Steve Little plays the loyal, awkward man at the edge of someone else's scene. Stevie Janowski in Eastbound & Down is the best of them, a grown man with a schoolboy's crush, and Little never once plays him for pity.
Fi1m perspective
Watch where Steve Little puts himself when Kenny Powers walks into a room in Eastbound & Down (2009). Stevie Janowski, the music teacher who becomes Kenny's assistant, does not greet his hero so much as turn towards him, the way a plant turns to a window. His devotion would be touching in a dog. Little plays him as a man who has found his purpose in life, and the purpose is carrying another man's bags.
Little has said he built the character from the memory of adolescence: "I wanted him to be like … in high school, before a person gets laid and has girls, they're awkward and goofy." That is what is on the screen. Stevie is a grown man with a teenager's crush, and across four series (2009–2013) Little never lets him grow out of it.
He came up through The Groundlings, the Los Angeles improv and sketch troupe, and it shows: Stevie is a physical performance first, posture and face, and the lines come after. Before Eastbound, the animator Joe Murray cast him in Camp Lazlo (2005), where he voiced Chip and Skip and wrote episodes, and the voice work has run alongside the live action ever since, most durably as Peppermint Butler and Abracadaniel in Adventure Time (2010). In between he took a lead, as Father William in Todd Rohal's The Catechism Cataclysm (2011), and supporting parts in Quentin Dupieux's Wrong (2012) and Wrong Cops (2013), comedies that need actors willing to do the strange thing with a straight face. We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to a view of them.
What we can say is that Little holds his own beside Danny McBride, with whom he has now worked four times, and McBride is not an easy man to stand next to. Kenny takes all the air in a scene; Stevie's trick is to need none. We laughed at him for most of the first series, and then, somewhere in the middle of it, we caught ourselves hoping Kenny would be kind to him just once, while being fairly sure he would not. The reason is that Little never plays the devotion for pity. Stevie is happy. He has what he wants, and it is a man who barely notices him, and Little lets us see both halves of that without underlining either.
The one reservation anyone raises is that his live-action work since has stayed in supporting and ensemble parts, and that is true. Whether it is a loss depends on what you think he is for. Stevie is a supporting part in the plainest sense, a man whose entire function is to support, and give Little the lead and you lose the thing he does best, which is to stand slightly behind someone and be glad of it. We would rather see him carry the bags in something good than the whole film in something not.
Biography
Steve Little is an American actor, comedian and writer. He trained with the improvisational comedy troupe The Groundlings in Los Angeles and began his career in voice acting.
Little is known for voicing characters including Chip and Skip on Camp Lazlo (2005–2008), roles on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack (2008–2010), and Abracadaniel and Peppermint Butler on Adventure Time (2010–2018). He played the recurring character Stevie Janowski on the HBO series Eastbound & Down (2009–2013).
His other credits include the film The Catechism Cataclysm (2011), guest appearances on The Office (2005) and How I Met Your Mother (2005), and voice work on American Dad! (2005) and Regular Show (2010).
