Clark Duke is in a nice spot. He has a supporting role in the new randy-teen comedy Sex Drive, he shot a well-received, CBS-funded series of online shorts with his sometime comedy partner Michael Cera (Clark and Michael) and he landed a key role as a kindly religious fanatic on the new TV series Greek. Not for nothing, he also has a whack of upcoming film projects in the works, including a role in the comic-book adaptation Kick-Ass, shot in Toronto recently. The affable 23-year-old is already in his second acting life, having spent his early years acting alongside John Ritter, Billy Bob Thornton and Markie Post on the USA Network sitcom Hearts Afire, after which he averted the Jaleel White/Jenna Von Oy route by returning to his native Arkansas to attend high school.
Did you deliberately avoid pursuing a Hollywood career as a child? Had you lost interest at that stage?
I think it was important to [take a break] so I could have a normal life. When you’re younger, you don’t take in the surreal-ness of what’s around you. But acting is what I’ve always wanted to do — I can’t think of another line of work.
Your interest in the medium led you to film school, where you used the first episode of Clark And Michael as your thesis.
I got an A on it. But we didn’t write it with huge aspirations or expectations — we wrote it for Adult Swim as an 11-minute show. Mike and I had a mutual friend who went to high school with a guy who worked at CBS, we had a couple of meetings and that was it. Shooting it felt like grad school, which is weird, because I went to actual grad school too.
Do you have a higher profile since landing your role on Greek?
Honestly, I get a lot more recognition from Clark and Michael. Getting the part on Sex Drive is a direct result of that. This summer people are still discovering it, which is probably a benefit of it being online.
Aside from the press junkets and the upcoming college tour to promote the movie, Sex Drive seems like a shift for you — the dirty broadness of some of the humour, for instance. Your character does nearly get defecated on by a woman…
That was new for me. It was the director’s sister [playing the woman] too, so he kept having to direct his own sister to do that awful shit. But it was all in good fun.