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" Ask Aisha Tyler, and she&amp;#039;ll tell you that she&amp;#039;s a failure. It&amp;#039;s hard to believe. But then you read her book from last year, Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation, and you see shameless descriptions of her life&amp;#039;s many gaffs and fk-ups\u2014and, well, it&amp;#039;s a convincing argument. But all of those missteps, as she&amp;#039;ll tell you, are also what make her so great \u2014 and not just as the brainy, beautiful, and highly pregnant super-spy Lana Kane on Archer, but really almost anywhere else on TV: guest-starring on Glee or Modern Family, or on Whose Line Is It Anyway? or The Talk, or on re-runs of Friends (if you&amp;#039;d forgotten that she was Ross&amp;#039;s girlfriend, big mistake). With this season of Archer coming to a close on Monday, we spoke with Aisha to get some insight into her persistence\u2014and try to grab a few hints at what&amp;#039;s next for Lana. ESQUIRE.COM: So how did it feel to put your most awkward stories in a book, for everyone to see? AISHA TYLER: It was really empowering. If you have a secret and it&amp;#039;s embarrassing to you, when you tell that story\u2014you own it. It becomes yours and no one can use it against you. If you have an embarrassing story and it&amp;#039;s a source of shame, keeping it in just compounds the shame and turns the story into something poisonous. And if someone knows about it, then it can be used against you. Everybody has those stories that make them wince when they think about them silently. But as soon as you tell that story, it becomes a little bit less cringe-inducing. ESQ: You talk about that a lot in the book\u2014about overcoming. You call yourself &amp;quot;occasionally and quite stupidly fearless.&amp;quot; AT: I mean, everyone has that inner-dialogue where they&amp;#039;re like, I don&amp;#039;t know if this is going to work out, but I try to ignore those voices. Because I figure if I don&amp;#039;t know how to something, I&amp;#039;ll figure out how to do it. Look, I&amp;#039;ve done shows that have failed. I&amp;#039;ve done projects that haven&amp;#039;t turned out the way I wanted. But I have this deathbed test where I go, On my deathbed, am I going to be bummed that I didn&amp;#039;t go for it? And it pretty much covers all of my decisions. ESQ: It&amp;#039;s worked well for you. AT: Success is not the absence of failure; it&amp;#039;s the persistence through failure. You&amp;#039;re going to fail. You&amp;#039;re absolutely going to fail. Multiple times. If you stick with it, you&amp;#039;ll fail repeatedly. I would not sit around here with my thumb up my ass and say I&amp;#039;m successful, but I&amp;#039;m very lucky to be as busy as I am. And part of the reason that I am as busy as I am is because I just absolutely go for everything that I want to do. ESQ: You seem to be pretty skilled at recovering after things go wrong, too. Like that moment in your book when you vomited in one of your crush&amp;#039;s cars. How&amp;#039;d you come back from that? AT: Oh my God. I don&amp;#039;t know! Just bullheadedness and an unwillingness to quit, really. What else are you going to do? You&amp;#039;ve gotta come back. It&amp;#039;s like those millions of times in my youth and even in my adulthood, actually, where I&amp;#039;m like, If that happens to me, I&amp;#039;m gonna die. And I didn&amp;#039;t die. I just had to wash it off. Soap and water solved a lot of problems, my friend. ESQ: You were also\u2014and this is coming from you\u2014a nerd. AT: [Laughs] I was! I was! And people always say, Oh yeah, you&amp;#039;re full of shit! Maybe you were a little gawky. No. I was a full-on nerd. I mean, like, a Casio watch and Saturdays at the library looking at cancer pathology books. Alone, by the way! Alone. I did everything alone. I was just\u2014ugh\u2014soul-crushingly dorky. ESQ: Could be worse, though. AT: I always say that nobody wants to be friends with the guy who comes into the bar and is like, &amp;quot;Hey everybody, I just got promoted. Corner office. Check out my suit. I&amp;#039;m fucking a model!&amp;quot; Nobody wants to be that guy&amp;#039;s friend. Everybody wants to be friends with the guy who comes sprinting into the bar and his pockets are turned inside out and he&amp;#039;s only got one shoe on and goes, &amp;quot;Guys, I think I just set my car on fire. Let&amp;#039;s have a beer.&amp;quot; No one sets out to fail. That&amp;#039;s not the point. But if you are thinking, I&amp;#039;m going to go hard, I&amp;#039;m going to go as big as I possibly can, twisted in that choice you know that things may not go your way. You get better when you fail. Failure is inherent in growth. You can&amp;#039;t get better at what you do without fucking up sometimes ESQ: Yeah. Larry David was once asked if ever bombed as a comic and he said, &amp;quot;What are you nuts? Every night, you idiot.&amp;quot; AT: Yes! For months, I mean months, I bombed. There are so many comedians that say they&amp;#039;ve never bombed. They&amp;#039;re liars. Bombing is what makes you funny. When you destroy, you drop the mike and go have a shot after the show. But when you bomb, you have to go home and literally rethink about everything that you have been doing and get better. ESQ: Speaking of shifts: What did you think of the Archer Vice switch-up? AT: I really loved it\u2014and I know I keep circling the same theme\u2014but I just love creative risk-taking. Someone asked Matt Thompson, who is the executive producer of the show, why did they go so off-piece this season, and he said, &amp;quot;Well, we wanted to.&amp;quot; Interesting art and interesting shows don&amp;#039;t try to figure out what people want; they just make the TV that they want to make. And we try to make it as funny and as excellent as we can and hopefully the audience finds you. I also like that for Lana, she&amp;#039;s all of a sudden in the field and is eight months pregnant\u2014and what does that mean? You know, to be a spy and to be surrounded by live fire and be pregnant. That concept has been really fun to think about and play this season. ESQ: And there will be a baby on Lana&amp;#039;s hip. AT: It is going to be really interesting to see what is going to happen with this baby. She is going to be juggling what a lot of people juggle\u2014male and female\u2014when they become parents. She&amp;#039;s super ambitious. I think it&amp;#039;s pretty clear that she was always angling for Malory&amp;#039;s job. And then, you know, Malory crapped the bed and ISIS blew up so it&amp;#039;s going to be interesting to see what Lana&amp;#039;s approach is to her life after this baby comes. And it&amp;#039;ll be fun to find out who the daddy is. ESQ: Do you know who it is? AT: I do know \u2014 but I can&amp;#039;t tell. Everybody will find out who it is relatively soon. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/interviews/a28433/aisha-tyler-archer-interview/>