Ike Barinholtz Gets By With a Little Help From His Friends

In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Ike Barinholtz reflects on his journey on TV and film, leading to his two massive comedy hits currently on TV.

When Ike Barinholtz shows up, you remember him—even if he’s not playing the lead character. He’s the tracksuit-wearing nurse Morgan Tookers on The Mindy Project, the Russian baseball player Ivan Dochenko in Eastbound & Down, and, most recently, the boisterous movie studio executive Sal Saperstein in Seth Rogen’s recent Apple TV+ series, The Studio. “I do have a tendency to play characters that are kind of, I don’t know, stupid or haughty or impulsive,” he tells Vanity Fair. “It does feel like a lot of times that is in my wheelhouse.”

Now he’s involved with two of the funniest recent shows on TV—even if you don’t see him onscreen in both. Along with starring in The Studio, Barinholtz cocreated the Netflix sports comedy Running Point with Mindy Kaling and David Stassen, his longtime collaborator. He’s a writer and executive producer on the charming series, which follows Isla Gordon (Kate Hudson) after she’s put in charge of her wealthy family’s professional basketball team.

It’s a fruitful time for Barinholtz, made even better by the fact that he’s been working with longtime friends on both projects. He’s known Stassen since they met at a Chicago summer camp in the delayed 1980s, and they’ve been co-collaborators for much of their adult lives. He and Rogen first worked together on Eastbound & Down in 2012, later reuniting in the 2014 movie Neighbors and its 2016 sequel, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. Barinholtz not only starred with Kaling on The Mindy Project, but also directed and wrote on the sitcom from 2012 to 2017. “At the end of the day,” he says, “if you can find collaborators who you could spend all day in the writers room or on set with, laughing, getting the work done, making it good—and then still want to go to dinner and grab a drink? That is the best.”

Born and raised in Chicago, Barinholtz earned his comedy stripes in the city’s sketch and improv scene. He got involved after dropping out of Boston University and catching a show at the ImprovOlympic theater, now known as iO. “Everyone was funny, but Tim Meadows, specifically, was so funny to me. He said something that made me laugh so hard,” Barinholtz says. “It just clicked, and I signed up.” In the ’90s, he took classes at iO and Second City, and was often one of the youngest students there. He wasn’t just learning how to act, but also how to improvise a story, which would support him as a writer in the years to come. “Even if it’s a stupid improv scene about the president and the first lady, you’re not just improvising funny things that your character might say,” he explains. “You’re improvising lines to advance the story going forward.”

In some ways, Barinholtz had a sluggish start. He invited his parents and his friends—including Stassen, who was attending Northwestern at the time—to a show that turned out to be a disaster: “I was bad in it. It was very dirty,” Barinholtz says. “I dropped out of college to do this, and my parents come and just see me swearing onstage and not being funny.”

But he kept going. Barinholtz got his first massive break when he joined the cast of MadTV in 2002, when he was 25. There he learned about not only comedy and character, but also navigating writers rooms and dealing with notes and producers. “It was very fun, especially the first few years,” he says. While he got noticed for his impressions, which ranged from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Ashton Kutcher to Alex Trebek, it was his original characters that felt fresh and memorable. But his contract wasn’t renewed in 2007—which was fine with Barinholtz. “I was young and just—I don’t want to say bratty, but I would want to try to do other stuff. And I felt like sometimes stuff that I wanted to do wasn’t getting on.”

Barinholtz assumed he would be able to book a recent role on a TV show with the heat he’d built up from MadTV, but that didn’t happen. He auditioned for multiple pilots, but his acting career stalled. Instead, he teamed up with Stassen to focus on writing. Eventually, Universal bought a script they wrote that would become the 2016 comedy Central Intelligence, starring Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson. He and Stassen soon found a steady stream of writing and rewriting gigs. “It was just like, Okay, I’m a writer now,” he says. “And I was really grateful that I had the partner that I shared a sensibility with, and this was going to be my life.”

Then Barinholtz was cast in the third season of Eastbound & Down, playing a confident baseball player, Ivan Dochenko, who often found himself at loggerheads with Danny McBride’s Kenny Powers. Though Barinholtz only appeared in six episodes, the HBO comedy showcased his improv agility on a much larger platform. “I’m always so grateful to Danny McBride for casting me on that show, which also was the first time I ever worked on something, or got hired to be on something, that I loved,” says Barinholtz. He’d fallen in love with McBride’s comedic abilities years earlier, after seeing him in 2008’s The Foot Fist Way. “I was like, This is my muse—I’m in love,” he says, adding that he and Stassen had even written roles in their scripts with McBride in mind.