animated film.
“When we have disagreements, we should still have affection for one another because whether we vote for the same person or not, we’re still neighbours and we still need to share all the apples on the tree.”
Offerman is no stranger to voicing animated children’s films, previously appearing in The Smurfs and The Lego Movie to name a couple. It’s something he enjoys, especially amid the chaos of other roles like a dictator president (2024’s Civil War) and an embattled sovereign citizen in Sovereign (2025).
“[Kid’s films] are such a great delivery system for laughter and for education. I just love imagining myself at that age, and I try to make things as much fun and as entertaining as I can for all the little Offermans out there trying to grow their whiskers.”
His desire to help the next generation is also apparent in his other passion: woodwork. The trained carpenter has been running his woodworking collective in Los Angeles for years.
“I actually just put out a new book in October to teach woodworking to families called Little Woodchucks,” he says.
As for when Offerman will head back to our shores, he hopes it’s soon. In the meantime, though, when he and Mullally get some time off from their busy schedules filming and touring, they’ll get into a mode that will likely make the low-effort Ron Swanson proud.
“We love to be as boring as possible. We love to stay home and cook together; we do jigsaw puzzles and listen to audiobooks. And I just love looking out in my yard, I have wonderful birdlife here in Southern California.”
The Pout-Pout Fish is now showing in cinemas.
Mitchell Hageman joined the Herald’s entertainment and lifestyle team in 2024. He previously worked as a multimedia journalist for Hawke’s Bay Today.