Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Born 17 days after the stock market crash that plunged the United States into the Great Depression, it’s fair to say that acting legend Ed Asner has seen it all. A winner of 7 Primetime Emmy Awards, making him the most honored male performer in television history, Asner has lived through World War II, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and music legend John Lennon, September 11, all manner of natural disasters, and a global transition from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Age. Babe Ruth was still swatting homers when Asner was born. He’s witnessed the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, spoken out about atrocities in El Salvador, and celebrated the end of apartheid in South Africa. Today, Asner can add the coronavirus pandemic to his list. Not that the man with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is particularly thrilled about the prospect of living through a global pandemic that has changed, well, everything.
“Like many people, I haven’t been able to do much or go anywhere, so I’ve been stuck reading all of the depressing news,” Asner says dryly. Ever the actor, he pauses for dramatic effect. “In fact, I should be at the top of the heap with all of the depressing news that I’ve been reading. I’m housebound. I don’t go anywhere, and the people that I live with don’t get out that much either, so I’m spared contact.”
Social distancing is now part of the national lexicon and masks have become a political hot button, but if you think the 91-year-old acting legend is living in fear of COVID-19, you’d better think again.
“It’s an inconvenience because it means I can’t work,” he says, “and that bugs the hell out of me.”
Asner, who won five of those Primetime Emmy Awards for portraying his iconic character Lou Grant, first on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and then later its spin-off, Lou Grant, has no plans on slowing down anytime soon. Like his good friend, the ageless Betty White, Asner continues to do what he loves doing most. Whether popping up on the megahit Modern Family or passing away on the Netflix smash Dead to Me, Asner continues adding credited roles to a resumé already filled to the brim.
“I’ve got to pay the bills,” he says with a laugh. “Besides, there’s no place I’d rather be than in front of a camera, or on a stage in front of a live audience.”
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 15, 1929, Asner went to college at the University of Chicago with dreams of being a journalist. His first real job was working on the General Motors assembly line, before serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he appeared in plays that toured European Army camps. That stint whetted his appetite for acting. He returned to Chicago and immediately joined the Playwrights Theatre Company, but left for New York City before members of that company regrouped as the Compass Players in the mid-1950s, a company that eventually developed into The Second City. There he appeared in an Off-Broadway revival production of Threepenny Opera, before costarring with Jack Lemmon in Broadway’s Face of a Hero in 1960.
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Asner made the jump to TV in 1957, appearing in an episode of Studio One in Hollywood before spending the ‘60s working steadily in everything from Elvis Presley’s Kid Galahad, to four episodes of The Untouchables, to Raymond Burr’s Ironside. With over 100 acting credits to his name by the end of the decade, Asner had carved out a niche as an actor who eschewed comedy in favor of serious roles. He was also a pro’s pro, someone who could be counted on to show up and deliver exactly what was written in the script.
And then, lightning in a bottle.
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Asner says. “Being a part of that ensemble changed everything. I went from taking small parts in a lot of different things to being a part of an all-time great sitcom.”
The casting of Asner as Lou Grant was a risky move for the show’s creators, James Brooks and Allan Burns, but the chemistry between Asner and Moore was apparent from the jump. In the first episode, when Grant says to Moore’s character, Mary Richards, “You’ve got spunk,” she reacts with pride before he bursts her bubble with the perfectly timed declaration, “I hate spunk.”
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The Mary Tyler Moore Show was perfectly cast, with Ted Knight’s booming voice and comedic chops breathing hilarity into the dim-witted, vain, and miserly anchorman Ted Baxter. Gavin MacLeod, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Georgia Engel, and Betty White each brought their own charisma to the screen, helping the show win a whopping 29 Primetime Emmy Awards during its seven year run.
“We loved each other,” he says. “We forgave each other’s faults and stayed a family for many years.”
The ‘70s also saw Asner appear in two critically-acclaimed miniseries – Roots, and Rich Man, Poor Man – both of which garnered him Emmy Awards and validated his place among television’s acting greats.
“Roles of a lifetime,” he says. “I followed my gut and it worked out.”
When Mary Tyler Moore came to an end, people thought they’d seen the last of Asner’s kind-hearted curmudgeon. All of that changed with Lou Grant, an hour-long drama that ran for five award-winning seasons and delivered a coup de grâce to skeptics waiting for the show to fail. Only when Asner decided to speak out on political issues did Lou Grant hit the rocks, with CBS unceremoniously cancelling what had become both a commercial and critical success. (Even though the network had nothing remotely as serious or substantial on its 1982 fall schedule.)
Asner pulls no punches when it comes to the show’s cancellation, saying the move evoked the 1950s with its “muzzling of the First Amendment and blacklisting,” and he has a point. CBS did little to dispel the notion that the show was cancelled because Asner’s political views had spooked key sponsors. For Asner, the move was a gut punch. Lou Grant had taken the innovative and unprecedented step of plucking a character from a half-hour TV sitcom, and placing him into a one-hour drama. It not only worked, it was exceedingly good, winning 13 Primetime Emmy Awards (two for Asner) during its run. Then came Asner’s comments on communism and El Salvador.
And then, poof. Lou Grant was gone.
“Lou Grant was a hit,” he says. “It was popular, and the critics loved it. There can be no other explanation.”
Unbowed, Asner continued working and continues to do so to this day. During the 1980s he served as the President of the Screen Actors Guild and clashed famously with Charlton Heston. A decade later he acted in Oliver Stone’s JFK. He’s turned in memorable performances in classic movies such as Will Ferrell’s Elf and Pixar’s Up. He’s returned to Broadway in Grace, and toured the country with his one-man show, FDR, portraying President Franklin D. Roosevelt. All this to go along with twenty Emmy nominations and more than 400 acting credits in a career spanning seven decades. Not bad for a man whose most memorable character hated spunk.
Turns out that Ed Asner has plenty of it himself.
You are one of the most honored men in television history, but you got your start in theatre.
Well, I had appeared quite successfully with a group in Chicago called the Playwrights Theatre Company. I received a lot of very good reviews from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News. Unfortunately, we lost our ability to perform as a city theater, so the two producers – Paul Sills and David Shepherd – decided to go further into improv. That’s when they founded Compass Players, which was the first improvisational theater in the United States. Sills was part of a group that later opened The Second City Theatre, which is a name that might sound familiar to you.
You continued to act onstage, just not in Chicago.
I was so taken by my reviews that I couldn’t relinquish the stage after Playwrights closed, so I decided to take my reviews and go to New York. I spent six years there. Within the first six months I was hired by director Carmen Capalbo to do Threepenny Opera, which became one of the biggest hits in Off-Broadway history. I did that for almost three years. Performing in that play gave me security and helped me to survive New York, which seems to get harder and harder to do if you read the papers. However, toward the end of those three years I realized that I was forsaking the lessons I’d learned – I’d forgotten what it was to be an actor. That’s when I left Threepenny Opera and went to another Off-Broadway production called Ivanov, which is a nineteenth century Chekhov play. I did that, which restored my dignity, and then I acted in one place or another, wherever I could. I did one of the first performances of Shakespeare in the Park for Joe Papp, for example. So I survived, I guess you could say.
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You soon landed on Broadway, starring alongside Jack Lemmon in Face the Hero. With things going so well, what prompted the jump into TV and film?
Well, I was not satisfied with what I was being offered, and I wasn’t satisfied with what the landscape provided me in New York, so I took a job offered by Marion Dougherty, the Casting Director for a TV series called Naked City, which they were shooting in Los Angeles. She was casting for a role in one episode, and I jumped on that. That was in 1961. She knew me, because I had acted in a few things on television leading up to that…a show called Studio One, for example. So I decided the time was right to make the move.
What was it like moving from New York to Los Angeles?
I was impressed by what I saw in Los Angeles, and by the agencies and the offers that seemed to be available, so I called my wife and explained that I wanted to investigate these talent agents more. She said plainly, “Oh God.” So I stayed out there and did that, and after a week I decided to go with one of them. I called my wife and said, “I think I would like to move out here.” Again she could only say, “Oh God.” Eventually the shock wore off and we were both on the same page.
I traveled back home and we started packing. I’d like to say that my wife did a fantastic job. She organized everything, tied up loose ends, and contacted professional movers. We rented a 14-foot U-Haul trailer and they packed it for us, and not one thing was broken on that cross country trip from New York to Los Angeles. We had 1,000 pounds left over that couldn’t fit into the U-Haul, so we hired Mayflower to take that additional thousand pounds. It was like they had drunks who loaded that thousand pounds, because when we got there everything was chipped, broken, or scraped. It was awful. We ultimately survived that, found a place that delighted us, and moved into the Hollywood Hills. I immediately began making rounds with my agent, who is now deceased. He did a great job introducing me. I began working steadily.
You weren’t known for comedy when you read for The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
My previous work must have impressed Ethel Winant, Vice President of CBS, because when Grant Tinker asked Ethel if Ed Asner could do comedy, Ethel replied, “Ed Asner can do anything.” So I guess you could say that I came highly recommended.
How did you land the iconic role of Lou Grant?
I went in to see the two genius producers, James Brooks and Allan Burns, and they gave me the central scene from the first script. I had avoided comedy to that point – I always felt I could do comedy, but I was afraid of it – so I read it in a very controlled manner, which wasn’t funny. They politely thanked me, and commended me on a very intelligent reading. I knew that was the kiss of death. Under my breath I kept muttering the same thing: “You just blew this audition.”
They ended by saying, “When we have you back with Mary, we want you to read it ‘crazy, crazy, crazy.’” I didn’t know what they meant, but I agreed and walked out. Well, I stopped almost immediately, and then went back inside. I said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but let me try it that way here and now. If I don’t do it the way you want, then don’t have me back.”
I don’t know where that courage came from, because I’ve never had guts like that before or since. I read it like a crazy lunatic, wild and crazy, unclever, and they laughed their asses off. They said that they wanted me to read it just like that when I came back to read with Mary. The next two weeks I tried like hell to recall what I had done to bump up that reading, so that I could recreate how wild, wacky, and far out I had been.
Back Row: Valerie Harper, Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman
It must have worked.
As promised, I read it with Mary as crazily as I had read it the first time. Once again, Brooks and Burns laughed their asses off. Only years later did I learn that Mary had turned to the producers after I’d left the audition and said, incredulously, “Are you sure?”
And they said, “That’s your Lou Grant.”
Mary Tyler Moore became one of the greatest comedies of all time. When did you realize that this show was something special?
We knew after the first show. The comfort level that we had with each other, and the reliance that we had on each other, was second to none. There was a true sense of cooperation that existed between us, and all of it was tied together by the back-bending work of our director, Jay Sandrich. It was all for one, and one for all.
Were you concerned that The Mary Tyler Moore Show would be canceled before it found an audience?
The show was never in any danger of getting canceled, at least to my knowledge. They first wrote the pilot script with Mary having suffered a divorce. CBS said, “No, we can’t have her be divorced. That won’t work.” So they had her breaking off her engagement and coming to Minneapolis to pursue a single life. That was the only stumbling block that we had.
I also knew that we were guaranteed to be on the air for 13 episodes. In my nine years in Hollywood up to that point, I had not had scripts for a character like that. I didn’t care whether the show went into the toilet after the thirteenth episode, because I knew that I would never have the chance to do that kind of writing again. That’s how special the show was.
Is it true that you traveled to various markets to do test scenes in front of live audiences?
We were given a list of cities that we were going to visit to do the test scenes. Mary and I covered a certain part of the nation, and then Cloris Leachman and I traveled to the second half of the cities on the list. I wanted to learn the lines so that I was prepared, but there was so much material that I instantly wore out. Mary, being the trooper that she is, carried the brunt of our appearances in those cities. She was a lifesaver. When Cloris and I hit the road, she said, “No, we don’t want to do that crap, we’ll just fake it.” So we faked it, and I breezed along, and I did very well with that. I’ll be forever grateful to her. Cloris was a lifesaver in her own way.
What was working on the pilot like?
We came back to Los Angeles and did some pilot scenes with Jay Sandrich, who had been designated as our director by the producers. We didn’t get along first – Jay wanted me to pick up the pace, he felt I was being too serious, and on and on, so there was a trust that had to develop between us. I was coming from a place of being a very serious actor, and suddenly I’m doing comedy, and adjustments had to be made. Anyway, we taped those earlier scenes from the first show in a rain-slogged Hollywood studio, and they were sent off to the same cities Mary, Cloris, and I had done earlier. Well, those scenes made my two producers writhe in agony. They hated them. They hated the approach. Let’s call it an overreaction. You look at the script now – granted, it didn’t have the audience’s reaction – but those scenes looked pretty good considering they were the first effort.
The chemistry between you and Mary Tyler Moore is undeniable. You’ve credited her with helping to bring out your best. What was it like working with her?
Mary was the most generous star that I have ever come across. You couldn’t say, “We’ve got to baby her,” because she wasn’t that type of star. She was very down-to-earth. She’d make it easy for you to get a laugh. I don’t think I’ve ever been with a star who made everything so easy, and who enabled one to do his best. Through my time with her, I discovered that just as she was the giving, generous lead of her show, that’s what I would have to become to make my own show [Lou Grant] successful – the giving, generous pivot around which everything revolved. In the end, it’s your generalship, your giving to the cast members around you. Your job is to be the backboard for them to bounce off, because if you somehow help make them better, then that makes the show succeed. Mary taught me that.
After twenty-nine Primetime Emmy Awards and seven seasons, the cast of The Mary Tyler Moore Show exits the air in a group hug. At that point, no one was sure they would ever see Lou Grant again.
You point them out to me.
Lou Grant was a huge risk. No one had ever taken a sitcom character and put them in a drama before.
When we realized that it was going to be the last year for Mary Tyler Moore, my agent asked CBS if they wanted Lou Grant to return on another show. They quickly agreed, and then asked me to decide who I wanted to produce it. I loved MTM Enterprises, so we pitched the idea to MTM and they also agreed. At that point I said that I would like Brooks and Burns to be my producers, and they were immediately offered the job. We waited a month or two while they mulled it over. They finally came back and said, “We think we would like to make it into an hour-long show, and have Lou go back to his original love, which is print journalism.” In my naïveté I said, “That’s all fine by me,” but the enormity of doing that kind of a show is unbelievable. It will never be done again.
What kind of an adjustment did it take to pivot to a filmed drama?
Nobody associated with it had ever done an hour-long series, with a recurring character, writer, producer, and director. Nobody fully understood the unbelievable sea change required to shift between doing a three-camera live comedy and doing a one-camera filmed drama. Jay Sandrich directed a couple of the early shows. Jay, as I mentioned earlier, had spent a good amount of time working with me to pick up the pace for Mary Tyler Moore. Suddenly, that was out the window. He said, “Okay, now we’re not going to be down on the set with you, you’re going to have to remember who Lou Grant is, you’ve got to keep that spirit of Lou.” Well, I kept trying to keep that spirit of Lou, but with no laughs, because it’s a filmed drama.
Is that when you realized that the humor from Mary Tyler Moore didn’t translate to Lou Grant?
First of all, with a half-hour live comedy you’re performing with 300 people in the audience, and you’re working with a three-camera system that was devised by Lucy and Desi [Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz]. The format is designed to make you laugh. Suddenly, you change it into an hour show that deals with serious themes, and has no audience. It was a totally different approach. With a half-hour show, you had to have the laughs going on all of the time. With an hour show, and a drama at that, nobody could laugh. Granted, there were laugh lines in there, so I wanted to keep those laughs coming whenever they occurred, rare that they might be.
Were the laughs trickier to pull off in a drama like Lou Grant?
I was in therapy at the time. As luck would have it, the therapist was both a Freudian therapist and an avid television watcher. The first several episodes of Lou Grant had already aired, and I went and laid down on his couch and said, “What did you think?” He replied, “Why do you grimace so much?” Just like that, it hit me between the eyes. Every time we had a laugh line, or a potential laugh line, I wanted the people at home to feel free to laugh. I knew that everybody was constrained in the studio, but unconsciously I was creating that grimace, which was my signal to the people at home to laugh. Even though the first shows were good, I told myself that I can’t keep doing that to Lou. I had to read the scripts and do the man that was written there, and let the people at home figure it out for themselves. I finally settled down. From then on it worked out beautifully.
The critics loved Lou Grant, even if it was slow to find an audience. Do you think there was confusion over what kind of show it was?
I don’t know if it was CBS’s fault or TV Guide’s, but for the first two weeks TV Guide listed Lou Grant as a comedy. I’m sure that people thought they would tune in and see some of the old Mary gang, and get a lot of the same old laughs.
Was the show in danger of being cancelled?
Not a chance. CBS had been such a ratings dog up to that point, and they really didn’t have a replacement for the show, so they couldn’t yank it that quickly because they just didn’t have anyone else to put into that time slot. In those days, they didn’t yank quickly anyway. Today it’s a nightmare. The first show that I did after Lou Grant, they yanked it after six shows. Now, some shows don’t even get that.
Because CBS didn’t have anything to replace it, and because it had gotten such critical acclaim, we were able to continue on in the hopes that the audience would come around. And then, when we got all of the honors that year, it would have looked foolish for CBS to cancel us.
Lou Grant was ahead of its time, in that show that tackled tough issues head on.
Well, Lou Grant was nowhere near the fun that Mary was. Working on the Mary Tyler Moore Show was like dying and going to heaven. It was a wonderful pleasure to have a live audience and get those laughs. Lou Grant was about grinding it out. It was hard work. The process wasn’t nearly as fun or rewarding for me as an actor, because I was doing the same character with the same limited opportunities of acting. The show was about the mission we were on, and airing the issues that we dealt with. When Lou Grant was being filmed, we were the only show taking on serious issues. I looked at [writer] Bob Ellison at one point and said, “We probably won’t be allowed to deal with busing, gun control, and abortion.” Everything else, we got into pretty good.
There was an authenticity to that newsroom. What was the secret to pulling that off?
I have no idea, other than the producer’s own experience. Jim Brooks had worked in news broadcasting before, so he came from that world and he was also an excellent writer. The writers also researched the hell out of it, if you want to be honest. We also had two guys from the LA Times always sitting around telling us what was right and what was wrong. Other than that, I have no idea. We were just lucky.
At the height of the show’s success you were speaking out about real-world issues in Central America and El Salvador. This immediately put you at odds with CBS.
CBS was William Paley’s fiefdom at the time, and he had disciplined the Smothers Brothers for going too far, abruptly cancelling their show even though it was very popular and won an Emmy Award for best writing the same season it was cancelled. Paley even reined in Edward R. Murrow, who was one of the leading lights in the CBS news division at the time. Paley was uncomfortable with the hard-hitting tone of Murrow’s show, See It Now, because he knew the sponsors were uneasy about some of the controversial topics, and because he was worried about things like lost revenue and the unwelcome scrutiny Murrow’s topics would bring during the era of McCarthyism. So I certainly knew about Paley’s history on things like this.
You were in Washington, DC, speaking out about atrocities in El Salvador. Please share that story, and the impact that it had on your career.
I got involved in El Salvador when a nun showed me pictures a Belgian photographer had taken of the atrocities being carried out by the death squads down there. I said to myself, “We’re giving them all kinds of military aid, and this is what’s going on with our government’s approval?” So I began to speak out, and I joined a medical aid effort created by a guy named Bill Zimmerman, a political activist who had also spearheaded getting medical aid into Indochina.
I went to Washington with a group of actors that included Ralph Waite, Lee Grant, and Howard Hesseman. Because Lou Grant was the leading show at the time, I somehow became the group’s spokesman. I stood there and read the preamble for the group, after which I became the live target of the assembled press. There was a cable TV guy there who asked, “Mr. Asner, you say you’re in favor of free elections and a democratic government in El Salvador. What if that election results in a communist government?” I responded with some kind of mealy-mouthed answer, and immediately said to myself, “Oh God, this is what it means to speak out.” I moved on to the next question, but the whole time I’m thinking, “Did I come all of this way to be a chicken?” So I finished answering the question and I turned back to that cable guy, and said that I wasn’t happy with my answer. I then said, “My answer to you is, ‘If it’s the government the people of El Salvador choose, then let them have it.’” It was about as simple a statement as you could make. Well, stuff didn’t really hit the fan on that particular remark, but I felt that it was the basis for what happened to me as an actor forever afterwards.
Including the cancellation of Lou Grant?
Yes, definitely. My outspokenness as a private citizen, or what I thought was as a private citizen, was not acceptable. It got some of the sponsors antsy, and it led to the cancellation of the show. A CBS vice president flew out from New York to assure me that a lack of sponsors wasn’t why the show was being canceled. Well, there was no other reason. Kimberly-Clark had two factories in El Salvador, and they canceled their sponsorship. Two British firms – Cadbury and Vidal Sassoon – pulled out. Everybody else stayed in. According to the VP – I can’t recall his name – other sponsors were lining up and ready to step into the shoes of whoever canceled, but CBS wasn’t going to test that water. I have no doubt that the show would have continued to thrive in much the same way that The Mary Tyler Moore Show had thrived. It never got the chance. It was one of the highest-rated shows on television when CBS pulled the plug.
Professionally, it seemed like a trying time for you.
It was a dark time. There were two different congressional proposals for blacklisting the show. I was SAG president at the time, and [former SAG president] Charlton Heston was also conducting his own campaign against me. The union was about to bring in the extras, about 1,500 of them, and he was the spearhead of the stuntmen and the day players who protested it. Those two things combined to create a swell of angst about me, and eventually resulted in the cancellation of the show.
Lou Grant was a critical and commercial success at the time of its cancellation.
We were canceled with a 27 share. You couldn’t buy that kind of rating today. We were never afraid to take chance – I mean, the lowest rating we had for that series was a show that we did about the atomic bomb, and it featured a parallel story about a little girl who gets horribly burned on a bus. The character is treated at the Sherman Oaks Burn Center, which is a great medical center in Los Angeles, so you’re going on that journey with her at the same time the city is experiencing an atomic bomb alert. These two very divergent storylines converge at the end, when it’s discussed how many hundreds of thousands of dollars went into saving that one little girl, when, in the case of an atomic bomb attack, there would be 100,000 such little girls. It was a brilliant show. Even though it got the lowest ratings of all the shows in that series, it still beat out everything else in its time slot.
In 1971, you won your first Emmy for your work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. What was that like?
It was unreal. It was really unreal. I was sitting next to the girlfriend of one of the assistant producers, David Davis, and when my name was announced I kissed her instead of my wife. That’s how shocking it was.
You also won an Emmy for the TV miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. Tell me about that project.
Harve Bennett was the Executive Producer for Rich Man, Poor Man. He called me and he said that he wanted me to read the book, and then he said that he wanted me to play the father. I thought there were other actors who could do a better job as the father, but I really wanted that opportunity. I squabbled with the director, David Greene, but I was determined to take the day, even if it killed me.
You also won an Emmy for your role as Captain Thomas Davies in the brilliant television miniseries, Roots.
I was actually offered a different role but I didn’t want to do it because I felt that it was too easy. I said I that I wanted to do the captain because it’s a person who goes along with evil. In my mind, I thought that Roots needed me. It was a worthwhile project that needed to be done, but I thought that most white actors would shy away from such a role, or from a show that dealt so strongly with racism and slavery. In fact, I was so sure that white actors would reject roles in Roots, I felt that it was my duty to volunteer. It turns out that I was so full of crap that it’s unbelievable! Actors were willing to break their bones, and each other’s bones, for an opportunity to be in that show.
Did you think that Roots would be such a big hit?
I questioned why [CBS television executive and producer] Fred Silverman would want to schedule it night after night. In my mind, he either expected it to be a colossal failure or it would dominate the sweeps – which it did, to great effect. It turned out to be a wonderful piece of work.
You served as the National President of the Screen Actors Guild for two terms.
I had belonged to a rebel group of actors who were always dissatisfied with the running of the guild. Being a member of that group and a hot property at the time, they wanted to put me forward as a candidate when the elections came around. They wanted to launch a new era for the Screen Actors Guild, and they felt that I could make a difference. Vainly, I agreed and was elected president, and I took my turn in the spotlight. I couldn’t begin to tell you if I accomplished anything, but some of the key issues were merging SAG and AFTRA, creating portability with the pension and welfare plans, and addressing compensation around reruns. The two unions did merge, but we never achieved that portability, so I would consider it an incomplete job.
The Pixar film Up Is a masterpiece, and you are wonderful as Carl Fredricksen.
It was a delight – and eventful – from start to finish. I tripped in the taping room one day and split my head wide open. I went across the street to St. Joseph’s Hospital, and they put some staples in my head. Up was a labor of love from the very beginning. I really knew very little about the history of Pixar, but it didn’t matter. I’m willing to follow anybody’s dream as long as I can have a crack at working on it.
Did you enjoy working on an animated film?
Yes, because I’ve never stopped loving cartoons. I was asked to do Ted Turner’s “Captain Planet” series in the early ‘90s – I played Hoggish Greedly [makes pig sounds]. I loved inventing shtick for him, and it served a very noble purpose at the same time.
To tell you the truth, I hadn’t seen any of the Pixar films until I went to see Wall-E. I watched it and I was shocked to see how adult it was, with the setting in our lives, both present and future, and how they dealt with it. I was both surprised and relieved to find that Up was also written with adults in mind, that it was written as much for them as for kids. That four-minute passage in there detailing the Carl Fredricksen’s life together with his wife…my God, we all wish that our lives could be displayed as beautifully as that one is.
You played Santa Claus in the now-classic Christmas film Elf. What was it like working with Will Ferrell?
Will Ferrell was brilliant – he is a brilliant comedian and actor. I still enjoy watching that film. If it’s on television I’ll stop everything to watch it every time.
How would you grade your performance as Santa Claus in Elf?
I’m the definitive Santa Claus [laughs].
You aren’t slowing down – you’re in everything from the Netflix hit Dead to Me to your one-man play, A Man and His Prostate. What motivates you?
Fame is the spur, as the old saying goes. The more I got grabbed by fame, the more I wanted more of it, and that’s the case for me today. The audiences keep me going, that’s where I draw my energy. Life is boring without them. I need them more than they need me.
As you look back on your career, what satisfies you the most?
I took the assignment to be an interpreter as an actor. I hope I fulfilled my purpose.