Adam Devine Chugs the Big Red Kool-Aid
Sep 02, 2018 11:58AM ● By Doug Meigs
While pretending to be busy as their distraught bud arrives late to the office, Adam Devine—playing his character Adam DeMamp in the Comedy Central series Workaholics—makes a passing reference to his home state over the phone: “I’m gonna go ahead and get two dozen throwing stars out to your residence in Bellevue, Nebraska. You’re gonna enjoy that, Mr. Johnson. Thank you, OK, I love you, too.” he says before hanging up. Then the on-screen office pranking escalates further.
The throwing stars reference was merely a small personal touch to the ridiculous storyline of “The Promotion,” the fourth episode in season one of a series dedicated to zany office antics and often-intoxicated misadventures of three cubicle-mates (played by Devine and his real-life friends, roommates, and co-creators of the show). Name-dropping Bellevue was a subtlety to the script from Devine that connects his breakout role in the show back to his roots in The Good Life.
“It’s just specificity,” Devine says. “In comedy, it really helps—instead of just saying some generic town or being vague—to use an exact place. I know a lot of Nebraska town names, and they’re always at the tip of my tongue. It’s always fun to rep Nebraska when you get a chance, too. Why not? Go Big Red!”
Devine’s fans in Nebraska can delight from the occasional references to Nebraska littered throughout his creative works. Meanwhile, any media-consuming Nebraskans who are unaware that the actor grew up in Omaha are likely familiar with his characters in Workaholics, the Pitch Perfect franchise, or other notable roles.
Workaholics concluded its run after seven seasons in March 2017, as Devine and his partners decided it was time to move on to other projects. A cursory look at his TV and film credits, however, shows that Devine truly is a “workaholic.”
Between 2013 and 2018, he appeared regularly on the ABC sitcom Modern Family as “Andy.” He starred in and co-wrote Adam Devine’s House Party on Comedy Central between 2013 and 2016 (a stand-up comedy show that he co-directed and co-created with fellow “Workaholic” Kyle Newacheck), starred in Pitch Perfect 1 and 2 as the egotistical leader of an all-male a cappella group (2012 and 2015), starred opposite Zac Efron in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016), voiced a mammoth in the animated film Ice Age: Collision Course (2016), voiced the Flash in The Lego Batman Movie (2017), and hosted the 2017 MTV Movie & TV Awards. But that’s only naming a few of the projects from his young yet jam-packed filmography.
Recently, online streaming platforms have become an important avenue for finding his latest projects. Not only can viewers binge all seven seasons of Workaholics on Hulu, Netflix also released two films in 2018 that showcase his writing, producing, and directing in addition to his starring on the screen: the rom-com When We First Met (February) and the raunchy action-comedy Game Over, Man! (March). In August, after this edition of Omaha Magazine went to press, Netflix also planned to debut The Package, a film that Devine co-produced with Anders Holm, Blake Anderson, and Newacheck of Workaholics. The movie tells the story of teenagers on a camping trip that devolves into a mission to save their friend’s “most prized [anatomical] possession.”
Of course, Devine was not always such a big-shot comedian/actor. In fact, he wasn’t even originally from Nebraska—though he considers Omaha his hometown (a fact that Omaha Magazine heartily endorses). He was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and moved to Millard when he was about 10 years old.
“It was 1994, and we [Nebraska football] were just dominant at that time,” he says. “I remember watching the Orange Bowl with my dad and a bunch of his friends and just a bunch of people from the neighborhood, and just being in awe of how much people loved the Huskers and how much it meant for people and how exciting it was to put on all the gear [red-and-white shirts with the team’s logo] and watch the Huskers play.”
If the Huskers had sucked, Devine admits, he might not have been such an enthusiastic convert. But it was like watching Michael Jordan play for the Chicago Bulls. “It was fun to watch because we won absolutely every time, and you know, that solidified it for me,” he says. “And now I still watch every game. I’m waiting for us to regain our glory because I already drank the Big Red Kool-Aid. Once you drink it, there’s no going back.”
When he first moved to Omaha, he was just a kid trying to fit in. Mom-dictated fashion choices didn’t help. He had previously attended a Catholic elementary school in eastern Iowa where uniforms were mandatory—navy blue pants with a shirt tucked in—and that’s what she made him wear for his first day of class at Millard Public Schools.
“After that, I was like, ‘I’ve got to do anything I can to fit in,’” he recalls. “I noticed Husker gear was a very popular thing to wear, so I was like, ‘I have to get decked out, Mom, and she was like, ‘You’re not even a Husker fan. We’re from Iowa,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t care, we’re buying the gear. I’m not wearing the turtleneck again.’"
The ’94 Orange Bowl came a few months after his family’s relocation. Devine made friends and settled into the start of a stereotypical suburban Omaha childhood. Until one summer day, a collision with destiny changed his life. Destiny, in this case, was a 42-ton truck that ran him over as he crossed the street to catch up with a friend going to buy candy at a neighborhood gas station.
Devine’s world went black. He woke up two weeks later. “They told me that I probably would have died if I didn’t have my bike on the right-hand side of my body,” he says, adding that the local news coverage of the accident showed a gnarly scene with the bike crumpled like a pretzel. “I kind of fell underneath it and got spit out, as opposed to taking the full hit myself.”
Physical recovery was many years in the making. Although disabled in the aftermath of the accident, Devine was a sponge for the sublime awesomeness of Nebraska football in its 1990s heyday. Tom Osborne’s Huskers squads helped sustain his soul. Bedridden and incapacitated during the ’95 national championship, he was limping around on crutches by the time the Huskers clinched another national championship in ’97. Thousands of fans once again gathered in the city’s major intersections to pump their fists and shout the “Go Big Red” call and response ad infinitum. Devine was there, and he loved it.
“It was the most mayhem I’d ever seen,” he says. “What I love about Omaha—and what I love about Nebraska and the Midwest in general—is that it was mayhem, and everyone was having a great time, but everyone was so cool and so polite and really open and giving. Here I am, a little boy on crutches, and I’m crutching around out there, and no one stole my crutches to use them as timber to start a fire [laughing], which I feel in most other cities it would have been, ‘Hey kid, give me that, I gotta bash in this window and quickly steal this TV as we start this liquor store on fire.’”
His role with Workaholics and Adam Devine’s House Party on Comedy Central would eventually make partying a visible part of his on-screen persona. But the mass of Huskers fans celebrating a national championship was his first epic party (or at least, his first big party that did not involve rollerblades, bowling, and a lot of pizza). Women were flashing boobs in jubilation. He and his friends had sneaked beer from the cooler at home and felt buzzed for the first time. He was having the time of his life. “I was such a little kid,” he says. “I didn’t really know where I was. If I wasn’t on Millard Avenue, I was probably thinking, ‘Oh my, we are MILES from home. I’m in the big city!’”
Unfortunately, he never had a chance to explore his own athletic prowess in Omaha. The cement truck of destiny smashed Devine’s dreams of advancing from peewee football to the Blackshirts of UNL. Nevertheless, he kept his athletic ambition alive by lowering the rim of his driveway basketball hoop and pretending he was Michael Jordan. Then, every year of high school, he would try out for the Millard South basketball team.
“I really just wanted to make the team, and I tried really hard,” he says. “But our team was pretty good throughout my high school life, and I ran like a 17-minute mile at that point because I was just relearning how to walk. So there was no way that I was going to make the cut. But I tried out every year...For whatever reason, players had to buy the shoes before you actually knew if you made the team or not, so I always bought the shoes. Finally, my senior year during tryouts, the coach yelled over to me like ‘Devine!’ and I was thinking, ‘Uh oh, he’s calling me up! He’s gonna say I’m the sixth man! I’m coming off the bench, here I go!’ and he’s like, ‘You don’t need to buy the shoes.’ I’m sure my mom appreciated the brutal honesty because she did not want to buy those shoes. I still think I did, though, I still think I got that last pair.”
In his roles in Workaholics and Pitch Perfect, Devine played characters oozing with overconfidence. These performances were shaped by his own youthful experiences deflecting hostility from occasional bullies. Humor, he found, was the great defensive strategy.
“The thing about bullies that always made me laugh is they’re usually the dumbest guy in the room; they’re never the smartest,” he says. “It’s funny, when playing a character like that, to have this braggadocio, that confidence, when you’re really an idiot masking all your insecurities. That’s what bullies are. They’re insecure about something, and that’s why they’re lashing out. Because they don’t want everyone to think they’re not cool, or to acknowledge whatever they’re insecure about. So they mask it by bullying someone else. I played that role a lot with Adam DeMamp on Workaholics. I created the character, and I loved playing it because he was so confident. But with his friends, he would cry in front of them and be super sad and be like, ‘No one likes me!’ because that’s what he’s really thinking. But when he goes out, he tries to act like the most confident, coolest guy, which usually backfires—which is what it does for most people when they try to act like something they’re not.”
Making gag phone calls to a now-defunct Omaha radio station, KDGE-FM 101.9 “The Edge,” gave Devine his earliest exposure to comedic performance for the general public. He was just having fun, not thinking of it as any sort of career development. But it was.
“After I had my accident, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t do anything,” he says. “So I would call into The Edge every day and do different voices and impressions. The DJs liked it, so I kept calling back. I would be writing bits at school in class and run home, well, not ‘run’ but aggressively crutch home or have someone push me up a hill in a wheelchair home, and then do my bits on the radio. I remember they were like, ‘Hey, you’re calling every day, we want you to be a color commentary guy on the radio station. We’ll think of bits for you to do every day and we’ll pay you. This could be your job, you call in every day anyway.’ And I was like, ‘This is great!’ so I went down to The Edge headquarters in the Old Market. My mom had to drive me all the way down there, I was 12 or 13 years old at this point and in a wheelchair. My mom pushes me in, and the guys are like, ‘What, we thought you were an adult!’ Because I never talked with them out of character, I would just be in character 100 percent of the time, and they were like, ‘Well, we can’t hire you, but what we can do is give you free concert tickets and free CDs to any events we throw.’ For the next couple of years, I got dozens and dozens of free concert tickets, which, at that age—13 and 14 years old—is better than any amount of money that they could have given. I would roll to Rockfest, Edgefest, and all the local rock shows put on by The Edge with 15 to 20 people. Which was a good way to have kids not make fun of you or punk you, since I was just getting over being crippled.”
Doing the bits on the radio gave him ammunition to negate the would-be meanness of monstrous middle schoolers. After all, the only thing these kids wanted more than making fun of someone else was getting to go to a concert for free. He had the power, like Devine intervention.
Three different telemarketing jobs during high school, likewise, gave him more unexpected fodder for his eventual foray into mainstream comedy and his role on Workaholics. But when he was working in his cubicle, he was just trying to pass the time.
For Professional Research Consultants, he conducted surveys over the phone for health care companies. “It was pretty straight forward,” he says. “You just had to have a polite voice on the phone, and people for the most part were like, ‘Yeah, my hospital stay was good,’ and you could take it from there. That being said, I would definitely change my voice for which part of the country I was calling. If I was calling the South, I would have a Southern accent [he says with a Southern drawl], and then if I was calling New York [he says with a Bronx accent], I would use more of a East Coast thing, and I would change my name to sound more New York. I remember my boss took me in and was like, ‘You’re doing great, just don’t change your name and your voice. You should not do that. Use your regular voice everywhere that we’re calling.’”
Selling meat for Omaha Steaks was more difficult. “Because as much as steaks are delicious and everyone likes steak, and Omaha Steaks is a great name brand, if you’re not hungry for steak, you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, I should buy $500 in steaks right now,’” Devine says. “So it was a lot of me taking a piece of paper and wiggling it in front of the phone and going, ‘What’s this?’ and then acting like I’m talking to someone else and going like, ‘Wow, I cannot believe this. The boss just brought this to me from upstairs’—there were no upstairs; it was a one-story building—‘and we are going to give you this amazing discount.’ It was the exact same discount we were going to give everybody else. But this was my sales technique, and it worked.”
The third of his telemarketing jobs was the worst. It was a company that sold everything from knives to Time-Life Books over the phone. “That was the worst phone job because, have you ever wanted to buy a Time-Life Book in your life? No. No one has,” he says imagining the poor souls who got stuck receiving the books month after month and having to scatter them around the house everytime Grandma came to visit. Grandparents, it seems, were a solid target for sales.
There were classes that helped his comedy and acting career along the way, too. He enrolled in the theater arts program at Millard South during his freshman year. But it wasn’t until his junior year that he began to take the school’s theater program more seriously.
“My drama teacher at Millard South High School, Robin Baker, was just awesome,” Devine says. “She was cool, and she knew people that were actually working actors in Hollywood and people who were producers and writers and people that were actually doing it—not just on the small level, but actually making careers out of it.”
Baker helped him to believe that he could do it, too. She saw that Devine enjoyed making videos, and she encouraged him by showing the videos during classes or at rehearsals. He had focused only on comedy in his first three years of high school. But, at her urging, he began to branch out from comedy to dramatic roles in his senior year.
“OK, this is what I want to do,” he realized. “My legs aren’t going to suddenly super-heal, and I’m not going to be the freak athlete that I once thought I was, so I should do something else.” So, Devine took parts in five plays his senior year.
“She was like, ‘For comedians, the reason they’re usually funny is they have a depth of emotion that they can easily tap into, and that lends itself to being a good dramatic actor,’” Devine says of his high school drama teacher. “She gave me a shot at doing some more dramatic stuff, so I ran with it. She gave me the confidence to move out to Hollywood and pursue a real career. And to her credit, during my senior year, when I was telling my parents that I wanted to move to L.A. and try to give acting and comedy a real go, she told them that she thought that I had the chops to make it. And that gave my parents the confidence to allow me to go.”
Off to California he went. Devine applied to UCLA and was accepted, but didn’t have enough money to cover tuition. He ended up studying at Orange Coast Community College, thinking he might transfer the credits to another California university afterward. Soon after enrolling at the community college, Devine met Blake Anderson and Kyle Newacheck (two of the four core members of Workaholics).
“On day one of improv class at the community college, I just kind of clicked with them,” Devine says. “Blake, as you know from Workaholics, ends up having these long, beautiful, luscious locks that the ladies just adore. But at that time he had the cutest little afro, very Justin Guarini-esque, and he was super funny, so I kind of latched on to him and we started writing comedy together. After a couple years, I realized that I didn’t want to go to school. I wanted to do comedy full-time. Kyle, who plays Carl the drug dealer on Workaholics, who directed many of the episodes for us on Workaholics, he moved up [to L.A. from Orange County] to go to film school, and at that time I was like, ‘I’m going to move up as well and really start to take my comedy/acting career seriously.’”
Devine never graduated from Orange Coast Community College, though he speaks highly of the school. He didn’t want to take the math and science credits needed to complete a degree. He only took improv, creative writing, screenwriting, and the classes that he thought would make him better at the job he actually wanted to do.
That strategy doesn’t work out for everyone, he admits: “I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. But I really put my nose down. I was determined that this is what I’m gonna do, and I’m gonna do it full-steam ahead. Luckily things kind of clicked into place for me.”
Devine intervention strikes again. Two years after moving to Orange County, the 20-year-old aspiring comedian took a job at the Hollywood Improv Comedy Club in L.A. He was just answering phones and working the door. Nevertheless, he considers it to be his first break.
“Even though it’s not like a true Hollywood break, I got to see comics like Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Fortune Feimster, Daniel Tosh, and all these guys from all different walks of life at the top of their game, these A-list comedians,” he says. “Second City, at that time, was connected to the Improv. It was right next door. If you worked at the Improv, you got half off of classes at Second City. So I was like, ‘This is perfect!’ I took as many classes over there as I possibly could.”
In the Second City musical improv class, Devine met Anders Holm, the fourth member of the yet-to-assemble Workaholics squad. A troupe associated with the class was planning to go on tour and do corporate gigs. Singing musical improv at the Mead Paper Corp. turned out to be Devine’s first paying comedy gig.
Devine found Holm to be like the yin to his yang, or vice versa. “He actually was the first person I met who was a writer that was serious about writing,” Devine says. “He was more serious about writing than performing, and I was kind of the other way. I was performing so often and doing stand-up every night. I think he wanted to be more of a performer, and I wanted to be more of a writer, and we sort of helped each other. We started writing together, and then he joined my class, and we started to perform together.”
YouTube was still a new phenomenon on the internet, and Devine saw an opportunity for his comedian friends to assemble like Voltron. “So I call my old friends Blake Anderson and Kyle Newacheck. I was living with Kyle at the time,” Devine says. “I was like, ‘We need to start making videos,’” as the only comedy-focused videos he was seeing on YouTube were from Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island crew.
“I think we came out with about 80 videos in about two years,” Devine says, “That’s when we started to get the attention of Comedy Central, because we were putting out so much stuff, and at the same time, I was doing stand-up and I started to catch the attention of Comedy Central. They had me on Live at Gotham, which was the new faces show before Adam Devine’s House Party. So that was my first TV stand-up show.”
The Comedy Central execs started watching all of their material on YouTube—which remains available under their group’s channel, Mail Order Comedy—then Devine says they were approached: “‘Oh, you guys can actually create something. Do you have any ideas for shows?’ And we were like, ‘We sure do.’”
Gangster-rapping wizards were going to be the next big thing in comedy. Almost. “We went through a weird period where we created an entire album of us as gangster-rapping wizards from another realm,” he says. “I mean, you can buy the album, it’s called Purple Magic, I believe it’s on iTunes still. We thought it was awesome, and we were getting great feedback, and those were our first videos that went really viral. That was right around the same time Comedy Central asked about show ideas.”
They also had done a Mail Order Comedy web series that Devine says “was basically Workaholics before Workaholics,” and the executives had expressed interest in that concept of the guys living together and working together and getting into hijinks, “and we’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea, but what’s a better idea is us as gangster-rapping wizards from another realm that come to this realm to take over the rap game.’ And they’re like, ‘What? No. That’s a horrible idea. We do not want that.’ But we kept pitching it anyway. We pitched the lower level execs; they were like, ‘Great, don’t pitch that when you go to the vice president.’ So we’re like, ‘OK,’ and then we pitch it to the vice president, and they’re like, ‘Great, you’re going to pitch the president next week, do not pitch the wizard rap,’ So then we go there and we pitch Workaholics; she’s loving it, she’s like, ‘This is a really great idea. We’re excited about this.’ Then we pull the rug out from under ourselves, and we’re like, ‘Well, it’s great you’re excited about that, but what we really wanna do is…’ and pitch her the wizards. And she’s like, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ Well, thank God the execs at Comedy Central were nice enough to just not go, ‘OK, you know what, just leave. Don’t come back. We’re trying to give you your shot, but you won’t shut up about wizards.’”
Whether or not the gangster-rapping wizards concept ever magically resurrects itself, Devine has remained plenty busy with other projects—minus his wand and Gandalf beard. “I’m coming off a whirlwind,” he says. “Last year I shot three movies and did a stand-up tour, a huge tour, and then I just promoted a bunch of those movies and was all over the country promoting, and went on a USO tour with my dad this last Christmas to Iraq and Afghanistan, and then went on a stand-up tour to Japan and Australia for about a month, and then here I am. This is like the first gasp of air these last couple weeks.”
Back in his regular routine, he’s still on the grind. He describes a regular day as, “Waking up, then I usually have an interview or two, then some meetings with someone, and then I chug coffee and go do shows. I usually try to do a couple shows a night still.”
His stand-up push is fodder for his next goal for his comedy career—a Netflix special, which Devine will be shooting this fall at the Orpheum Theater in Omaha. The discussion with Netflix was still under negotiation over the summer when Devine spoke with Omaha Magazine for this article. His desire to film the potential comedy special back in his Homaha once again demonstrates his genuine love of Nebraska.
But that’s not all on the horizon for him. With an anticipated 2019 release on Disney’s new streaming platform, Devine stars in the upcoming family-friendly Disney film Magic Camp, where he plays a banker returning to the magic camp of his youth.
Meanwhile, in July, HBO announced plans for a pilot for a new comedy series titled The Righteous Gemstones about a conflicted televangelist family by the name of Gemstone. Devine is signed on for the role of the family patriarch’s hardcore fundamentalist son bent on destroying Satan.
Devine says he has several other undisclosed projects percolating, and he doesn’t see the term “workaholic” as a negative in his personal circumstances: “It’s not like I’m working so hard that I’m ignoring my family and not making it to a birthday dinner for someone I love, like ‘Sorry, he’s too busy working,’ while I’m just in the other room aggressively writing dick and fart jokes. Like, ‘I can’t make your birthday dinner! I must finish this perfect dick analogy!’ But no, I do work very hard, and that comes from being from the Midwest and having that mentality.”
He attributes his work ethic to Midwestern parents and upbringing: “Seeing how hard my parents worked to take care of me and my sister, I knew in order to get this career up off the ground, I needed to work as hard as I possibly could. It really just comes down to, surround yourself with people that you think are smarter and more talented than you are, and then try to outwork anyone that you know. If you do that, even if you’re not the smartest or most talented, but you’re willing to work harder than anyone else you know, you can get smarter and you can get more talented. As long as you’re willing to put in the extra work. A lot of people aren’t. I used to work with some people who I thought, ‘These are the funniest people I’ve met in my life!’ and now they’re not even in the business because they weren’t willing to do the 15 shows a week and stay out until 4 a.m. driving around the country doing shows and staying up late to finish that script.”
He has worked as a comedian, writer, actor, voice actor, producer, and director for various projects over the years. But how would he like to be seen? “The thing is, I like doing all of it. I wouldn’t want to do just one thing,” he says. “I have friends that only do stand-up, that’s all they do. To me, I would get bored if I didn’t have other avenues to go down. I love acting. I love playing different roles. I would love to play some more dramatic roles, and do like Robin Williams did toward the end of his career.
But then I also love producing, I love taking other people’s projects and ideas and using my connections that I’ve made through the years and helping them find money for the projects and actually helping get them made. I also would like to direct movies and have control over making a creative vision come to life. I love writing and coming up with this little nugget of an idea, this little morsel, and seeing it become a full-fledged movie or a TV show that has a life of its own. That is really gratifying, a very cool experience.”
While experimenting in all aspects of creative production appeals to Devine, he also doesn’t mind letting it all hang out. Literally. As evidenced by his dropping his pants and jumping buck naked from a closet to surprise the armed mercenaries in Game Over, Man!, the Netflix film that Devine and all of his fellow Workaholics co-creators put together as a team.
The concept for Game Over, Man! evolved from their writing “Office Campout,” their third episode of Workaholics, which first aired seven years ago on Comedy Central. The episode featured an attempted defense of their cubicle maze from nighttime invaders—inspired by the film Die Hard with psychedelic mushrooms. The plot of the Netflix film drives home the Die Hard inspiration even harder (with the trio working as hotel janitorial staff rather than telemarketers) with action combat scenes, mercenaries with automatic weapons, and a big boss, plus illicit substances.
Did he get any grief from his parents over his family jewels flashing? “No,” he says. “I love my parents. They’re the best, they’re so supportive. My mom was sitting by me at the premiere. I was sitting in front of her actually. I didn’t want to sit right next to her. Then, as it’s happening [as his penis is bouncing on the screen], she’s going ‘Aww’ [in an affectionate motherly way], and then she kept going, ‘Well, this is funny. This is funny,’ which I think is her nervous way of not being like, ‘Ew, gross, why is my son’s dick out?’”
Around the time that Game Over, Man! debuted on Netflix in spring 2018, the HBO series Westworld started its second season. One of the male actors in Westworld, Simon Quarterman, dropped his pants in the first episode for a full-frontal nude scene. Quarterman told New York Magazine’s Vulture that the experience was liberating and he urged other actors to try it. Well, Devine is all over that trend like a dog humping a leg. “We don’t coast,” as Omaha’s official slogan insists. We’re ahead of the curve.
“Yeah, yeah we are,” he says with a laugh. “I’m not afraid to let it all hang out.”
No one in the audience of the premiere was cheering “Go Big Red!” but it would have been a cute way to welcome the actor’s manicured manparts on the big screen.
Like any true Nebraskan, Devine remains a Husker fan in spite of the program’s struggles in recent years. He even had an opportunity to come and work out with the Huskers in 2016 while promoting the film Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.
“I love going to Nebraska to promote movies,” he says. “It’s just fun for me, especially when I get to do cool stuff like going on the field and retrieving some punts—which was really much harder than it looks. Turns out, those guys are freak athletes. They gave me a jersey with my name on it, I got to run up and down the field, I got to take the passes, retrieve some punts, and I also got to go in the gym and get my swole on with the weight-training staff. Big shout-out to them, and thanks for the free gym membership. We were doing push-ups, stuff with the medicine ball, and they told me I could come back any time. I have yet to take them up on it, but I kind of want to go back for just a month and really abuse my privileges [laughing] make them be like, ‘You gotta go. We’re trying to work out here.’”
During that promo visit, he had a chance to talk one-on-one with then-Coach Mike Riley. The coach sat the actor down in his office for the recruitment talk. It was likely the closest Devine will ever comes to realizing his dream of playing for the Cornhuskers.
“He’s a super nice guy,” he says of Riley. “You know, it’s sad because I don’t like it when people lose their jobs—they’ve got family they’re supporting, so that’s never a good thing—but at the same time, it just wasn’t clicking. It wasn’t working out...Coming off of Scott Frost’s [undefeated 2017] season at Central Florida, I think this was the right time to make the move.”
A die-hard fan, Devine can’t conceal his excitement about coach Frost’s shakeup of the storied football program, even if it’s merely for the morale of the fans. “Who knows what’s going to happen, especially the first couple seasons,” he says. “I think we have to give him time to adjust, but just as far as excitement about the team, thinking we have a shot, that goes a long way. We’re the Huskers, baby. You can’t count us out. It’s a Frost Warning!”
He’s not alone in his outlook on the 2018 season. Devine has witnessed the excitement from fellow roving residents of the Husker Nation all around the country, even overseas. He received a reminder in his adopted home in Southern California.
“This is going to sound like I’m a fancy asshole, but I have a beach house and have a Husker flag at the end of my dock,” he says, “and just the other day, this guy kept driving past and screaming something. I didn’t know what he was screaming. Finally, after he passed the fourth time, I hear him shout, ‘GOHHHHHHHHH BIHHHHHHG REHHHHHHHD,’ and then me and all my friends—I keep a real tight Nebraska/Omaha crew—we all hollered back with the classic call and response: Go Big Red!”
Follow Adam Devine on Instagram (@andybovine) and Twitter (@adamdevine).
This article was printed in the September/October 2018 edition of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
