‘Hangover’ actor and North Carolina native Zach Galifianakis has message about voting
Zach Galifianakis, a North Carolina native who rose to fame as a “lone wolf” named Alan Garner in the hit 2009 comedy “The Hangover,” has a serious message for his fellow North Carolinians ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
“Please vote. Please,” he said Wednesday in a public service announcement.
Galifianakis recorded the one-and-a-half-minute nonpartisan PSA for NowThis. In the video, he introduces himself as “born and raised in North Carolina” before describing how to register to vote ahead of the Oct. 9 deadline.
“Voting in North Carolina is easy,” he begins by saying.
To register online, Galifianakis tells voters to visit the DMV website with their driver’s license and Social Security card on-hand.
“It’s that easy. It takes less than 5 minutes,” he says. “Not to brag, but I did it in less than four.”
Anyone without a driver’s license or who wants to register offline can ask for a voter registration application from their local Board of Elections office, town hall, library, DMV or high school, according to the PSA. The completed application can be mailed or delivered in person to the Board of Elections.
Galifianakis was born in Wilksboro — about an hour and a half north of Charlotte — and owns a farm in northeastern Alleghany County, where he splits his time with work, The News & Observer reported in 2017.
He went to N.C. State University but left one credit shy of graduating — “I was a film minor at an agriculture school,” Galifianakis told David Letterman in an interview last year — before moving to New York to pursue comedy.
“The Hangover” put him on the map, and he’s since starred in a slew of hits while hosting “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis,” a talk show on Funny or Die in which he interviews celebrities.
He also remains vocal about politics in his home state.
Galifianakis is the nephew of Nick Galifianakis, a North Carolina Congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1967 to 1973. He was beat out by conservative television commentator Jesse Helms in 1972 for the U.S. Senate, The N&O reported.
More than four decades later in 2012, his nephew starred as Marty Huggins alongside Will Ferrell in “The Campaign,” a political satire about two men running for Congress in North Carolina’s fictional 14th District.
“This has been my dream, running for office,” says Huggins, clad in a plaid sweater and turtleneck while seated at the stern of a boat in the movie trailer.
Spoiler alert: he loses the vote but wins by default after Ferrell’s character withdraws.
While a seat in Congress might not be Galifianakis’ actual dream, he did star in a 2017 documentary critical of North Carolina’s politics called “Democracy for Sale.” The film explored how the state’s politics transformed amid increased political spending.
During the course of the movie, The N&O reported Galifianakis helped investigate whether the government was “put in power by moneyed interests and has thus carried out a program that only benefits its backers.”
Still, he’s proud to be from here — or at least, prouder than people from Charleston.
“I’m more proud of being from North Carolina than you should be from being from South Carolina,” he told Charleston-native Stephen Colbert on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” last year.
This story was originally published October 7, 2020 at 4:52 PM.
