TJ Miller’s I-95 Morning Show Chat: Deadpool, Silicon Valley, and Love for Radio

You know him from Deadpool, SIlicon Valley, Office XMAS Party, Cloverfield, Big Hero 6 and the Emoji Movie, actor TJ Miller called the I-95 Morning Show on Wednesday (04/02/24). TJ is promoting his new comedy album "Smooth Peanut Butter" and a massive tour to support it.

We ended up spending nearly thirty minutes with TJ and covered a lot of ground. We learned about the advice he got from Robin Williams, his experience on-set with Jason Bateman, the roles that surprised him and why he loves radio.

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Have you had one of those movies or TV shows that snuck up on you and you just could never guess what a hit it would be? 

TJ: "Oh Deadpool, and surprisingly Silicon Valley. With Silicon Valley, we thought for sure that no one was going to be interested in that, that nobody, why would anybody care about people in Silicon Valley? We were just like two years ahead of the game but that's Mike Judge, that is sort of what he does. We just really thought nobody cares about Silicon Valley or tech people, or anything to do with it. Why would somebody care what is going on with Facebook much less a start-up company, you know? Now it's hard to get away from hearing about Elon Musk or this billionaire did this or they're stealing our data doing this. So, that was just a crazy hit out of nowhere for us. Then, Deadpool, all of us were kind of like we'll see it's an R-rated superhero movie, does anybody even want this? It was also niche, no one had heard of the comic, only hardcore Marvel fans knew anything about it and so it was really mind-blowing when it did as well as it did."

We heard you love radio, what is it about radio that pulls you in? 

TJ: "Well, it's completely improvised first of all. You have themes and such but I find it so impressive that you guys are just able to talk for you know an hour, two hours, three hours and kind of keep it fresh. I'm always fascinated by you know, dead air is the thing that everyone fears the most. but true radio personalities can avoid that dead air without it sort of feeling forced. I also like a medium where it's just your voice, you don't have facial expressions, or body language or anything so it's much harder than acting where you have your body and your voice. It's very impressive what you guys do, like Smooth Peanut Butter, it's the jam."

Tell us about your new comedy album, Smooth Peanut Butter.

TJ: "I think the funniest thing about all of this, is that I have my own line of peanut butter, you can get that on Amazon or on my website tjmillerdoesnothaveawebsite.com. I don't know why but I'm a peanut butter guy. This is my first comedy album and people say oh that's crazy because you've got an HBO special, a Comedy Central special, I have a Youtube special, my Youtube channel has one full special called Dear Jonah, and then several specials that are completely improvised because that is a lot of what I do when I perform live and there is a little bit of that in the album. This is my first comedy album and I love that because I grew up listening to comedy albums. I grew up, I loved Steve Martin, I wore out those discs, and when I was coming up as a comedian, when I was in high school and stuff there was no way to stream anything so the only way to hear a comedian's routine twice was to get their album. I think that what's amazing is that, there may be some aspiring comedians that listen to it going well, if he can do this, then I can." 

You can listen to our full two-part interview (26:00) with TJ Miller below.

Part 1 - We got to hear about the time Robin Williams gave TJ advice on dealing with stardom.

Part 2 - We also spoke about the movie "Office Christmas Party" and what it was like sharing the screen with Jason Bateman. I wanted to know what it's like to be on-set with someone of that caliber and if TJ tried to mirror his energy. We learned that TJ needed to bring his own energy to compliment Jason. Jason also gave TJ insight into a project he was working on at the time called "Ozark."