CHICAGO — “When I daydream,” Nick Offerman says, “it’s of having quiet moments with a cup of tea, sitting out by the birdfeeder and coming to know my neighborhood birds by name as they come to eat out of my hand.”

The fantasy, however, has yet to become a reality. “I’m moving too fast to do that right now.”

Offerman's newest book is out this week, called “Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery,” which is an introduction to woodworking for kids. He co-stars in the upcoming Netflix miniseries “Death By Lightning” about the 1881 assassination of U.S. president James Garfield, playing his vice president-turned-successor Chester Arthur. He also has another series in the works, this one for Apple called “Margo’s Got Money Problems,” due out next year. Offerman was even multitasking when we caught up by phone, juggling our conversation while he was behind the wheel, driving from Los Angeles to Orange County to pick up his Airstream for an upcoming trip with his wife, Megan Mullally.

“I’m always running a circus with too many plates spinning in it,” he says. One of those plates resulted in an Emmy win last year for his guest role in HBO’s “The Last of Us,” but it is also why any plans of becoming “a little more Whitman-esque or Thoreau-vian” will have to wait.

“I enjoy being productive way too much. For me, happiness in life is derived from being in service to others, which starts with Megan, expands to my family and friends, and then my job, whether it’s acting, writing a book, touring as a humorist or working at my woodshop — these are things that I would do for fun, so that’s kind of become my main vice. Somebody will call up and say, ‘Hey, you wanna come tour England and enjoy a pint of Guinness and a sausage roll while you make people laugh with your guitar?’ That doesn’t sound like the drudgery of the workplace, that sounds like a vacation that I would pay handsomely to take.

“Perhaps one day, as my knee starts to complain more, I’ll have time to get to know the avian life around my house a little bit better. But for now, I’m just happy to wave to them on my way to my next gig. I’m living my dream more powerfully than anybody I’ve ever met.”

Q: Prior to “Death By Lightning,” how much did you know about James Garfield, his assassin Charles Guiteau (played by Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen respectively) and the character you play, Chester Arthur?

A: Well, I knew pretty much all of the information that could be gleaned from Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Assassins,” a production for which I built a set in Urbana, Illinois, in 1991 or so, during my college years. So I actually knew more about Charlie Guiteau than Garfield. But the thrill of the miniseries is that it’s one of those true stories you can’t believe isn’t common knowledge.

I’m such a huge fan of Candice Millard, who wrote the book “Destiny of the Republic,” which is what Mike Makowsky adapted into the miniseries. I was fascinated to learn that Chester Arthur was a former lawyer and good guy who was kind of corrupted — as so many are — by the money around politics. By the time our story begins, he’s become a strong-arming goon in service of Roscoe Conkling (a senator from New York played by Shea Whigham), which gives him a wonderful arc in the show. He has a long way to go (chuckles) to win back the approval of his constituency.

Q: Both you and Michael Shannon spent your formative years doing theater in Chicago. Did your time here overlap? Did you know each other?

A: We sure did. I met Mike — I think I was 23 and he was 19 — and we were exact contemporaries, in fact. We got started at the same time in the early '90s and we did a play together at his company, A Red Orchid Theatre. It was by Arthur Kopit called “The Questioning of Nick” (about two detectives and a student who stands accused). It’s this 20-minute play that’s a three-hander, so it was me, Mike and Guy Van Swearingen and it was directed by Rich Cotovsky and it was the one of the greatest things that I ever got to do.

It’s this simple little play and we would perform it, then the lights would go down and we would switch parts and we’d do it again, and then the lights would go down and we’d do it a third time. So the audience saw each of us play all three parts in a neat little hour. It was so fascinating, it had a “Rashomon” sensibility where everyone immediately got the gimmick and were just rapt at these three young actors taking their swing at their interpretation of these roles. There’s a scene where Mike was one of the detectives and I was the errant high schooler in the play, and he would take my head and hold it between his two dinner plate hands and speak softly and menacingly to me. I’ve never had a more comfortable coddling on stage, but at the same time it was terrifying — it was like a shark gently nuzzling my head in its teeth before delivering the final honors.

So I’ve long been a huge fan of Mike and we’ve been friends for decades.

Q: What was it like working together again all this time later?

A: There is a comfort level. And thanks to our director Matt Ross and Mike Makowsky, who wrote and executive produced it, they put together this team where all of us are theater people. So it felt like we all went to theater school together on some level.

There’s a scene where Betty Gilpin (as Garfield’s wife Lucretia) has to slap me across the face and, there was no question, my stage combat chops stepped in and I said, “If it’s OK with everybody, I’ll take care of it.” And we did 12 or 15 — and Betty was nothing short of gleeful to be asked to strike me full across the face.

Q: You really took a slap? I know it’s possible to shoot from an angle where two people aren’t making contact but it looks like they are.

A: You absolutely can do that, and I always insist, as a fight choreographer, that there’s no need to take a punch. It’s just dumb. It’s juvenile machismo if you’re like, “No, no, no, I want you to really punch me!” But an open-handed slap, whenever possible — if everybody is competent — is so impactful to actually do it. And if you do it right, you can do it without causing any injury. And there’s nothing Betty does that isn’t right, so she was equal and eager to the task. And I’m not kidding, she slapped the hell out of my face 12 times, and 15 minutes later it wasn’t even red. If you do it right, it’s really effective.

Q: Perhaps there was a slight cushion with the mutton chops that Arthur sports. I always assume everything is fake, so maybe those were applied to you each morning, but you seem like someone who would want to grow your own!

A: Those are fully my own facial hair. The only time I would use fake facial hair is if I need a big beard and I don’t have time to grow it. But 95% of the whiskers I have in my career are my own. Ariana Grande can sing like an angel; for me, it’s growing facial hair.

Q: Your new book is focused on woodworking projects for young people. How did that come about?

A: It’s at the heart of everything I do at my woodshop, which encompasses so much of my life. Part of what fueled my skills as a fine woodworker was my work building scenery for Chicago theater. And my co-author Lee Buchanan, the same is true for her. We were taught by our parents to use tools and make things as kids, and that has made our lives so rewarding. And we’ve never stopped making things.

So the book is designed to make things with kids, and for kids. But it’s actually a thinly veiled screed to, and for, everybody. There are many, many parents who never learned how to make things with their hands or tools. So it’s truly speaking to the kid in all of us. I think that the more our society falls into a fealty to corporate systems and technology — where we choose all of the items in our lives by pushing a button on our phone — I think that’s terrifying. I bristle against that, and the way that I do that is by knowing how to make things for myself. Or by buying them from people who make things.

This book is a lot of fun. It’s really funny and it’s a great, gentle, beginner level woodworking course. But moms and dads, grandparents, neighborhood friends, everybody will get the same childish delight out of gluing together three pieces of wood to make a set of toast tongs, and suddenly you feel the super power of being able to pull your toast out of the toaster with your own woodworking skills.

Q: In the preface, you only use the words “artificial intelligence” once, but the introduction feels like such a rousing manifesto against AI.

A: I apparently fall into the category of “curmudgeon” because I appreciate, with the rest of the world, advances in technology and all of the good things that have been brought to our planet by the information age. But we’re all also painfully aware of all the nefarious and cancerous forces at play delivered by those same systems. And now this complicity, this tacit agreement on the part of society to allow AI and robots to do as much work as possible for us, seems so narrow-minded and short-sighted.

I’ve crunched these numbers: If you make some money and sit around and get drunk and fat, it is very enjoyable — sometimes for up to a day-and-a-half. And then after that (laughs) you realize, oh, this is no way to live. It’ll go downhill very quickly because this goes against every moral rule that I’ve been brought up with.

And so, instead of falling into the trap of getting online and being the one billionth person to give my hot take on the state of affairs, I recognize the futility of that. And I recognize the delight that the billionaires and corporations take in all of us being distracted with online fist-shaking. My solution, instead, is to write a book that encourages positivity, that encourages empathy, and in this case, it’s encouraging people to keep the reins of your life in your own hands and don’t allow corporations to decide what happens with all of our natural resources. That’s what it comes down to: By lazily handing over this agency to AI or whoever is running the algorithm, then you’re saying “I don’t care what you’re doing with the oil, or the ocean or the fish or the soil. Or the people.” I think it’s incumbent upon us as citizens of this nation and this planet to always give a (expletive) about what is happening to all of those resources.

I’m not a literally religious person, but that’s where my spirituality lies. I think we’re responsible to one another — and to the creation — to care for it, if for no other reason than to be a good ancestor to the generations coming after this.

Q: One of the things you write in the preface is that “you’ll begin to learn how to generally solve problems” and “you’ll become a better thinker in every aspect of your life.” Problem-solving jumped out as a really smart thing to focus on because it’s a skill that we’re being encouraged to rely on less and less.

A: Our society is built on the progression and evolution of thought. And part of what manifests those thoughts and grand ideas is our ability to truck in grammar and communication and writing and reading and problem-solving. And when you let the computer do all of your thinking for you, that terrifies me. Age and natural entropy on their own are doing all the damage that I need.

So what can I do about this? One little thing is that I can write this book and encourage people to think for themselves — and know how the world is put together — so that wherever we can, we can make our own goods and support other members of the ecosystem who care about a community, and don’t just job-out our decision-making and our retail purchases to some nameless, faceless corporation.

Q: There are lots of photos of you horsing around with children in the book. Are they models, or are they children you know?

A: (Laughs) I’m not so Hollywood that I would need to acquire models.

Two of them are the sons of Lee, my co-author, and they could probably out-work me by now. They’re Berkeley kids, which means they could probably build a house faster than I could. And the rest of them are kids that I know and love and that are part of my community.

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