The more Tom Green changes, the more he stays the same.
In 2021, Green pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to the Ottawa Valley. He bought a farm and a mule and started making country music.
On the face of it, it was a dramatic change. Green had called Los Angeles home for 20 years, and a life in the country seemed anathema to his 30-year career as a talk show host, movie star and general onscreen comic chaos agent.
Yet, the Ottawa Valley was where he grew up. His parents and many old friends still lived in the area, and the unlikely Canadian hip-hop pioneer still makes beats in his home studio. And, like so many other aspects of his life — from waking up his parents at 3 a.m. with a dead cow's head to his cancer surgery — Green filmed it all.
The results are on display in a trio of new projects: Tom Green Country, a reality series about Green's attempts to adjust to a rural life; I Got a Mule!, his new standup special; and the self-explanatory This Is the Tom Green Documentary.
"The pandemic happened, and for the first time in 20 years I canceled my stand-up tour," Green tells Exclaim! "I think a lot of people were able to shut off that engine that's sort of constantly whirring in their head and go do something different."
Something different for Green included getting a dog — Charley, who Green is quick to say is named after the Steinbeck novel Travels with Charley — hitting the road in a van and learning how to use some new video equipment. "I realized I really love being in nature. I love waking up in the morning and making a cup of coffee and looking at the sun come up over those mountains. I felt, in some ways, better than I'd felt in years," he reflects.
The fresh start felt like as good a time as any to reflect on the past. Green says he's been approached by producers in the past about making a documentary, but they were never willing to let Green direct the project. "I essentially edited and shot all of the videos on the street from the The Tom Green Show," he points out. "I've actually kept all the footage and storage and 1000s of hours of video tapes, and I know what's on every one of those tapes."
That includes plenty of footage from Green's days in the hip-hop duo Organized Rhyme, as well as his stint hosting a late-night college radio show on CHUO, experiences that fed into the original public access incarnation of his talk show. After finding fame in Canada, MTV came calling, then Hollywood. Green notes, "It's a very complicated story to tell, because of the path that my life has taken me. [There are] a lot of things that nobody really knows, except for me."
While Green makes the past explicit in The Tom Green Documentary, it's the tie that binds the three projects together. In his standup, he makes plenty of hay out of some of his earliest and most infamous bits, while suggesting that this wasn't necessarily how he envisioned his life three decades later.
In an extended riff on the time he humped a dead moose (a segment Eminem referenced in "The Real Slim Shady"), he points out in I Got a Mule! that "people weren't supposed to see that for the rest of my life. It was supposed to air once at midnight on Ottawa public access TV. That was it." Similarly, much of the comedy in Tom Green Country hinges on the idea of Hollywood city slicker Green adapting to country life, a tension Green references often.
But it's conversations with his surprisingly affable parents that get the most laughs. While feeding his chickens, Green observes, "You two were some of the first TV parents to be pranked on television. Now it's all the rage. We started that." His mom quickly claps back: "No, you started that."
Green's career began with music — Orgnaized Rhyme's song "Check the O.R." won the 1992 MuchMusic Video Award for Best Rap Video and was nominated for a JUNO — and it continues to play an important part in his creative process. "I'm getting back into music in a big way right now and releasing a country album very soon," he says. He wrote and performed original music for both This Is The Tom Green Documentary and Tom Green Country, which were recorded at the Tragically Hip's studio, the Bathhouse.
Having spent so much time digging through his past over the last few years, Green admits, "There was maybe a period of time where I was sort of unhappy with how things had gone."
Despite hosting Saturday Night Live, appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone and writing a hit song, by the mid-2000s, Green's career, at least in the mainstream, was starting to wane. He had written and directed a box-office bomb Freddy Got Fingered, battled testicular cancer, and put his show on hiatus so he could recover.
Green says, "It's easy to look back at some of those little bumps in the road along the way, which at the time seemed extraordinarily insurmountable and devastating. Now I'm able to say, 'Hey, that was actually kind of kind of cool that that happened. That made me the person that I am today.'"