Random Reminiscing: Looking Back at My Many Random Roles Interviews (Part 25 of Quite a Few)

Featuring anecdotes from Keith Carradine, Billy Bob Thornton, Nick Nolte, Cedric Yarbrough, John Lithgow, and John Rothman

Back in 2021, when I celebrated the 10th anniversary of my first Random Roles, I was feeling a tad nostalgic, so I decided that I wanted to start looking back at my contributions to this A.V. Club feature, since it’s the portion of my freelance career of which I’m most proud.

If you accidentally missed the previous part of this reminiscing (and you may have, because it was in 2021!), you can check it out by clicking right here…and if you missed the part before that, well, each installment has a link to the previous installment in the intro, so just keep on clicking back until you’ve read ‘em all!

If you’re all up to date, though, then for heaven’s sake, why are you wasting time with this intro? Just dive right in!

Keith Carradine:

Cold Feet (1989)—“Monte Latham”

On your album Lost And Found, you did a version of “San Diego Serenade.”

Keith Carradine: Yeah, I’m a big Tom Waits fan. Tom Waits and I worked together: We did a movie called Cold Feet. But Tom and I had been friends since back in the day, and our lives have criss-crossed a bit. My daughter Martha, when she was about 4 years old—Tom and Shelley, Martha’s mother, were in a relationship for a couple of years. So Tom and I, our paths have crossed in interesting ways over the years. But I just think he’s a genius. I think he’s maybe one of the top 10 songwriters of all time, and I was a huge fan of Tom’s before we even met.

The first time we met, he was doing a gig at McCabe’s [Guitar Shop], and I went to see his concert because I had heard his first record and was a huge fan. I’m trying to remember the name of the folk artist who was on before him, but I wasn’t too interested in her, so I was just kind of hanging out in the guitar shop. And he was out there, so I went over to say hi. I said, “Hey, I’m here to see your show, man.” And he said, “Hey, I know you!” And I said, “Well, I’m…” He said, “No, no, no, no. I know you. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me where. I know you. Where’d you go to high school?” I said, “No, I’m…” “Are you from San Diego?” ’Cause that’s where he’s from. I said, “No,” and he said, “Don’t tell me!” I said, “Well, anyhow, I’m really looking forward to hearing our set. I’m a big fan.”

I walked away, and then he came over to me and said, “Cigaret!” I said, “Yeah?” He said, “Cigaret, man. I drove 90 miles to see that movie when it first came out.” And he recognized me as playing Cigaret in Emperor Of The North! He was very interested in that world and that genre, that kind of American folklore. And Lee Marvin was very knowledgeable about that period of time in American history. When he was a kid, he lived through it: the “black shadow,” as it was called, it was all these homeless, itinerant workers who sort of moved from east to west, and a lot of them rode the rails. Tom Waits, he’s kind of a sociologist, you know? He’s very, very interested in all of those kinds of aspects in American culture, so he was very interested in that movie and drove a long way to go see it when it came out.

How was it working with him on Cold Feet?

Great. We had a really good time. And Rip Torn was amazing. You know, I’ve had a chance to work with some legendary actors in my life, and Rip is certainly one of them. But Tom, I mean, he’s a great guy, you know? And we’ve stayed in touch sporadically over the years. I got a really nice phone call from him when my brother Davey checked out. And then I got another really nice call from him when… [Chuckles.] he finally caught up and saw Deadwood. This was just a couple of years ago, but he and Kathleen, his wife, finally got around to watching Deadwood, and he called up to leave me a message about that.

Billy Bob Thornton:

Hunter’s Blood (1986)—“Billy Bob”

It looks like your first on-camera role was playing a character named Billy Bob—a big surprise there—in a film called Hunter’s Blood.

Billy Bob Thornton: Oh, yeah. [Chuckles.] I don’t even remember what that was like, it was so long ago. I was a stand-in on that movie for the whole production, and then I was in, like, two scenes. And they didn’t know what else to call me, ’cause they just kind of threw me in there, so they had me keep my name!

It looks suspiciously like a Deliverance rip-off.

Yeah, I think that’s what it was: a cheap rip-off of Deliverance. I don’t think many people ever saw that one.

I can’t claim that I have, either.

Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it. [Laughs.] I wouldn’t put it on your list!

How did you find your way into acting in the first place? What led you down the path to make it a career?

Well, I came out here just to continue playing in a band. Tom Epperson was coming to L.A. to become a writer, and he said, “You ought to go with me!” So I came out here, and I kind of found out that you don’t just come out here and get in a band in L.A., but we met this one guy who had a contact with this other guy that… Tom knew his girlfriend’s mother back home. [Laughs.] And he was in an acting class, and he said, “Hey, you ought to come to my acting class and try that!” And everything kind of started from there. I got a theater group, and casting directors started seeing me doing one-act plays, and I used to do a one-man show and stuff like that. So that’s kind of how it happened. I started getting roles, I started to have a little bit of money, and I just kind of went with what was happening.

As far as your music career goes, it looks like your first actual recording credit was on Neil Young’s soundtrack to Dead Man. And that’s not even music. It’s just dialogue from one of the scenes.

Yeah, I didn’t record anything when I first got out to L.A. In fact, before that, the last time I’d recorded was in about ’78 or ’79 in Ardent Studios, in Memphis, with my band back there. And the first time I recorded was in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but that was never released. That was just my local band. We went down there to make a 45, which… I think one of those guys still has that on reel-to-reel tape! But, no, the next time I recorded anything with my own music was… the late ’90s? Somewhere around there. Because the acting thing just kind of took over for a long time.

Yeah, your first solo album, Private Radio, came out in 2001.

Yeah, that was the first actual album on a real label. That was on Lost Highway. It’s a Universal label. That was great. Robert Hilburn really liked that album, and that was a big thing to me, because I’d always read his reviews and articles. That was huge to me. And then about 10 years ago, we started The Boxmasters after I’d done four solo albums. The last solo album I did was Beautiful Door, and J.D. Andrews was doing some assistant-engineering on it. Somebody asked me to record a song for something, and he played guitar on it. So we recorded this thing together, and we really liked the sound.

We did two stylized albums where we used old hillbilly stuff mixed with the British Invasion, and then we did another one where it was more along the lines of Big Star and late-’60s stuff like The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and that kind of thing. These days, people say we fall into the category of being sort of Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers-ish. But we just got off tour a couple of weeks ago, and it was probably our best tour ever. We’ve gained a lot of new fans, and we’ve built up a real cult following. So I’m real satisfied.

You opened up for the Steve Miller Band, right?

Right. Not on this last tour, though. But we’ve opened for Steve Miller and ZZ Top. We’ve opened for ZZ before over the years. Also, Elvis Costello, Heart, and different people. We kind of like that role, opening for people that we admire and people we listened to growing up. That’s always a great thing. It also gets us in front of bigger audiences. That’s always something that appeals to us.

On the topic of people you admire, is there a particular memory that stands out for you about your friendship with Warren Zevon?

Oh, every moment with Warren stands out. [Laughs.] He was a real character, Warren. I loved him. He and I didn’t meet through the entertainment business. We were neighbors in an apartment complex in West Hollywood. That’s how we met. I was a working actor and writer by then, but I wasn’t by any means a household name. So when we met, I knew who he was—he didn’t know who I was. I was just a guy who lived in the apartment building.

We met because he discovered that I have OCD, which he had, and we started talking about that. He saw the way I was getting my mail out of the mailbox, which was… quite complicated. [Laughs.] And he said, “Oh, so you’ve got it, too, huh?” “Yep, I do.” So that’s how our friendship started.

You did a nice version of “The Wind” on his tribute album.

Yeah, he made some of The Wind at my studio. I used to own Slash’s old house. I bought my house from Slash in Beverly Hills, so it was the old Snakepit studio there. I was there for 13 years—we moved recently—but Warren recorded “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” there and parts of some of the other songs. I did some background vocals on two or three songs.

That’s such a great album, but it’s still a rough album to listen to even now.

Oh, yeah, I hear you. Yeah, it was really something else. I went to do background vocals on one session over at Sunset Sound, and I got there and Jim Keltner was on drums. Ry Cooder and Warren and Jorge Calderón were there… I mean, it really was something else.

Nick Nolte:

Heart Beat (1980)—“Neal Cassady”

Nick Nolte: We had us a good time. You know, in fact… Oh, what’s his name? Beat Generation author, the one who shot his wife in the head.

William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs! Burroughs came and stayed two weeks with us. So I had lunch with Burroughs every day. He had two assistants, and they dressed exactly like Burroughs, and they would ask questions like, “You know, Neal Cassady used to flip hammers all the time. Are you gonna do that?” [Flummoxed.] “I… I don’t know.” And then they’d be quiet for awhile. And then Burroughs would say something like, “You know, Nick, one time I got in a car with Neal in Texas. We were going to California. He didn’t say an entire word until we got there.” He’d throw out the stereotypes, which was good.

That was something that Arthur Krim, the head of United Artists, wanted. He called me in to ask me if I thought it was time for a Beat Generation film. And I said, “Yeah, I think so! I mean, the public still doesn’t really know they exist. The word is out, Jack’s books are out there, but to know a little more about it would be good.” And he said, “Well, Carolyn Cassady has written a book, and John Byrum is going to direct, but there’s a problem. He thinks you’re just the kid from The Deep. But he lives right over here in Hollywood, up above Sunset, so why don’t you go over to his house and convince him differently.” And I said, “Arthur, you mean… take him up on the roof a little bit?” [Laughs.] “Yeah, something like that!” So… I got the part!

I don’t know how many people knew this, but Arthur Krim was an in-house presidential advisor to [Lyndon] Johnson. And Eric Pleskow was from Austria, and Mike Medavoy was the Hollywood agent they hired for the front office. It was Eric, Arthur Krim, and him. And, boy, they had a run going. They’d just won the Academy Award with [Jack] Nicholson and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which was a role that Kirk Douglas wanted to play. He owned the rights to the book. I had talked to Kirk because I wanted to play it, too! [Laughs.] But he said, “Well, my son’s going to do it with Jack [Nicholson].” I said, “But he’s too little!” I was just teasing, though. Jack did a great job. He had the charisma part of [Ken] Kesey.

Kesey was a giant man, though. He had a constitution that… [Dismissively.] Well, that’s not really the important part about Kesey. It’s the literature, and then his decision to go into the moment, to live in the moment. Robert Stone [author of Dog Soldiers, which was later adapted into Nolte’s film Who’ll Stop The Rain] would tell me about how they stopped by his house in that crazy bus and say, “Stone! Let’s go! Come on!” And he said he was running into the woods in the opposite direction! [Laughs.] When you look at that bus, you realize that at that period of time, it wasn’t hippie-dom yet. Nobody had seen anything like that. So they didn’t touch it. They were spooked by it.

You know, in the early ’60s, I was studying photography with Allen Dutton and Minor White—Alan Dutton was a professor of photography at Phoenix College, and I would carry their 8x10 view [cameras]—and Alan had been sent from Harvard from Professor [Timothy] Leary and Professor [Richard] Alpert a letter and these little crystal substances. He couldn’t find any teacher to go drop it with. He couldn’t find anybody at all. But I was one of his older students, so… we took eight trips to the desert, when it was legal. Then we had a kid in the photojournalism class, Manny Garcia, and he wanted to shoot a documentary of me dropping acid for Channel 3 in Phoenix, but when we got down to the hotel, the police were there. And he’s going, “You can’t be here! There’s nothing illegal going on!” And they’re saying, “There will be!” [Laughs.] So there’s a little-known story for you.

Cedric Yarbrough:

The Bernie Mac Show (2004)—“Monroe”

Meet The Fockers (2004)—“Prison Guard”

Cedric Yarbrough: The Bernie Mac Show was such a fun week for me. Niecy Nash was playing Bernie’s sister, and this character Monroe was a suitor, and he ends up marrying her on the show. [Adds a twang to his voice.] And he’s this country-western kind of guy who is also a singer-songwriter kind of a person, but he’s got no kind of career—at all. He actually works at a stereophonic stereo store, but he has aspirations to be a singer of some sort. But Bernie was so cool and so generous that I just thought, “If I ever get to have a show of my own, I will be that way, the way he is with me.”

He didn’t know me from anything, but he never felt threatened; he never felt like I was trying to get bigger laughs than him. He would invite me over to his dressing room. We would talk—and this was when he was pretty sick, too. But he always had time for people. He loved to have them in his dressing room and talk to them about anything and everything. And when we talked, he said, “You know, I’m here every day. It’s called The Bernie Mac Show. So when you come in and do what you’re doing”—because I was doing a lot of improv—“it’s only helping my show, and I appreciate you coming in here and making it funny. Make the show funny! That’s what matters!” A lot of times you work with people who are pretty big, and they feel threatened, but he never felt like that. And I vowed that if I ever got a television show, that’s how I would want the show to be run. No one’s getting yelled at on set, and it’s very generous. It’s a welcoming place for everyone to play.

But Bernie, man, was the coolest millionaire I ever met. [Laughs.] Him and Dustin Hoffman. Those two are, like, the coolest rich people I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. I worked with Dustin Hoffman when I did Meet The Fockers. I worked on there for two days. I played a guard on that. The first day, [Robert] De Niro was extremely quiet. The second day, I couldn’t shut him up. He was so cool. We talked for a long, long time about kids and his family and acting. But with Dustin Hoffman, it was, like, right away he was the grandfather I never had. He was fucking around with me while we’re getting ready to do a take. He’s pinching me! I’m, like, “Oh, god, okay, I’m about to do my lines, and Dustin Hoffman’s doing a bit.” But that was another very cool experience about how to handle yourself on set, and to watch these legends having such a good time, really enjoying working together, and having the genuine respect from the people that they’re working around and with.

John Lithgow:

Dealing: Or The Berkeley-To-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972)—“John”

We try to go back to an actor’s first on-camera role, and it looks like yours was playing John in Dealing.

John Lithgow: Oh, my god! I haven’t heard about that in so many years. Good for you! You’ve actually surprised me!

It was the first time I was ever in a movie. I didn’t know what moviemaking was about. Nothing! And nobody told me! Nobody gave me the slightest instructions! I didn’t know about two-shots and over-the-shoulders and close-ups and masters. I knew nothing! And it was a very interesting experience, for sure. I was quite young, it was in… oh, god, what year would it have been?

It was released in ’72, so it would’ve been made maybe in ’71?

I think it was ’71. And everybody wanted to do another Easy Rider. That’s what it was all about. We were all stoned, all the time, so that didn’t help. I mean, try to learn how to make a movie when you’re stoned. I don’t think we were ever stoned on the set, but… it was about dope dealing, for god’s sake, so I did plenty of research with everybody else.

I don’t know. I was playing a sort of Harvard fop, which a couple of years before was exactly what I had been. The director was from Harvard, and he’d known me then very slightly. He’d known me as sort of a campus star actor. And that’s how I got into the movies: in a movie that nobody has seen or even mentioned to me in about 40 years. So good for you, Will!

How did you find your way into acting in the first place?

Well, I grew up in a theater family. My father was a regional theater classical repertory producer. He created Shakespeare festivals. He produced all of Shakespeare’s plays, mostly in Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. One of them, the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, is still going. So I grew up not wanting to be an actor, not wanting to go into the family business.

I was going to ask if there was a temptation to rebel.

Well, it wasn’t actually rebellion, but I was very interested in being a painter. I had facility, I had talent, and I loved painting and printmaking, and I was quite serious about it. But I went to Harvard and immediately fell into the theater gang, and I was already an experienced actor, so you go with the flow! I’ve already used the phrase “campus star.” [Laughs.]

Were you surprised to find yourself the campus star?

Well, surprised and delighted! Anyone who hears enough laughter and applause at a young age will become an actor, whether they intend to or not. And it’s worked out fine. I’ve always considered it my first big mistake.

John Rothman:

Sophie’s Choice (1982)—“Librarian”
Prime (2005)—“John Bloomberg”
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)—“Editor”

John Rothman: I have a website now, and it’s allowing me to put clips from all these movies. It takes time to edit them, but they’re working on that. Anyway, I thought about having a section that would be just lawyers. I’ve played a lot of lawyers.

Lawyers, doctors, librarians…

Librarians, yes! Oh, but you’re bringing up a sore subject: Why wasn’t I in the [2016] Ghostbusters? [Laughs.] But, yes, I was a librarian in Ghostbusters, I was a librarian in Sophie’s Choice… That was my second movie, Sophie’s Choice, and that was wonderful. That’s definitely on my website. It’s a great scene where Meryl [Streep] is coming into the library and saying [Affects accent.] “The poems of Emil Dickens, please.” I said, “There is no Emil Dickens.” “Yes, please, I am sure. Emil Dickens.” And then I yell at her, and she faints, and Kevin [Kline] comes out and rescues her. The point is that the Brooklyn librarian is as much of a Nazi as the actual Nazis. He’s a Nazi librarian, really. In fact, the American Library Association was very upset about my portrayal!

It was very good, though. That was a great experience. I mean, Alan Pakula was a great director; Nestor Almendros was a great cinematographer. Also, Meryl is a very old friend. I went to school with Meryl, and we’re very, very good friends to this day. In fact, I went to the premiere of Florence Foster Jenkins. It was great, as I knew it was going to be. But being her friend, I’m around when she’s thinking about what she’s doing and when she’s working on things, and Sophie’s Choice was a long saga of winning that part and working on that part. I used to live on the lower East Side, and there was a Polish restaurant right on First Avenue. Meryl and I would have lunch there, and she would listen to the Polish, and then she would learn Polish and talk Polish. And they shot that movie in New York.

Anyway, I felt like, even though I only had that one part as the librarian, I was around, and I felt very much a part of that whole movie. Also, do you know Prime? It’s a very bad title for a very good movie. [Laughs.] I mean, really. It’s a movie where I play Meryl’s husband. She’s a Jewish psychiatrist in the upper West Side, her son is played by Bryan Greenberg, who falls in love with Uma Thurman’s character, who’s Meryl’s patient, and it uses Meryl’s sort of physical comedy. She’s so funny. And that was a great experience. As I say, I’ve known her for a long time, and I’ve done other films with her. I’m in The Devil Wears Prada, although we don’t have scenes together. But actually getting to play her husband in Prime was thrilling. I hope I get to do it again!