Having just passed the 10th anniversary of my career as a freelance pop culture journalist coming up on April 1st, I’m feeling a tad nostalgic, so I decided that I wanted to start looking back at the portion of my freelance career of which I’m most proud: my Random Roles interviews for the A.V. Club.
If you accidentally missed the previous part of this reminiscing, 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!
Mary McDonnell:
Sneakers (1992)—“Liz”
Mary McDonnell: Oh, my God! Who wouldn’t love that? And then I was the only gal! How do you not like that when it’s people like Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, David Strathairn, Dan Aykroyd… I mean, let’s go on and on, right? [Laughs.] And there was little old me in the middle of all of it! And I got to dance with all of ’em? Come on! It just couldn’t have been more fun!
But I have to say that the one and only time as an actress where I went to my first day of work and I became a blithering idiot when faced with a movie star was when I sat down at the table read and I suddenly had to be Robert Redford’s ex-girlfriend. It came my turn to talk, and I have to say that I think I went [Makes a stuttering, coughing sound.] I mean, it didn’t come out. Like, nothing came out. I turned bright red. And of course Bob, being Bob, got such a kick out of it that he just kind of said, “Are you, uh, having a little trouble there?” And the whole table knew was going on. I just couldn’t believe I was sitting across the table from Robert Redford! I mean, I was in love with Robert Redford as a girl. It was like, “What? There he is? And I’m here? How did this happen?!?” I thought I was being punk’d. [Laughs.] I don’t think that feeling ever quite left me through the entire production. So I had to take a very deep breath and do some meditating and yoga before I shot scenes with him… because it was Robert Redford. [Laughs.] It was! Oh, dear, oh, dear. I can still feel it…
Martin Mull:
Wonder Woman (1977)—“Hamlin Rule”
Martin Mull: [Bursts out laughing.] You are a son of a bitch! Oh, my God. I think that was one of my first, shall we say, dramatic performances. First of all, no man should ever be forced to wear a jumpsuit, including Elvis. And, yeah, I played a crazed flautist, and I ended up being lassoed by the bullet-breasted Lynda Carter in her little outfit. It was insane. And I remember the script was written by somebody who was somewhere between 90 and death, and in it I was supposed to be this young, with-it kind of musician, and the word “hep” was in there. That’s “h-e-p.” I pointed out to the director, “This is a typo, of course. He wouldn’t say that. He would say ‘hip.’” And he looked at me, and he said [Growling.] “You read it as written.” So I actually used the word “hep.” It’s amazing the things you’re making me recall. At least I realize I’m not dealing with insipient Alzheimer’s here. I’m 70, and I can actually remember some of this shit.
Ted Levine:
The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)—“Jame Gumb”
Supposedly, when you were first offered the role of Jame Gumb in The Silence Of The Lambs, you actually called Del Close in Chicago to ask him what he thought about you taking it.
Ted Levine: I did! Wow. Wow! Yeah, I’ll tell you why that happened. I had gotten the part and went to New York for a read-through, and this was one of those ones where everybody was pulling their weight, and everyone was there at the read-through. All of these departments were there. And Locations was there, and they came up to me with a pile of Polaroid photographs—we used Polaroid photographs in those days—to show me these locations that they were considering for the Jame Gumb house. And I’m flipping through these pictures of houses… and the hair on the back of my neck started rising up. And I said, “Where the hell… Where are these houses? Where is this?” And he goes, “Well, we found this really depressed little coal-mining town on the Ohio River.” And I said, “Bellaire, Ohio?” He said, “Yeah!”
Now, Bellaire is where I was born and lived until I was 11 years old… and the house they were looking at for the Gumb house was the haunted house next to my little girlfriend’s house, where would go for lunch because my mom, being a physician, worked. And this house was this scary house next door to Megan’s house, down by the river. They’ve all been bulldozed now for a stupid highway, but this house… They didn’t end up using it. They used a house a few doors down. But Belvedere, Ohio, where Jame Gumb allegedly lived, was actually Bellaire, Ohio, where I was born and raised.
So it freaked me out… and I didn’t know what to do! And I knew that Del was a warlock-y, black-magic kind of guy, and since I was kind of freaked out and Del was a bit of a friend, I called him up. And he said, “Oh, it’s a wonderful thing!” He was all happy about it. And I said, “Okay, good.” So I guess it turned out to be a wonderful thing. But maybe I sold my soul at the time. I don’t know.
You’ve said before that you thought your audition was better than your actual performance. It’s hard to imagine how disconcerting your audition must’ve been.
Oh, yeah, well, sometimes when something just comes flying out, off the cuff, it can be better. I’d done a bit of work, obviously—I’d read the book a whole lot—but I hadn’t nailed something down. I actually read with Brooke Smith, who played the girl in the pit. She read Jodie [Foster’s] part in the audition. Again, there was sort of an ensemble feel about it, because I guess Brooke had already been cast. And Jonathan [Demme], I don’t know, he just sort of likes actors to read with actors. But that was pretty cool from the get-go, because right then she and I kind of hit it off, which made it a whole lot easier to do the work and to make a separation between that insane misogyny and the actual person. So that was a real gift, to be able to get to know Brooke so soon, so early on in the process.
One of the best quotes describing Buffalo Bill during his dance number, as it were, is when you referred to him as “a would-be glitter rocker.”
Oh, yeah, for sure. Well, the dance… You know, actually, that’s from Chapter 20, where he was in the shower and did the little penis-tuck deal. That wasn’t in the original script, and I asked that that be put in there because I thought it was really pretty key, because it made it totally accessible to the man on the street. “Just look at yourself as a woman,” which is basically what he was doing. It made this psychotic monster accessible, in a strange sort of way. But in a weirdly gentle sort of way.
Actually, my ex-wife tells a story of how she was on a plane to Vegas with a bunch of girlfriends, and there were a bunch of guys on their way to Vegas, too, for a stag party. And everybody’s drinking on the plane—the girls are all drinking, the guys are drinking—and one of the guys is saying, “Yeah, we do this thing, we’ve done it three times now, where we get drunk enough and then we do that thing that the freak did in Silence Of The Lambs!” They do this at the stag party for each other! [Laughs.] Which I think is kind of funny. I wonder how many dates have gone, “Hey, why don’t you do that thing we saw in the movie tonight, sweetie? Go ahead, do that.”
And how much did you have to drink to film the scene?
Well, I did drink. [Laughs.] I did. I drank some… I think I had some scotch. Or maybe it was tequila. But, yeah, I had a few drinks before I did it. But like I said, the set was very cool. Jodie tells the story where she had a scene in the shower where she had to take her shirt off, and the whole crew took their shirts off, too, so she was comfortable. So the set was very cool that way. And I’d done some nudity on stage and stuff with the Remains Theater, so it wasn’t that big a deal. I wasn’t too upset about that. But I did have to shave my ass. That was a drag. I shaved my whole chest and all that. I did a little Brazilian on myself. And that growing back? Yeah, that wasn’t fun.
Beau Bridges:
Village Of The Giants (1965)—“Fred”
Beau Bridges: Village Of The Giants plays all the time even now. In fact, it’s appeared on that show… what’s that show where the little robots are at the bottom of the scene, insulting the film and stuff? [Laughs.]
AVC: Mystery Science Theater 3000.
BB: Yeah! But when I did it, I was about 18 or 19, and I took it all quite seriously. I thought it was my chance to really be a spokesperson for my generation, you know? I had that long speech when I’m in the theater, and I’ve eaten this goo… that Ronny Howard provides, by the way! He’s the little kid that provides the magic goo that makes the people become giants. But in the movie, I address the police chief of the town about the young people, the teenagers, that he says are losing control, and I speak out about freedom and everything. I took it so seriously, and I think I even rewrote my lines. Now, though, it’s, uh, a little embarrassing. [Laughs.]
Keith David:
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1983-1985)—“Keith The Handyman”
Keith David: [Long laugh.] Now you’re digging! That was my very first job in TV, and that was… My God, that was back in the early ’80s. I was a recurring guy on Mister Rogers, and when I got that job, I was working in Pittsburgh at the Public Theater there. When I first got there, I was playing Oberon [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream] at the Public, and then somehow that job came up, and then I kept coming back periodically. A wonderful director, Paul Lally, was the director. And Mr. Rogers was a wonderful cat. He really was.
When I first met him, it was kind of surreal, because he had just come out of the makeup chair, and he had these tissues coming out of his shirt, and he walks over to me and says, “Hi, I’m Fred Rogers, welcome to the show.” And it was just, like, “Okayyy…” [Laughs.] But when you think that he was a Presbyterian minister whose ministry was focused on children 2 through 6 years old… I mean, very young kids. When you think about that, it was phenomenal. I had a friend who had… well, in those days, they called them “hyperactive” kids, and he was all over the place. He was never stopping, always doing something. But when Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood came on, you could hear a pin drop. And if you made noise in the room, Brian would go, “Shhhhhhh! Mister Rogers!” For that period of time, he was completely still and completely focused. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life.
I’ve grown to have a great appreciation for Mr. Rogers, because he did not placate. He didn’t talk down to them. I remember my favorite episode was one called “War And Peace,” and he talks about the beginnings of war and conflict and how they start, and it was very kind of complex, but it was also simple. And he was fun, too, with the puppets. I was just, like, “Wow, okay, I get this.”
Sherilyn Fenn:
Boxing Helena (1993)—“Helena”
What was it like working with two generations of Lynches?
Sherilyn Fenn: The best. I wish I could only work with the both of them. [Laughs.]
Did you detect any genetic similarities in their styles?
Sure, but David—I call him D.K.L.—always says that Jennifer did a great job of raising him. [Laughs.] That’s his buddy. They’re, like, best friends. And she’s actually one of my best friends. She’s one of the most honestly brilliant young women I know. She’s amazing. I love her! We have all these ideas of things to do in the future together.
It’s well documented how Boxing Helena was received, but how was the experience of actually making it?
It was great. It was challenging. It was a lot of different things. But it was one of those things that people didn’t know how to receive it then. As far as I’m concerned, I’m happy with it just as it is.
When I talked to her a few years ago, Jennifer summed it up by saying, “For a long time, I couldn’t look at it, but now I find it as something precious. When you finish something and you let it out there, it is completely out of your control. You’ve done what you’ve done, you haven’t done what you haven’t done, and now you are up for judgment.”
[Wistfully.] Yeah.
When it was mauled by the critics, did you roll with it, or were you taken aback?
Well, I went to the Cannes Film Festival, and I was seven or eight months pregnant, so I had something far more amazing on the verge. I felt that I did the best that I could, and some things come together and some things don’t. I poured everything I could into it, and sometimes… Actually, in a perfect world, that would be enough all the time. If I believe the good, then I have to believe the bad, you know what I mean? So I didn’t read a lot of things. I knew they said a lot of really cruel things about Jen, but, you know, you have a life beyond wondering, “What did they say? What did they think?”
I showed up to the premiere here, and these women were out picketing it! They had these T-shirts on, with their arms inside their T-shirts. The movie they were there to complain about wasn’t the movie that Jen and I had made. I don’t think these people had even seen the movie. I don’t know, maybe what we tried to do didn’t come across to all people. She was 19 when she wrote it. It’s a trippy thing. But I’ve had many people come to me and say, “Oh, my God, that movie tripped me out, and I loved it.” There’s no blood in it, and we tried to… there’s so many different levels where you could think of what it feels like to be boxed in. We did the best we could.
Mindy Sterling:
On The Spot (2003)—“Fifi”
Mindy Sterling: Oh, my God, I loved that! Me and Mike Hitchcock played Fifi and the Professor, and we were an older couple who… It took place in a hotel, and we were the horrible lounge act who performed there. So you can imagine, if you know Mike Hitchcock, that we were just completely insane and over the top. I would walk around in my bra half the time. [Laughs.] And we’d always pop in with something insane. It was one of the first sort of improv/scripted shows that we were trying to do, and unfortunately I think we only did five or six episodes. But oh, my God, I had so much fun with that.
How did you enjoy the experience of working with Tim Conway?
Oh, such a dream. What a lovely man. So funny… and the stories! It was just great. The whole cast was wonderful, and, you know, everybody worked their hardest. It was definitely a dream.
Kurtwood Smith:
The Renegades (1982, 1983)—“Captain Scanlon”
Your first proper series role was as Captain Scanlon on The Renegades, right?
Kurtwood Smith: Yep. That was kind of big for me, in the sense that it catapulted me out of day player into a kind of a guest star. The series didn’t go anyplace—we did seven episodes, then it collapsed—but it still put me on another level.
How was the overall experience of working on the show?
Well… [Starts to laugh.] It was my first real experience, in a way, and I was working for Larry Gordon, and Chuck [Gordon] and Joel Silver ran the show. They were characters, you know. Especially Joel. He was just this aggressive young guy. And Chuck was so easy-going. Patrick Swayze was on it. It was fun, I have to say. A lot of times, looking back on it, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. But I was just going for it. And it seemed to work all right, you know? I had fun, and I learned a lot.
The opening credits are on YouTube, and you would be hard-pressed to create opening credits that scream “’80s action series” more than the ones for The Renegades do.
Oh, my God. I’ll have to go back and look at them.
We’ll link to it, don’t worry.
Okay, thank you!
Well, you thank me now…
Oh. [Grimaces.] Yeah, you’re right. Well, let’s wait and see, then. [Laughs.]
Matt LeBlanc:
Grey Knight (a.k.a. Ghost Brigade) (1993)—“Terhune”
Between the cast and the plot summary, IMDB makes this movie sound more awesome than it probably is.
Matt LeBlanc: [Laughs.] Yeah, that was a film with Corbin Bernsen and… oh, what’s the other guy’s name?
Martin Sheen?
[Surprised.] Martin Sheen was in it?
According to IMDB, he was in there somewhere.
Wow. I don’t remember him being in it. But it was set during the Civil War, and a band of Rebel soldiers that had been killed, their ghosts were now ambushing Union soldiers. I was in the first act and had a good little part. I was one of the Union soldiers that got attacked by these ghosts, and then at the beginning of the second act, the leads of the movie show up and find our dead bodies. So you see me, like, crucified upside down with my throat slit. Pretty gruesome. But when they tested it, it seemed like two movies, so they cut the whole first act out, and all you see is my dead body. So, yeah, I was great in that one. [Laughs.] And it actually wasn’t even me! It was a dummy, and they’d made a life-cast of my face and put it on the body… so I’m actually not even in it!
Silar Weir Mitchell:
Rat Race (2001)—“Lloyd”
Silas Weir Mitchell: I have such a story. This is going to have to be the last one, because it’s just such a story.
I was in the Bangor International Airport for about 14 hours, trying to get from Bangor to Calgary. They eventually had to hire a Lear jet, because for whatever reason—I guess mechanical failure—my flight was canceled. They couldn’t get me on another one, so I missed my flight out of Boston, but then [that] flight out of Boston was canceled because of weather, anyway.
So, basically, it becomes nighttime in the Bangor International Airport, the airport shuts down, and…oh! I actually got onto a plane, because I sweet-talked one of the girls behind the counter. I still remember this girl’s eyes. I was like, “You’ve got to get me on this plane, I’m doing a movie, and it’s day one…” I’m already on the phone with my manager, saying, “I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to get there!” So I get on the plane, we’re on the runway, we’re literally taxiing to the takeoff, and they say, “We have to turn around, there’s a mechanical failure.” Again! This is two mechanical failures in the Bangor airport!
So I’m back in the Bangor airport—that’s when I missed the flight out of Boston—and the dust settles, there’s no more flights, and now I’m supposed to get on a private flight. So I’m walking toward where the private-flight area is, which is across the tarmac, and I decide, “Fuck it, I’m just going to walk on the tarmac, because if I don’t, it’s, like, a mile around.” I’m walking on the tarmac, and I’m smoking a cigarette, and this guy in the Exxon fuel truck drives up to me and says, “Dude, put that fucking cigarette out and get in the truck!” I get into the truck, and I’m driven back to the terminal, where I walk in the back door where the baggage carousel is, and he says, “Start again and walk where you’re supposed to go… and not on the tarmac!” It was just this crazy odyssey.
That was at about twilight. At nightfall, it starts storming. They try to get a Lear jet, but the Lear jet can’t get to where I am because of the weather, so they have to wait another couple of hours for the storm to clear. Finally the plane gets to Bangor, and by now it’s, like, midnight. So I’ve been in this airport for hours, I’ve gotten drunk on White Russians with a sea-urchin fisherman from New Brunswick who had so few teeth in his head, and I’m finally shoved onto this jet, and… I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a Lear jet, but it’s like being on a fucking rocket ship. This thing takes off, I’m pulling G’s, and we had to stop and refuel in Winnipeg, which was good, because I could put my throw-up bag into a garbage can and it didn’t have to be sitting in the seat next to me in, which it had been since I threw up about three seconds after takeoff.
AVC: So after all of that, how was the experience of making the movie?
SWM: When I finally got to the hotel, it was lights out. I ate half of a banana and lay on my side, shivering, before I had to get in the van with Seth Green and Vince Vieluf. I sat there, sweated out the night in 15 minutes, and then I was in a van on the way to the set. Needless to say, it was a rough day.
This got me down the rabbit hole of the full Kurtwood Smith interview, and oh my God, that intro to "The Renegades."