Mark Duplass offers a warning before he starts talking about his ideal Sunday.
“Be prepared,” he says. “There’s not gonna be a lot of leaving the house today.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
The actor-director-producer has settled into a comfortable rhythm with his wife, Katie Aselton, their two kids and their pack of rambunctious dogs. For them, home is Valley Village, a neighborhood the couple quickly fell in love with. “It’s quiet, super family-friendly and very dog-oriented,” he says.
Duplass’ career, however, has been anything but quiet. He stars alongside Ellen Pompeo and Imogen Faith Reid in Hulu’s “Good American Family,” a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about the Natalia Grace case. Meanwhile, his series “The Creep Tapes” was renewed for a second season on Shudder. Duplass also runs an independent film company with his brother, Jay, and is also a founding partner of the newly relaunched Vidiots, the nonprofit movie theater and rental shop in Eagle Rock.
His nonprofit the Soul Points Fund, which he launched with Aselton in 2020 to support artists, recently shifted gears to help those affected by the Los Angeles fires. “If there’s one thing people in this town know how to do, it’s tackle unexpected problems,” he says. “It happens every day on a film set, so that kind of thinking is second nature.”
For Duplass, Sundays are for slowing down. Here’s how he’d spend his ideal day.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
7:30 a.m.: The T-Man rises
Generally, I get up around 7:30. I don’t really stay up too late on weekends. I’m not a big drinker. I deal with a lot of anxiety and depression. So I have very specific rhythms that I need to obtain, which is: Get a lot of sleep. So you’re not gonna find me on a Sunday morning sleeping until 11 because I got off the rails. Daddy doesn’t get off the rails anymore.
First things first: Open the door, both the dogs are up. I am known in the house as “the T-Man,” and what it stands for is “the Treat Man.” But we can’t say “treat,” because if you say “treat,” they’ll freak the f— out. My sweet German shepherd-husky mix, Blue, circles me sweetly. Murphy, who’s my pitty-Staffy mix, is a goddamn maniac, and he’ll jump on me and lunge at me. I give them their absolutely disgusting beef liver treats.
Then we go for coffee No. 1. I get one caffeinated coffee per day because, again, Daddy stays on the rails. I put a little chocolate in it, and I put a little cinnamon in it and I put a little raw sugar in it. Then I see who’s up. Usually it’s Molly, my youngest, who’s 12, and Katie, my wife. My oldest daughter, Ora, who just turned 17, is probably still sleeping at this point. Breakfast is oatmeal with fresh blueberries almost every day. And then a second coffee — going into decaf mode at this point, which is fine for me. It’s just as good. I just want the hot, brown ritual.
10 a.m.: Endorphins up
We have a little home gym, and I do a 20-minute, brutal, fast-paced blast on the elliptical machine to make sure I get my endorphins up and my cardiovascular system going.
The dogs come in there with me, because they know soon as I’m done with that, we’re gonna go out for a walk. I take the two puppies and go for a 40-minute walk. I use that as a nice meditation.
I usually listen to some kind of record. I’m not a playlist guy. I like the full artist’s statement. I’ll try to pull something from my past that will connect me to feeling 16 again or 23 again. Sometimes that’s as ridiculous as the Spin Doctors record that I used to love, or sometimes it’s one of my Indigo Girls records.
11 a.m.: Hot and cold plunges
When I’m done with the walk, I’ve been heating up the hot tub. I do 104 degrees in the hot tub and 57 in the cold plunge, which, not to sound like a broken record, but that’s good for the mental health and good for the body.
Noon: Nothing goes to waste
I’m “the Leftovers Man.” I grew up in the suburbs of New Orleans with an extreme Depression-era mentality bestowed on me by my grandmother and my mother. You do not waste food, even if it’s potentially rotting in the fridge. You just fry it up at intense heat in the pan and hopefully it kills the bacteria.
Toward the end of the week, I’ll bake a big chicken and the family will eat a third of it for dinner, and then I have that to pull from. I keep a very strategic group of frozen vegetables and frozen rice in my freezer that can be paired with the chicken and different kinds of sauces: “Oh, maybe this can be a soy-based meal” or, “We’re going to take it more to Mexico for this one.” And I make a big stir-fry. And usually two or three people in the family partake of that.
2 p.m.: The village Vidiot
This is where the day in my “ideal” Sunday would shift a little bit. [On an ideal Sunday], I would go to Vidiots for either a 2 or a 4 o’clock movie. Vidiots is my church. Sometimes they’re playing a family-friendly Japanime movie we all want to see — some of the family will come with. Or the Mubi Microcinema in Vidiots is showing second-run art-house movies.
I just feel so good there. It’s connected to my whole life. There was a view-and-brew second-run art-house cinema in New Orleans called Movie Pitchers that I went to for years in high school. I went to college in Austin and, of course, we had Alamo Drafthouse. And I lived in New York, so I’ve always had a theater like that.
3:30 p.m.: A strategic cold one
You got the Fosters Freeze next to Vidiots in case you want to do something nasty to yourself after a screening. Or, one of my favorite things to do is have a drink around like 3:30 or 4 o’clock at the pinball bar [Walt’s] on an empty stomach, so I can get a relatively cheap buzz on without putting too much alcohol in my body. And then have dinner so it doesn’t have any mood damage or hangover damage for me. And I can still remember who I was — that New Orleans kid at 14 years old who did so many drugs. So. Many. Drugs. I can’t believe I’m here.
4:30 p.m.: Zankou and Rummikub with the folks
My parents live in Pasadena, and we’re very, very close with them, and they’re very close with my kids. They’re in their late 70s. My dad’s gonna turn 80 this year.
You ever watch a movie and someone’s dying at the end of it, and they’re like, “Man, I just wish we could have had more memories like that one trip we took here’?” There’s not just one memory with my parents and my brother and his family. We have hundreds, and they’re great. So there’s no making up for lost time, but I just selfishly want more of it.
All this time we spent together has now fully taken the pressure off. It’s not like, “We’ve got to go to Europe and do it all up.” All we want to do together is: My parents come over, I order Zankou Chicken, and we will play Bananagrams or Rummikub or there’s a puzzle going on. We’ll look at some old videos of when the kids were younger, which they love to do. And it’s really boring in the best way — it’s very comforting.
7 p.m.: “Alone” in a crowd
So I do some dishes, and Ora, my oldest, will scatter to go work on an audition or talk to her boyfriend. Katie and I will put on “Alone” on the History Channel. It’s the slightly low-rent, Canadian version of “Survivor.” You learn a lot about berries and ethical hunting. But more importantly, you have a lot of personalities who have not really had the luxury, or in some cases, horror, of existentially facing themselves.
9 p.m.: Rekindling his love of books
When you have kids, something funny happens, which is, when they’re very young, you get them in bed, and then you race to get in bed yourself, because you’re constantly trying to store up sleep because you know they’re gonna wake you up. My wife and I have stayed on that schedule, even though we don’t have to anymore. Our kids are 12 and 17, but we love just getting into bed around 9 o’clock or so.
We get our books. I love my Kindle because I’ve got it connected to my Los Angeles Public Library account. The public library — they make you wait. So there will be a book I really want to read, and it’ll be like an eight-week waiting list, and then when it comes in, it’s like Christmas.
Then I go into the bathroom, brush my teeth, and take my very important 20 milligrams of citalopram — [an] SSRI — which keeps Daddy on the rails. I’ve been taking that for 16 years. And I take a little probiotic because I am 48.
I say five little things as I close my eyes before I go to bed that I am either grateful for or excited about for the next day, which is self-help 101, as basic as it comes, but that s— works. Just to sit there in bed and say, “I’m gonna open the door, and those frickin’ dogs are going to be so happy to see me, and I’m gonna be able to bring them joy. So even if the whole day goes to s— tomorrow, I’m gonna have this wonderful little interaction with these little puppies that I love.” I try to center myself before I zonk out.
