Louis C.K. was unusually chatty in his session with reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour Sunday. He didn’t have too much to say about the upcoming fifth season of his acclaimed “Louie,” returning April 9 to FX except to say it would be “more laugh centric.”
So he was asked about a number of questions about specific, memorable story lines of season four.
I asked him about the episode that played like an After School Special, as a junior high school age Louis C.K. gets involved with the pot heads and steals some scientific scales from a beloved teacher to pay for it.
He admitted it was all true.
“I stole several scales from my junior high school and sold them for drugs. And I let people defend me when I knew I was wrong,” he said. “It’s about the worst I’ve ever felt in my I know, it’s terrible. I’ve been sitting on that story all this time.”
You’ve held this in, all this time? I asked.
“It’s terrible,” he said.
“It’s a shame thing,” said his co-star Pamela Adlon.
Had he heard from his teacher at the time? Well he had something to say about that as well.
“A few years ago I got an email from my old teacher who had defended me, and she said, ‘I’m so proud of you!’ She said, ‘I’ve been reading about you. All my students love you.’ And she said — I’m not going to say the principal’s name, but let’s say it was Mr. Johnson. She said, ‘And f— Mr. Johnson!’
“She wrote this to me at the end of the email. It’s not Mr. Johnson, but it was the principal at the time. So it broke my heart, and I wrote to her. I said, ‘I have to tell you that I really did do this. I stole these scales. And Mr. Johnson was a good man.
“He didn’t even, in the end, press charges against me,” he went on. “There was a scene where the principal tells me, ‘I know you did this, but I’m going to let it go because it’s too much for you. I’m a man. I can take the heat, but you can’t.’ And that’s verbatim from my principal’s mouth. He was a great man.
“But anyway, so she wrote me back and said, ‘I’m not going to lie. I’m very disappointed that you did this.’
But she said, ‘The reason we defended you, as teachers, was because he was a big powerful man and you were a child. And he didn’t have a lawyer when he accused you, and he still needed to respect your rights.’ So she was a great teacher.
“I had every advantage when I was a kid. I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, which was a nice town. I grew up in the more working class part of it, but here and there I just got high, and my working, single mother I f–ed her life up. I was a terrible kid. So yeah, I take I think I put it all in that show, though. I don’t think I left anything out. I don’t think I did anything much worse than that.”
“I feel so much better that I’m not the only person who knows all of this now,” Adlon said.
“Yeah, she’s known all of this about me for a long time,” C.K. said.
I asked if he thought that story was worth a movie, why he put it in the show. Did he ever save anything from his show for a later movie?
“Well, that one kept growing,” he said of the scales story. “And then I knew: This is a really great idea. I want to shoot this.’
“Then I thought: Don’t save it for a movie, because right now I’m playing for the Detroit Tigers or whatever. If you’re playing for a team, you don’t go, ‘Well, I’m going to save my best home runs for another team.’ The best ideas I have, I’m doing them now.”