That Thing They Did: A Chat with Daniel Roebuck (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.
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We now return to the conversation right where we left off in Pt. 1, which is to say that Dan has just finished talking about how awesome Fred Gwynne was in Disorganized Crime.
Daniel Roebuck: So Fred [Gwynne] was great, and...my mom and dad came to visit the set, and here's what I want to say about Ruben Blades: I think he and my mother... He was in touch with my mother for years after that. He would send her notes, just asking, "How are you doing?" Even though he's obviously a busy guy, he's also a classy guy. That whole experience was some great times. I'd go horseback riding all the time.
All five of the main actors - Corbin Bernsen, Fred, Lou Diamond Phillips, Ruben, and Bill Russ - got there first, and Ed O'Neill and I got in the next day. So there was this place called, like, The Rooster's Roost or something, and it had five cabins around a little lake, and they all moved in there. They all grabbed those. And since there were only five, that left Ed and I looking for a place to live! So we were talking about sharing a place, and then Ed... I think at some point he thought, "I don't want to share a house with a 25-year-old moron! I'm a TV star!" So we each got a place: he got a trailer home, and I got a trailer home, too, but I got a doublewide. So Kouf will still say, "Ah, remember the doublewide..." It was this doublewide trailer home on 40 acres of land on the outside of town, and that's where I spent my summer that year. 40 of my own acres, deer wandering around, lakes, creeks... I just thought, "Shit, man, life doesn't get better than this!" And believe me, when you go to Montana, the last thing you want to do is come home. I was videotaping the airport when we got home, and the noise... I was, like, "I just wanna go back!" It was so beautiful there. So beautiful...
When I talked to Lou, he mentioned the five cabins, and he also talked about how, because the other four guys were close, they formed the Hamilton Dining Club.
That's funny! And that's completely true! I remember that!
Yeah, he said, "We’d dine together practically every evening and just rotate the restaurants. Unfortunately, there were only four restaurants, and two of them weren’t so good. So we worked our way down the menu on a couple of them."
They were the Hamilton Dining Club, and we were the Really Good Actors. So that's what our chair backs said. [Laughs.] If you remember the movie, we're chasing them, so they'd shoot the location, and then we'd shoot the location after that. So they'd leave, and Jim Kouf would say, "Okay, the Really Good Actors are coming!" So our chairs said the Really Good Actors, and...theirs might've said the Hamilton Dining Club. I don't remember. But it was funny, because in the movie, we only ever really have three scenes where we're in the same place at the same time, because they're leaving and we're entering. But what a good time. And we all made some shitty deal where we didn't get trailers, we were in honeywagons. But they had one big trailer for us to go into, because... You know, Fred Gwynne was 6'8"! He couldn't be in a honeywagon! [Goes quiet for a moment.] God, what an amazing time that was. And that was also great because... You know, I've always been a family guy, so my parents would come. The guy who thought I was retarded when I was a kid, he could come and be on these sets with me. [Laughs.] My dad and mom were there on Disorganized Crime, they were there on The Fugitive... Good times.
Money Talks (1997)—“Detective Williams"
Money Talks, with Brett Ratner. That was his first film. I liked him a lot, although I did always wonder... He'd say, "Cut!" and then he'd turn to, like, the craft services guy and ask, "How was that? Should we print it?" I don't believe he had a great belief in his own talent. I believed in his talent. And...what was the name of the guy who was my cohort in that? Paul Gleason! He's since passed away, but he was so great in The Breakfast Club. He was in a bit of a mood on that film, though. He would yell at people, and I'd think, "Ugh, the light's gonna fall, and it's gonna hit me, too..." [Laughs.] "They're gonna not screw in the Leko as well as they should..."
On that movie... Now, I've kind of known Charlie Sheen off and on since '84 or '85. We'd see each other around Fox. They'd cast me, and I'm just wearing my suits, and I'd go over to say hello to Charlie, and I walk over, and he'd go, "Oh, God, what did I do now?" I said, "What?" He goes, "What did I do? What are you here for? What did they say I did?" And I was, like, "Charlie, it's Danny Roebuck." "Oh, my God, I thought you were a real detective when you walked up! Oh, my God!" [Laughs.] It's, like, I don't know how guilty Charlie Sheen is with shit, but he couldn't even remember that I was a guy he knew. It was very strange. Very strange times.
And Chris Tucker, that was very interesting to watch. And, you know, it was really a good lesson that Brett Ratner let Chris Tucker kind of improvise the way Eddie Murphy obviously did in his early movies. Because Chris Tucker was so funny. It was so hard not to laugh during any of his takes, because he would just improvise within the takes. And I love that, so I was all for that. So, yeah, that was a good time, but there it is again, where it's me and Paul Gleason in the car, and...I did like Paul, but maybe he wasn't feeling well. I don't know why he was in a bad mood sometimes. But when I saw him after that, we were always pleased to see each other. You know, it's funny: we're such nomads. There's Paul Gleason and Dan Roebuck, starring in a movie together one day, and then auditioning to be on a TV show two weeks later. There's no rhyme or reason to it. And if you don't accept it as a fact, you're in trouble. It's just how it works. It's just life as we know it, so you can't be bothered by it.
You know, there's someone else in that movie who I've interviewed: David Warner.
Oh, yeah! Actually, David Warner and I are in two movies together...and yet I've never met him!
Oh, you haven't? That's funny.
Yeah, but what a great actor. I mean, are you kidding me? What a classy guy. I'd love to really work with him one day.
Well, the craziest thing about that interview is how it came to pass in the first place. Somebody who follows me on Twitter and reads my stuff said, "I'm working with him right now. I can set this up for you. You've got to do this. I want you to do this Random Roles." And that person...was Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Uh...wow.
I will second that. I don't know him, I've never met him, I've never even interviewed him! He just likes my stuff, and he literally went to David Warner and said, "You need to do this interview with this guy," and the next thing I know, David Warner's agent is expecting my email.
And I mean, David Warner? That's a real coup.
It was such an amazing conversation, too. He apparently doesn't even like doing interviews, but Lin-Manuel swayed him, so he relented, and we ended up talking for two hours.
Oh, I'm a huge fan of his. And that movie... I mean, he's in it, Paul Sorvino's in it... It's got a lot of great actors in it! By the way, another movie that people enjoy... I'm usually good at guessing when I meet people and they ask, "How do I know you?" I can usually guess within one question what movie they've seen me in. I mean, it's easy if they're 90, they've seen me in Matlock. [Laughs.] But the others I have to kind of think about. But that's cool about David Warner. I wish I had a David Warner story for you! Now that I'm talking about him, I think I might have to write him into a movie, just so I can use him!
[Quick sidebar: In the moment, I neglected to ask Dan to identify the other movie in which he didn’t actually work with David Warner, but I looked it up after the fact, and it was the 2004 war movie Straight into Darkness, which actually looks reeeeeeeally cool…and if you like what you see, then the whole thing is available to watch on YouTube via PopcornFlix.]
The Dirty Dozen: The Series (1988)—“Irwin Moskowitz"
[Bursts out laughing.] Oh, God! All right, so we've got to go back to '87 or '88, when the Commies were still Commies. I don't give a shit what politically correct term we're using now, but at the time, they were Commies, and they were wrong. You know what I mean? They were making people live in a system that did not help them but hurt them. And they had just opened up Yugoslavia for filmmaking, so Fox, they were going to do this Dirty Dozen TV show...and you have to remember that Fox was still really just getting started at this point. So I went to the audition to play a series regular, and then they started negotiating, and... I didn't know anything, dude. I just knew that you had to go live in Yugoslavia for ten months, and I said, "Wait, I don't want to go live with Commies! I want to live in America!" So they came back to me and said, "Well, do you want to just play this character who dies in the two-hour pilot?" "Sure, I'll play that character. “
So I go over there, we have a great time, and one of my dearest friends, John D'Aquino... He and I are still close, and whenever someone says, "How do you know John?" I say, "We met in the war." [Laughs.] "We met in World War II."
But as Irwin Moskowitz, I got to deliver some of the most ridiculous lines. I'm dressed as a Nazi, which means I look like Sgt. Schultz, and they stop me at one point when we're infiltrating this hospital in a Nazi camp, and the guy looks at my passport or whatever and says, "Moskowitz?!" I say, "Yeah, yeah, Moskowitz. Like in the poem: 'Roses are red, violets are blue, you are a Nazi, and I am a Jew!" And then I kill them all with a machine gun. [Laughs.] Come on now: that's exactly the kind of thing I got into acting for! What the hell more would you want than that?
The other Dirty Dozen story was that that was directed by Kevin Connor, who... I didn't know him, but I knew of him because he'd directed At the Earth's Core and The Land That Time Forgot and all of these other Amicus movies that I saw as a child. And remember: in 1988, that was right after I was a child. [Laughs.] So I wasn't really a grown-up! I was only seven years from going to see his movies at a drive-in theater!
Kevin is a very proper, very smart Englishman, and there was a scene where we're dressed as Nazis and we're infiltrating a hospital that the Nazis had turned into a command center and...the scene is this: I run in, I throw a grenade, I blow up these Nazis, I go shoot other Nazis on the stairs, I throw another grenade and blow up those Nazis, I run up the stairs, and I get shot in the arm. That's the scene. So Kevin Connor says, "Now, Daniel, darling... Darling, this is all going to be very confusing. We're going to roll four cameras, but it's going to be very confusing. Now here's what I want you to do: I want you to make sure that you pay attention to me." And I was, like, "Hey, now, come on: I don't know what it's been like for you, maybe Doug McClure and Peter Cushing couldn't follow direction, but I'm sure that I'll be fine." "Well, I'm telling you, it's going to be very confusing..." "I'm gonna be fine!"
So they give me the fake grenades, which are the fake German grenades with the handle and the round top, and they set the stuntmen, and there's a sandbag enforcement right inside the door and halfway up the stairs. And everybody's ready, they're ready to roll... Camera one, two, three, four... "Action!" I run in, I throw the first grenade into the sandbags, and BOOM! Dude, this Nazi flies out of the sandbag, over my head. And I'm, like, "What the fuck?!" And I'm just staring at him. And Kevin goes, "Dan!" I go, "What?!" "Go to your spot!" "Oh! Oh, yeah!" [Laughs.] So I run to my spot! But no one said that the guy was actually going to fly over my head! But he was on one of those ramps that shot him into the air!
So I go to the spot, my first mark, and I'm standing there, still looking at the guy, and I hear, "Dan!" "What?" "Shoot!" "Yes! Right! Right!" And I start shooting, and these Nazis are running down the steps...and they start falling down the steps! And I'm, like, "Fuck! The Nazis are falling down the steps! I just killed a Nazi!" And I hear, "Dan!" "What?" "Throw the next grenade!" I throw the next grenade...and another Nazi flies over my head! "What the..." "Dan!" "What?" "Go up the stairs!" Everything that he said would happen... He was absolutely right. [Laughs.]
Of all the stuff I've ever shot - and I've shot a lot of stuff - the only thing that I would put close to that would be in Halloween II, when I turned around and saw Michael Myers running down a hallway at me at 7'4" or whatever Tyler Mane is. I mean, it was as real as anything could be. Truly real. Nazis falling and rolling on the ground, and I've got to jump over them to run up the stairs?! Oh, my God!
Oh, and we were doing a fight scene in that movie, and one of the stunt men actually punched me in the nose...and you can see it in the movie! He hits me so hard... He was supposed to do two fake punches, but he connected on the first one, and you see me, like, shove him back away from my face so he can't land the second one. Because in Yugoslavia... Believe me, if the Commies had made that movie, they would've been, like, "You just punch each other. It's fine. No problem." It was the pussy American who was going [Whining.] "I don't want to get punched in the face!"
By the way, the guy who wrote that, Dan Gordon, I just worked with him again last year. We did that Let There Be Light, a Kevin Sorbo movie. He co-wrote that with Sam Sorbo.
Capital News (1990)—“Haskell Epstein"
I wanted to ask about this one in particular because it was, from what I can tell, your first series-regular role.
Oh, yeah, Capital News! So that was a learning lesson, Capital News. I kind of fucked up on that one. Oh, excuse me, let me rephrase that: I kind of screwed up on that one. [Laughs.] So after Dudes and Disorganized Crime... There was a thing that happened on Disorganized Crime that kind of changed things a little bit for me. When they knocked out my character, Ruben and Lou ad-libbed something while they were moving me about how heavy I was. Like, "God, he's so fat!" And I didn't say anything at the time. I didn't go, like, "Hey, don't say that, I don't want to hear that." And then when I saw Disorganized Crime, they looped in another line where someone said, "The fat guy you hit." They didn't say, "The guy in the brown suit," or whatever. So I thought, "I'm gonna lose some weight."
Unfortunately, I'd shot the pilot for Capital News, which was a David Milch series, and then they weren't calling to say they were picking it up, so I started losing weight and...I lost 45 pounds in nine weeks! And then they decided to pick up the series. So we were in trouble, because I didn't ask them if I could lose the weight, and they'd hired a fat guy! So they called and said, "Well, they picked it up, and they're going to reshoot some scenes from the pilot." And I said [Giggling nervously.] "I, uh, don't think they can reshoot the scenes from the pilot with me..."
So we had to confess that I'd lost all the weight, and then they made me come in to film me, to see how different I looked, because nobody could believe that I would've looked as different as I did in nine weeks. So we film it on a Tuesday or whatever, and on Wednesday I'm back at that studio for another audition, and I just go into the office, and one of the girls in the office says, "Hey, you know, they're gonna show your screen test right now, if you want to see the skinny version of you on film!"
So I went down to the screening room, and I walked in and said hello to everybody, and then the lights came down, and then David Milch sat down after the lights came down. He came in last. And then the first thing that came up was me. Skinny me, cavorting. And Milch is, like, "Goddamit! Motherfucker! This fuck!" Because he has no idea I'm literally sitting in front of him, because the lights were out when he came in the room. He goes, "Show some footage from the pilot! I'm gonna run this fuckhead over with a car!" So I stand up and I'm, like, "You wanna go outside?" And he's completely fucking thrown that I'm in there. And I fucking walk out - I had my buddy Rod Gilkeson with me, so he follows me out - and Milch runs out of the building and goes, "Dan! Dan!" And I think, "Oh, he's gonna apologize." And he goes, "If I would've known you were in there, I wouldn't have said that." [Laughs.] It's, like, "That's your fucking apology?"
So lawyers got involved and... Anyway, can I say, 27 years later, I realize I was completely, 100% in the wrong? They hired me at a weight with the idea that I would play that character in a particular way, I changed the character completely. Dude, it was so crazy: they made me put 15 pounds back on to shoot the very next episode. And then I was allowed to lose the weight, but I had to, like, hire a dietician. Think of how evil that is: I'd just lost 45 pounds, and I had to put 15 pounds back on just to appease them. And they also wanted the name of the girl who told me to go into the screening, but I knew they would fire her, so I never gave them her name. It was all a very dark time.
Milch never did like me after that, which is too bad, because I consider Milch to be one of the three real geniuses I've met in my life. There's really no one as smart as he is, that's for sure. I mean, he's a smart fucking guy. But if I could do it again, I wouldn't do it like that, let me tell ya. It probably damaged that relationship forever, unfortunately. But as it turned out, nobody ever watched Capital News, so it didn't really make a big difference.
Yeah, I interviewed Kurt Fuller, and he said that series being canceled so quickly was one of the biggest heartbreaks of his life.
Oh, yeah, Kurt had a really good part in that! You know, my father put it best with Capital News...and my dad read two or three papers a day back then. He said, "I don't understand what the hell they're talking about!" [Laughs.] It was a very well-written, smart show about really smart people that were all smarter than anybody who could be watching it. But Kurt Fuller... You know, I liked Kurt as Werner Klemperer [in Auto Focus]. "Hogaaaaannn!' That was really good casting.
A Minute with Stan Hooper (2003-2004)—“Pete Petersen"
I hate to keep bringing up short-lived series, but...
Oh, come on. We should've been on for twelve seasons. We should still be on with that show! [Laughs.] That show... Barry Kemp, another genius. Seriously, we should've been on for twelve seasons. But for some reason, Norm MacDonald - that brilliant talent - just didn't want to play ball. He just did not want to go on TV and promote the show. He was much more concerned about saying "ass" on The Tonight Show. He just would not promote it. But...have you seen any of it? You should watch some of it. It's online if you look for it.
Yeah, I've watched a few episodes on YouTube.
We had such a great time. The Thanksgiving episode - and, really, the Christmas episode - were really good. Garret Dillahunt, who played my partner in that... I'm actually trying to get Garret a job in a movie I'm producing, because I think Garret's a movie star, not a TV star! Although he does a lot of stuff on TV. But, man, we had a great, great time. It was a great cast. It could've been Newhart. But for some reason it wasn't. I don't know if it was the wrong network or what. It certainly wasn't the wrong actors. All the actors were great! Penelope Ann Miller, Fred Willard... Comedy all-stars! Jesus, it was a good time.
But everybody could be tense, because it was also a hard show. I remember it was falling apart at one point. Norm was also a writer, so he didn't rehearse with us. We had someone else rehearsing. And on a sitcom, the lead guy... I mean, when you do Becker, it's Ted Danson's show, and Ted Danson sets the tone. So we didn't have Norm there. He wasn't around all the time to set the tone. So I remember people were getting a little odd. And I just couldn't take it anymore, because as far as I was concerned, it was the best job I'd ever had in my life! So I called a meeting and essentially said as much to the other actors, and I said, "All of this complaining is kind of ruining it!" So we all got out what they needed to get out, and we had a nice big group hug, and...then I think we were canceled a week later! [Laughs.] But what are you gonna do?
Even so, you've got to imagine that for me, a guy who reveres The Odd Couple and the TV history of that show, to get to go to Paramount every day and park where Tony Randall and Jack Klugman parked and shoot on the soundstage right next to where they shot... Life just didn't get any better than that. That was pretty great.