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In 2004, Fox Searchlight Pictures released Napoleon Dynamite, a quirky comedy out of rural Idaho about a misfit teen who learns that friendship is the greatest skill of all. It became the sleeper hit of the summer, quoted ad nauseam by an audience of teenage fans and propelling Jon Heder, who played the title role, into comedy stardom. Things have changed for Heder in the past 22 years—he relocated to Portland, for one—but the influence of Napoleon follows him.
“It ages well because it was already aged when it came out,” he tells WW. “I’ve heard so many guys who were teenagers in the ’70s who said, ‘That’s who I looked like. I wore that brown suit to prom, I had that curly hair and the dark glasses.’…And not just Napoleon, but all the characters. Everybody’s like, ‘I had a weird brother like Kip’ or ‘I had an annoying uncle like Rico.’ There’s a relatability to everyone.”
Heder has reprised his iconic role over the years in parodies, a short-lived animated series, and a commercial for Ore-Ida Tater Tots. It comes as no surprise that Tapawingo (2023), one of his latter-day projects that hit streaming in December, reads as a spiritual successor to Napoleon Dynamite. Heder stars as another eccentric outcast, Nate Skoog, a 30-something postal worker who lives with his mom (Amanda Bearse) and dreams of leaving his small town to pursue a career as a mercenary. He gets his chance when he accepts a contract to bodyguard his boss’s teenage son (Sawyer Williams), who has made enemies of a local family of bullies.
Even for smaller projects like Tapawingo, moviemaking is a weighty endeavor, and the film went through its own odyssey before it was finished. The script by Brad DeMarea was shopped around Hollywood for a decade before falling into the hands of Dylan K. Narang, who went on to direct it. Budgetary restraints and COVID regulations further slowed the filmmaking process. Heder gives Narang credit for getting Tapawingo across the finish line.
“This was very much a labor of love, especially on the director’s part, where he shot a lot of stuff,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff in that script, and he had to make the tough choices, as all directors do. You can’t have a 2½-hour-long comedy.”
Being a loose parody of action movies, Tapawingo boasts its own farcical take on fight scenes and car chases—features that aren’t common to Heder’s filmography. While he did have to learn to drive Nate’s sweet ride (a refurbished ’80s go-kart), his inexperience in combat proved to be an asset to the film.
“If you watch the movie and see what kind of car stunts and fight choreography there is, you’ll quickly realize how little it’s taking notes from The Matrix and more from just bumbling idiots doing stupid stuff,” Heder says. “There was choreography, you watch it and it’s planned out, but it’s not at all a shiny-looking fight scene that looks raw and bloody and visceral. It’s more like it’s very dorky, but that’s the way I kind of like it. It’s fun.”
Although Tapawingo never gives an exact date for its setting, the costuming and needle drops put it somewhere in the mid- to late ’80s. Heder said that filming the project in Hopewell, Va., proved the ideal place to shoot. “When I showed up to Hopewell, it was like, oh wow, they had some set designer come in and design everything to look that way. And it’s just that way. It kind of feels like a step back in time, and it looks incredible. It’s perfect for the film, and we didn’t have to do much.”
Tapawingo ultimately succeeds as comedy for the same reason Napoleon Dynamite did so many years ago. It’s a quirky story that’s both strange and familiar, taking the emotional journey seriously while inviting audiences to laugh at the hero’s buffoonery. Heder in particular shows a depth and maturity that befits this coming-of-age story, and he’s backed by an exceptional cast of lesser-known names and familiar faces, including Gina Gershon, Billy Zane and John Ratzenberger.
As for the future, Heder’s upcoming projects include The Grim and the Dark: The Search for John Blanche, a documentary about the tabletop strategy game Warhammer and its art designer (which he admits has “a very niche audience”), as well as the psychological thriller I See the Demon, which is currently looking for a distributor. Though his career is taking an intentionally gloomier turn, they with Tapawingo feel as if they will be as indie and self-determined as his best-known work.
SEE IT: Tapawingo, not rated, streams on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
