‘Death By Lightning’ Gives Nick Offerman the Role of a Lifetime in Chester A. Arthur: “Those Were His Actual Muttonchops”

There are so many things to love about Netflix‘s new historic drama, Death By Lightning — its wild true story, vivid portrayal of madness, biting humor, and brilliant ensemble cast, for starters — but Nick Offerman‘s career-defining performance as Chester A. Arthur has to be at the top of that list. As Chester A. Arthur, Offerman gets to call upon his sharp comedic timing, bullish physicality, emotional pathos, and strong facial hair game to bring one of the most unlikely American presidents to life.

“He kind of has the most defined arc of any of the characters in the show,” Death By Lightning creator and showrunner Mike Makowsky told DECIDER. “Chester Arthur, in many ways, is the character or the subject that surprised me the most as I was doing research.”

Most people probably only know Chester A. Arthur as a black and white portrait of a man with impressively bristly muttonchops in their American history text books. What Death By Lightning tracks, though, is Arthur’s evolution from a corrupt fixer of the New York City political machine to a President whose legacy is passing major civil service reform.

“Everyone knows the muttonchops, right?” Makowsky said. “What’s also so crazy about Chester Arthur is, you know, this is a man who have never held elected office in his entire life. He was a crony of the spoils system of the New York machine who somehow fell upward to the presidency.”

“You know, the ingrained absurdity of that was like, as a writer, like you hope to find subject matter like that.”

The first episode of Death By Lightning deals with the 1880 Republican National Convention. In those days, a party’s presidential candidate was determined solely by delegates at the convention. In 1880, the Republican Party had enjoyed over a decade of power in the years following the Civil War, but was struggling with its own deeply divided membership. The Stalwarts enjoyed the venal “pay for play” system that celebrated cronyism, while the “Half-Breeds” wanted to reform government into a true meritocracy.

New York Senator Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham) rolled up to the 1880 RNC with the plan of securing former President Ulysses S. Grant the Republican nomination for the Stalwart cause. Conkling’s best friend and right hand? Chester Arthur, the man in charge of running customs at New York City’s obscenely wealthy port. The Half-Breeds, meanwhile, were split between Maine’s James A. Blaine (Bradley Whitford) and Ohio’s John Sherman (Alistair Petrie).

For thirty-five votes, the Republicans were stuck in a deadlock, with no single candidate reaching a majority. However on the 35th vote, a dark horse candidate, Ohio Representative James A. Garfield (Michael Shannon), began to gain steam. Garfield had delivered a fiery speech nominating friend Sherman that soon led many to believe that he ought to be a candidate. On the thirty-sixth vote, the Half-Breeds threw all their support behind Garfield, locking him the nomination.

Death By Lightning dramatizes how the Half-Breeds offered Chester A. Arthur the Vice Presidency to undermine Conkling. Arthur was in no way qualified for the position and the Netflix series shows how the rowdy, crooked, grieving, bellicose man somehow transformed into the reformer he became. It’s a tricky transition that only works because Makowsky got the actor he imagined as Chester A. Arthur while writing the series.

“When I started writing Arthur, Nick was really the voice that I had in my mind the entire time. And I don’t sort of mean that apocryphally,” Makowsky said. “Like I pictured Nick Offerman the entire time, to the extent that I feel like I kind of wrote him into the script.”

Fans of The Last of Us already know that Offerman has the range to portray a tough man hiding surprising tenderness, but Death By Lightning taps that to even more profound degrees. Whether we’re talking about how moved Arthur is whenever the memory of his dead wife comes up or his actual horror at best friend Conkling’s open betrayals, Offerman lets Arthur’s hard mask fall. Offerman also imbues Arthur with the warmth and humor that define so many of his comedy roles. (There’s a scene where a drunken Arthur is cutting a rug in the Haymarket that made me instantly flash back to Ron Swanson at the Snakehole.)

“I was so lucky,” Makowsky said. “He brought so much to that character, not just in terms of humor, but he can tap into this like deep well of pathos that I think we’ve seen… My god, I mean, he is just remarkable.”

Something else remarkable about Offerman as Chester A. Arthur? He grew his own muttonchops.

“Those were his actual muttonchops,” Makowsky confirmed. “He walked around for four months with those muttonchops.”

Nick Offerman gave Chester A. Arthur the full Offerman and it’s incredible to behold.

Death By Lightning is now streaming on Netflix.