Interview: John Ross Bowie (Pt. 2)

WARNING: If you haven’t yet read Pt. 1 of this piece, then you’re going to want to do that. I’m not saying you can’t read Pt. 2 first, but you’re only ruining the experience for yourself.

P.S. Like what you’re reading here? Don’t be afraid to upgrade to a paid subscription! Otherwise, I’m doing this for free…and it ain’t easy doing this for me, let me tell ya. Putting the second part of every multipart interview behind the paywall isn’t something that I want to do, but…I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered it. Repeatedly.

When it comes to The Big Bang Theory, I really only have one question: your choice or their choice to go with Kripke's speech pattern?

John Ross Bowie: Their choice. As sprung on me in the audition. The audition was for a role called Stuart Kripke, and it was just an alpha-nerd douchebag, played with a fair amount of chest-first confidence, I felt like. And it's funny: I went in, and I had not booked Leonard. I had auditioned a couple of times for Leonard and had not booked it, and in hindsight I played him with a little too much confidence, I think. And I watched what [Johnny] Galecki was doing, and I was, like, "Okay, that's a better move right there. What Galecki's doing is what this thing needs. However, this character can be played with just... I can actually ramp up the arrogance with this guy, and that might work."

So I go in, and I do it, and as I say, I kind of changed my center of gravity - chest forward a little bit - and did the cocked eyebrow. Sort of a nerd Bond villain. Chuck [Lorre] and Bill Prady were both in the audition, and Chuck suggested having some sort of speech impediment to play against the character's arrogance, to play against his cocksurety, and Bill suggested - and this is almost a direct quote - a sort of subtle Tom Brokaw liquid-L thing. And what you will find with actors is that we will say, "Yes, sure, I can do that," whether we can or not. Now, all I did was lie about my ability to do a Tom Brokaw liquid L. Where you get into trouble is when you say things like, "Yes, I can ride a motorcycle! Yes, I have incredible skill with nunchucks!" That's when you can really start to put yourself in harm's way. Those are the kind of lies that can blacken your eye or break your neck. Mine was a relative white lie.

What came out in lieu of the Tom Brokaw liquid L was this ridiculous fucking Elmer Fudd thing, but Chuck's head flies back, and he has this cackle that anyone who's been on set with him has heard. And for a moment I thought, "Oh, my God, this might really work!" And then there's a knock on the door, somebody barges into my audition, and says, "Chuck, Leonard Nimoy's on the phone." And it's like the moment in La La Land when her interview gets interrupted, you know? And I was, like, "Well, it's Mr. Spock. You've gotta go take that." And Chuck goes, "I really have to go take this." I'm like [Emphatically.] "Off you go! No offense! None taken! Go talk to Leonard Nimoy!" But I'm also in the back of my head going, "Well, I'm now the least memorable thing that's happened this afternoon, so...I guess we're fucked!"

What I had going for me was that the role started the following morning, and they had only seen four people. And I went back out in the waiting room, and they said, "Okay, guys, we'll call your agents. John, can you stick around for a moment?" Which has happened exactly once. And they double-checked my availability for the next morning, and I was, like, "Yeah, no, I've got nothing going on right now. I won't have to move a goddamned thing!" [Laughs.] And it was December, it was pouring rain out - like one of those making-up-for-lost-time rainstorms that Los Angeles gets - and I was on my way back down the 101 when I got the confirmed call, and I started work the next day. 

So, yeah, Chuck Lorre is the short answer to your question about whose idea the speech pattern was, and it was something that I always had to get kind of get back into practice of, because I would go sometimes eight months between gigs on that show, and it would always take a little bit of a ramp-up. But it was his signature, you know? The rhotacism was to Barry Kripke what alopecia was to Lex Luthor. I've used that analogy before, but it was this person's one weakness. And here's the surprising thing: I expected, like, "Man, we are gonna get an earful from speech pathologists!" And we never have. It's the damndest thing. I thought for sure somebody was going to lash out. And there were a couple of little sparks of dissent here and there on social media, but nothing major, compared to what it could've been.

I'll admit, I'm surprised to hear that.

I know, right? But I think one of the things it had going for it is that Kripke's not a loser. Kripke's very sure of himself. Kripke does not win the Nobel, but there are numerous occasions throughout the series where it is suggested, implied, or even flat-out stated that his work is stronger than Cooper's. There's a lot of moments where he comes out ahead. He's never a victim. And I think people responded to that. So as insufferably obnoxious as he is, I think people saw something in his alpha-nerd persona that was very appealing. 

I'd forgotten until looking through your filmography another series on which you had a recurring role, and I actually interviewing another of the series' recurring actors for this very site. You were on Retired at 35...

Yeah!

...and I interviewed George Wyner.

Oh, George Wyner! Oh, my God... George Wyner comes up all the time. I've got to get back in touch with George, actually, because I want him to do my podcast. 

I was going to say: he's a perfect person for it!

Here's my George Wyner story. So, yes, I did Retired at 35, I recurred in their second season, I did something like 10 of the 12 episodes. It was a nice, busy time. I remember I had not booked a pilot that year, but I got this amazing gig working with all these incredible actors. I became friends with George Segal, who was absolutely fantastic. I got to kiss Marissa Jaret Winokur. Jonathan McClain and I have remained friends since. But George Wyner comes on, and... You know, I am beyond starstruck. Spaceballs, Hill Street Blues... It's one thing after another with this guy. He was on, like, eight of the 12 episodes. We did a ton of stuff together.

Two months later, I'm in the Studio City farmer's market, and he comes over to me and goes, "Hey, John, George Wyner!" I'm, like, "George, I knew your name before we worked together. You do not have to introduce yourself to me." [Laughs.] I don't think he recognizes the breadth of his work. He's got, like, a 200-credit resume. It's insane. And by the way, anyone who's reading this and doesn't recognize the name has gone onto their phone, looked it up, and said, "Oh, that guy!" Because he's just a work horse. And he's a lovely guy. What a sweetheart. What a sweet, sweet guy. I love him. 

Yeah, it was fun to get questions from readers before I talked to him, once of which was, "Why couldn't you and Jim Rockford ever get along?"

[Laughs.] Yeah, and why wouldn't Joyce Davenport give him a chance? There's a bunch of great questions that surround his storied career. But he's just one of those guys, too, who lost his hair in his twenties and will look middle-aged until the day he dies, you know? So he hasn't really aged in any perceptible way. He's looked like this since he was about 29, and...that's it! That's George Wyner. God bless him. He's great. 

Do you have a favorite project that you've worked on over the years that didn't get the love you thought it deserved?

Ooh, there are a couple... Look, I can't really complain that Speechless got 64 episodes and three seasons on a network. That's all incredible. But I still maintain that we weren't fully appreciated for what we were doing over there. And I'll openly blame ABC's marketing of the show. We were marketed as a sort of treacly, feel-good, "oh, I guess we're all gonna learn something this week" kind of show." And we weren't that at all. We had the trappings of that, in that one of our cast members had a disability, and the show centered disability in an unprecedented way, but we were dark and funny and occasionally really absurdist.

We did a Halloween episode where everybody in the family gets food poisoning from eating old candy that they found inside a wall, and...it's basically our Treehouse of Horror. Just one crazy thing after another happens. We had this amazing joke really early on in the series where we're trying to describe the pitfalls of handling insurance costs to Kenneth, our son's helper, and they gave me the line, "There's a lot of hidden costs. There's getting insurance, there's dealing with insurance, there's paying for medical equipment and medical procedures... Having a disability is expensive. It's almost not even worth it." Which is a dark-ass joke. [Laughs.] It is a dark fucking joke for 8:30 on a Wednesday on ABC, and they gave it to me, and we were very careful: they made sure we got a shot of Micah [Fowler], the young man who played my son with a disability, laughing at the joke, so the audience knew it was okay for them to laugh at the joke. We covered our bets. But it was still kind of a dark, edgy bit of material...and that should've been in the promo. Instead, the promo was me hugging my son and kissing the top of his head with no context, and it just didn't... [Hesitates.] Look, I'm not going to pretend that we were It's Always Sunny by any stretch, but it was an edgier show than we were given credit for. So that's one.

My wife did a show that she created and produced called American Princess, which was about her experience at the Renaissance Fair, and I played a sleazy ex-employee on that show. Amazing cast: Steve Agee, Mary Hollis Inboden, who's crushing it on Kevin Can F*** Himself right now, Lucas Neff was on it... Really, just this monstrously strong cast of great actors. Rory O'Malley! And that was on Lifetime, and Lifetime made it look like this sweet, romantic comedy, and it was that, sort of, but it was also a lot more. That show, I think, didn't quite get the kudos or find the audience it deserved, either. 

But at the same time, all of this should be under the umbrella of "it's nice to have put anything out there." And because we are in a streaming economy, nothing's really ever completely dead. You can still find Speechless on Hulu, you can find American Princess on...Hoopla, maybe? But it's definitely on iTunes. So it's out there. "Everything dies / That's a fact / Maybe everything that dies / Someday comes back" is the Springsteen lyric that we will apply to today's media ecology. [Laughs.] 

Speaking of Speechless, I wanted to ask about the experience of working with John Cleese.

Oh, my God... Oh, my God... I mean, you know, it's a bittersweet story, believe it or not. Cleese is one of my comic heroes. I mean, really, across the board. Because it's not just Cleese's work, but Cleese's philosophy towards the work, that I've always loved. He's got a quote... I'm pretty sure it's him who said this, but it was definitely one of the Pythons, and I'm pretty sure it was him: "In the first season of Monty Python's Flying Circus, we thought comedy was watching people do funny things. In the second season, we realized that comedy is watching people watch people do funny things." And that has governed so much of my work.

In particular, so much of my work on Speechless was being a straight man to the craziness around me. But there's nothing that says you can't get your own laughs that way by being the audience's proxy and being the person who reacts as they would, were they in these circumstances, and creating that kind of inextricable bond where you don't necessary have to look right down the barrel of the camera and go, "Isn't this nuts?" But they still feel a certain kinship to you as the voice of reason.

So right out of the gate, Cleese is just one of my comedy philosophical heroes. And we get these scenes together, and, um... [Hesitates.] And...on the first morning we work together, I crack him up during a take. He breaks at one moment. And the reason it's bittersweet... 

[At this moment, John's voice catches, and he says, "Shit." And at that moment, I realize that I've unwittingly walked us into an emotional minefield, which - in my defense - is absolutely not where I ever would've expected a discussion about John Cleese to end up. Nevertheless, we persevered.]

My mom had just passed a couple of months before I worked with Cleese, between seasons two and three of Speechless. She had died very suddenly, and I was not quite... [Pauses.] She was 76, which is a little young for nowadays, but she'd been a smoker, and she wasn't maybe the most fit person. But it was still kind of flooring for me. But I had to put one foot in front of the other, and I went back to work, and we flew to London a couple of months later, and... Yeah, it was not quite two months when I flew to London, and I was having this amazing time. But I cracked Cleese up at one moment, and I realized at lunch that I wasn't able to call the woman with whom I had seen A Fish Called Wanda and tell her about it. [Pauses.] Shit. And, um... Hmm.

You're getting me, too, so...it's cool.

[Smiles.] So it was bittersweet, you know? Still, I have that moment, and it felt really good, and there are people I can share it with. But I really kind of wish I could've called my mom long-distance. It would've absolutely been worth the roaming charges. [Laughs.] To call my mom from London and tell her that I'd just cracked up John Cleese during a take. And I think it was during his coverage, too, so we have the film somewhere! 

I'll just quickly tell you this story: my wife lost her father more than 14 years ago now, and yet two weeks ago, she and my daughter did goat yoga, if you're familiar with that phenomenon...

Yeah, and they, like, stand on you sometimes, right?

Exactly, yeah. They had so much fun, took all these pictures, and afterwards my wife had this sudden momentary burst of emotion, and she said, "I was just sitting here, and I don't know why, but...I just found myself thinking about sending my dad a picture!"

Yeah, I don't know that it ever really goes away. And that's okay. You know, it wasn't incapacitating. It was... [Hesitates.] Yeah, the only word, really, is "bittersweet." I was so glad I had it. At the end of the day, he paid me a lovely compliment, Cleese, and it was great working with him. But, yeah, it would've been nice to share it with my mom. And my wife - she and I aren't particularly religious by any stretch, but she was quick to say, "Yeah, I think she probably knows, wherever she is." So your wife's dad... He's seen her doing yoga with goats.

Well, I know we're about to hit the hour mark, and I promised I wouldn't keep you beyond that, so I'll just grab one last project from your back catalog at random: how was the experience of doing Childrens Hospital?

I mean, Childrens Hospital was created by the guy who was my best man. Rob Corddry was the best man at my wedding, and I read at his wedding. We dared each other to take UCB classes when we started. He was already an actor, doing Black Box Shakespeare around New York. We met at a temp job in 1994, and we've been friends ever since. So I knew him going in, I knew Ken Marino and Rob Huebel going in. It was just old home week on the set of Childrens Hospital. So it was a chance to work with my friends and then to work with new people, like Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly and François Chau from Lost, with whom I did some work.

My other thing... People don't know this, but my other claim to fame regarding Childrens Hospital is that I wrote a lot of the "attention, staff" announcements that Michael Cera read over the P.A. system. If you're a big fan of the show, he would come on and say these non sequiturs, and a lot of them I would just send Rob and Jon Stern, one of the other producers, an email with a bunch of random shit, like, "Attention, staff: you really only need two Tom Waits albums," or whatever popped into my head that I felt, like, "This could be a tweet, or I could send it to Childrens Hospital." [Laughs.] So as proud as I am of my acting work on that show, I'm low-key covertly proud of getting to write for Michael Cera as well. 

So you wrote that Tom Waits line? 

Yeah, that was me!

And what are those two albums?

I would argue you need Rain Dogs and maybe The Black Rider, and you get the gist. You're fine. If you want to trade Rain Dogs out for Franks Wild Years, go ahead, you know? But let's not kid yourself that you need the entire Tom Waits catalog. C'mon! He knew an old drunk hooker. Lather, rinse, repeat. You get the idea.

Just as long as he sends the old drunk hooker a postcard.

And he wakes up in a foreign port. [Laughs.] All that, and it's fine! You've got it!

I'll admit, it took me awhile to wrap my head around Tom Waits' music. I finally did. But it took awhile.

Yeah, and it's not even a knock, you know? It's not a knock. And I've enjoyed him as an actor, and I saw The Black Rider at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the '90s and I enjoyed myself immensely. A wonderful evening of theater. But I find Tom Waits completists to be pretty exhausting. [Laughs.] It's, like, "All right, take off your fedora. You're inside."

Yeah, my first publishing writing was music journalism, and I was never even remotely pretentious enough to pull it off. I bought a copy of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and...I think of how much time I wasted trying to write like a subpar Lester Bangs, and it just depresses me.

I did my share of music criticism as well, writing for my high school newspaper, and then I wrote for CMJ for awhile in my twenties.

Ha! I probably read you there!

You might've. It was the early '90s, and they didn't give me the really amazing stuff, so...if you happened to read my take on the Eve's Plum record, then you're breathing some rare air. [Laughs.] But, yeah, it's hard to do well. Talking about music... Well, you know the old aphorism: it's like dancing about architecture. How do you get that across? How many ways can you describe a guitar sound?

I've frequently said that the reason I stopped doing music reviews was because I ran out of adjectives.

Yeah, and I'm even finding that with the actor interviews I'm doing. I mean, how many different ways can I say "understated"? [Laughs.] But I'm having a little bit of an easier time with that, thankfully. I'm just trying to find interesting ways of analyzing performances and asking leading questions of my guests and trying to do it from an actor's perspective. Like, "When it comes to crying in a scene, are you the sort of person who has to think about a dead childhood pet, or can you just wing it?" I'm trying to get process-oriented throughout the whole thing. But I don't feel like I'm repeating myself just yet, so I think I'm in pretty good shape. 

With my interviews, I've found that the best way to get the most memorable responses is to say as little as possible beyond bringing up the project at hand…and I've been called out for it. When I thanked Kurt Fuller - who's wonderful, by the way - for being on my podcast, Obscurity Knocks, at first he thanked me back, but then he said, "Why am I thanking you? What did you even do? You said the titles of things, and I told you these long stories! I'm the one doing the heavy lifting here!"

[Laughs.] But I think that's the nature of those interviews. That's just how it works, and that's how you get these sweeping career retrospectives with Random Roles.

I kind of live by Roger Ebert's remark about the secret to interviewing: "If you let people talk, they are apt to say just about anything."

It's really true. And that's something I've had to learn. Knowing the right questions to ask, sure, but also knowing when to shut the fuck up, and don't be afraid of the silence. Because you can always cut it out, and it can often lead to something interesting. That's been my experience, and I stand on the shoulders of giants. Yours included.

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