That Thing They Did: A Chat with Daniel Roebuck (Pt. 3)
WARNING: If you haven’t yet read Pt. 2 of this piece, then you’re gonna want to do that…and if you haven’t yet read Pt. 1 of this piece, then you’re definitely going to want to do that.
Mind you, I’m not saying you absolutely, positively have to read either of them before you read this part. I’m just saying that you’ll only ruin the experience for yourself if you don’t.
P.S. If you like what you’re reading here, don’t be afraid to upgrade to a paid subscription!
Man in the High Castle (2015-2016)—“Arnold Walker”
Daniel Roebuck: You can't really say you're a fan of World War II, or someone would put you in the nuthouse. "I'm a fan of the death of 60 million people!" But I think we just have a lot to learn from World War II that people don't really learn. They don't really understand what socialism is, or communism, or fascism. They use terms like that, but they don't really get what they mean. They've got to get educated about it, and World War II is the perfect schoolhouse for how people gave away their rights, they rescinded their obligations as citizens, and then they ended up looking the other way when there was mass extermination. So I'm not a scholar of it, and I'm definitely not a fan of it, but I've studied World War II, so I really fought to get on this show.
And what's fun about it is, one day we're shooting the second episode and Alexa Davalos says to me, "You know my mother!" And I say, "I know your mother? Who's she?" "She's an actress." "Oh, what's her name?" And she tells me, and I'm, like, "Wait, I do know your mother!" She says, "Yeah, you guys did some show where you were stealing people's kidneys..." And I was, like, "Oh, my God!" And I thought about it...and I thought about how old Alexa was, the girl playing my fake daughter on Man in the High Castle, and I said, "Alexa, do you understand that your mother and I had fake sex the year you were born? So you might be the fake daughter we had after the fake sex!" Think of that, Will: I pretended to have sex with that girl's mother, and then 30 years later, she's playing my daughter...and she's 30!
That...is crazy.
It is crazy! Boy, she's great. I'm a huge fan of hers. We'd done Mob City beforehand and... I like that, at this point in my life, there are still times when I can be completely fooled. Because when we had the first readthrough of Mob City and I met her, I thought, "Oh, God, look at this beautiful girl... She's gonna be such a pain in the ass." [Laughs.] Well, shut my mouth: she's not only not a pain in the ass, she's as easygoing and good-natured and gracious as any actress I've ever known. I brought my son to the set one day, and he was quite taken with her, and she gave him a lot of attention. Yeah, she's a very, very classy girl, and I love that show. I knew Cary Tagawa from Nash Bridges - what was it, 22 years ago? - so it was nice to work with him again, although... You know, sometimes you do these shows, Will, and... Like, Arnold Walker's an interesting character, because he's a very complex character, but he's kind of working in a vacuum. He's not seen in the context of the show as a whole. All of his complexity plays out within the storyline of two characters. So that's a little hard. Essentially, I'm saying I wish I had more to do on the show. But I am glad I'm in it!
I will tell you this: when you go to work... Well, say we were doing The Fugitive, it would say "Dr. Kimble" on Harrison Ford's trailer, right? They don't write "Harrison Ford" on it. That's just how it's always done: it's your character name on the trailer. So I come in one day, and my trailer says "Arnold," and the trailer next to me says "Hitler." And I'm, like, "Oh, my God, he's here!"
And the other thing that's funny... To schedule correctly, you're given a character number on a movie and a TV show, so your character number is consistent. So if they write Arnold into the script and then #16, well, I'm #16. And I'm always #16. There's never gonna be another #16. So because Hitler was coming in and out, and they wanted to give him a number, they gave him #666! So that's how they tracked Hitler throughout Man in the High Castle!
I said to that actor [Wolf Muser] - because he's, like, a 65-year-old German-American. I said, "Could you have ever dreamed you'd be playing this guy?" And he was, like, "No, you know, he was dead at 50. I figured once I was 51 I'd never get to play him again!" But leave it to the brilliant mind of Philip K. Dick to come up with an opportunity.
So, yeah, I like that show. Great people, smart people who made that, too. I'm in the first two seasons, not the third, as far as I know. But maybe they'll surprise me and I'll show up in it without knowing it!
[Narrator: They didn’t.]
Lost (2005-2010)—“Dr. Leslie Arzt”
Oh, yeah, that was great. So Dr. Arzt... I had done Nash Bridges with Carlton Cuse, who was the show runner on Lost, and they called up and asked if I'd play this character. "What's the character?" "Well, we can't really tell you. We can tell you that he's in three episodes, and then he dies." "How does he die?" "We can't tell you." "Can I see a script?" "Nope." "All right." So I say "yes." Someone asked me once, "How do you take a part if you can't read a script?" I said, "I read the plane ticket: it said, 'LAX to Honolulu.' I didn't need any more information than that!
So when I got to the office, I landed on a Sunday, and everybody's out of the office except a skeleton crew. They were very nice, but I said, "Can I get the script?" and they said, "Nope." And I said, "Oh, okay, very classified, I get it. Can I get my sides for tomorrow?" And they said, "Nope." So we're standing there, and...they're not budging! And I said, "Well, can someone do an interpretive dance of the character I'm supposed to play? Because I really don't know how to do this if I don't have a script!" So then calls were made, and they decided to give me my sides. Just my words, with my name emblazoned across them, so I couldn't give them to anybody. And it was that whole first thing about how [Quoting.] "The monsoon season is bad!" So I don't know anything about the guy, except that he's a Mr. Know-It-All.
And then we go to the set, and I meet Evangeline Lilly, I meet Matt [Fox], I meet Jorge [Garcia], all these nice people...and they're clean! I'd never seen the show, but they're all on a deserted island, and I'm, like, "Oh, that's good, at least we don't have to be dirty!" And then they start making me dirty. Like, they put so much silt and grime on my body and in my hair... And I think, "Well, how come they all get to be clean, and I have to be the stinky, dirty man?" Steve LaPorte, the makeup man, is such a great, talented guy. He turns me into this filthy, dirty man, and then we shoot, and I say the lines, and I have no idea what any of them mean. I literally have no idea! And I think, "Well, maybe I'm going on this raft. I guess maybe I die in the water!" And then I get the next script, which was a two-part script, and I saw how I die. [Laughs.] And then I told no one except my wife and my manager.
And they were such masters of deception on that show that, on the day they were running that last episode, I think they announced in TV Guide that I was a new series regular! And my mom called and said, "Oh, my God, you're going to be on Lost next year!" And I said, "Uh... Uh, Mom, watch the show tonight." [Laughs.] Now, at that point, I don't think they had done too much of the backtracking, but I hadn't seen it yet anyway, so I didn't know that I could go back once I was dead. But I was glad that I did! Believe me, that was a nice place to work. No problem there, hanging out on the beaches.
I bonded a lot with Jorge. He's a very good man, a great guy. Years later, I'm still friendly with him. Lost was interesting, because all the show was about transformation at some point, right? Well, Terry O'Quinn did Matlock, and...I say this respectfully, because I'm a huge Terry O'Quinn fan, but he was pretty uptight when we did Matlock! He was quite serious. And when I pulled up in the van on the beach to do Lost, he was throwing a football around in his shorts, and he was, like, 'Danny! Heyyyyyyy, Danny Roebuck! How are you, man?" And I was, like, "Oh, my God, he's gone native!" [Laughs.] He really was a completely different person!
Yeah, that was a good time. And it was kind of fun to do all that acting and not really know what you were talking about. Because nobody said, "Hey, let's tell the guest star what this is about!" They weren't going to risk that on me!
You know, I was actually just about to ask you about Matlock anyway, but it's funny that you bring up Terry O'Quinn specifically, because he lives here in Virginia Beach, and I interviewed him for a local magazine recently. I just want to read this story to you real quick...
"Andy Griffith: what a sweetheart of a man. We were working on Matlock in North Carolina, in Wilmington, and he was a lawyer, of course, and I was a bad guy. I remember one day, somebody - one of the drivers - came in and brought him a bag of tomatoes from their garden. And he said, 'Terry, do you like tomatoes?' I said, 'I love them! You know, my mother used to make tomato sandwiches.' He said, 'Tomato sandwiches? With white bread and mayonnaise and salt and pepper?' I said, 'That's exactly what we grew up with!' And probably 30 minutes later, there's a knock on my door, and there he is outside my trailer door with tomato sandwiches. I said, 'Come in!' And he came in, and he played my guitar for a little bit. And I said, 'You're one of the reasons I play guitar, you know. Because of you sitting on the porch with Opie and Aunt Bea, strumming the guitar. So it's really significant to me that you're playing mine right now.'"
Wow. How great.
So he might've come across as uptight back then, but however many years ago that was, he's still carrying that memory with him.
Yeah, Andy was... [Pauses.] Now, look, I get a little choked up when I think about Andy Griffith, because not only was he someone I revered, but he was somebody who, without his direct intervention in my life, a good portion of my life may have been different. You know, I was a guest star on one episode, and we had one scene in that one episode, and after that one scene, he had said to the director, "I'm gonna get that guy on my show." One scene! But to really appreciate this, I have to give you a little back story that'll make it even better.
So in the episode we were doing, we were all doctors, and I was a red herring in that episode. I wasn't the bad guy. And the running gag of the show was, he had a pain next to his groin. Well, we went out and met him beforehand, and...I had just done No Time for Sergeants, I had just played [Griffith's character] Will Stockdale. So they bring me to the set, and...what I'm going to tell you is exactly how it happened.
Okay.
They said, "Dan, this is Andy Griffith." And I said... [Makes a stammering, choking sound for 10 solid seconds.] And that is neither a lie nor an exaggeration.
He was getting uncomfortable, I was getting uncomfortable… And then I finally said [Abruptly.] 'I just did No Time for Sergeants!" And he said, "Really. Who'd you play?" And I said, "I played Will." He said, "Wait a minute: where'd you do it?" I said, "Glendale." He said, "I know you invited us to the play. Now, we wanted to come, but I was doing this show here." So can you imagine how I would've shit myself if he'd have walked into the theater? [Laughs.]
So we rehearsed, and you just kind of mark your actions. And when we came back to shoot it, when he said, "I have a pain here," while we were rolling the master, I yanked his pants open and I shoved my hand down into his pants, and I said, "Here?" And he was, like, "No, a little over to the right," or whatever the gag was. So the next day, what the director said was, "I don't know what you touched when you put your hand down the old man's pants, but he wants you to be on the show!" [Laughs.] So that's how I met Andy and how, years later, I ended up on Matlock.
But he was telling me how Jack Dodson ended up on The Andy Griffith Show. He went to see the play Hughie in L.A. with Jason Robards and Jack Dodson, and in the play Hughie, Jack Dodson literally has four lines. The rest of the play is kind of a monologue. And Andy told me, "Jack Dodson was onstage with Jason Robards, and Jason Robards was the one talking, and all Jack Dodson did was listen, and...I've never seen someone listen so legitimately and organically in my entire life." So he went backstage and offered him a part on the show. So that was kind of Andy's M.O.: he would find a talent - and I'm not saying I'm a talent, but he would find an actor who possessed a quality that he felt was needed - and he'd use it.
They wrote a character for me a year and a half later, and Fred Silverman didn't allow me to play it. They made it a series option, and Fred didn't pick it up. And I remember Andy coming into my trailer, and my girlfriend had her guitar in there, and he came in and said, "Well, we're gonna have some fun." And he's playing my girlfriend's guitar. And I said, "Andy, they're not picking up the option." He said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "Yeah, they had to let me know by noon today, and they're not gonna do it, I don't think." And he said, "Let me go talk to them." And he goes off, and he comes back, and he says, "You're right. They're not. I don't understand." And I remember later that day... You know, we were all in kind of a sad mood, and we were shooting at Universal at the time, and he said, "You know, it's an awful big backlot out here. We could bury Fred Silverman in so many places, they'd never find him." [Laughs.]
Now, I know he loved Fred Silverman, so he was just joking. But it was years later when Andy became a producer on the series - we'd moved down to North Carolina - and he said, "Now I want Danny Roebuck and Brynn Thayer." And they reconfigured the show and wrote parts for us. And that’s how I got on Matlock!
You were only there for one or two episodes when Don Knotts was on the show. Did you even have scenes with him?
I was there. We didn't have any scenes together, but I did go down to meet him. Because I'm not an idiot. [Laughs.] But Don and I did do a TV movie together. We did do a movie called Quints years later. So that was as good as it could be, let me tell ya. I mean, look, this is the best thing: I'm an actor because I wanted to be on TV, and I wanted to be with Don Knotts and Andy Griffith. So the fact that I was... It's just extraordinary!