Richard Kind Just Doesn’t Want to Be Left Out

Playing a character that doesn’t have much in common with the other people onscreen is Kind’s specialty. He’s an odd man out, sometimes downright disagreeable, but somehow always disarming. He plays one of the sweetest characters on Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry David’s dim cousin Andy, who tells Larry that he “missed a good one,” when bringing up Larry’s mother’s funeral.

In season 11, Kind’s character is sitting at a table with David, Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman, Vince Vaughn, and Patton Oswalt. David and Essman go into the kitchen to discuss how important the people sitting in the middle of the table are, how they anchor the entire evening. Meanwhile, Kind’s character is droning on about how kids today don’t use the Dewey decimal system or about buying reclaimed wood. Then Kind starts talking about fishing: “The bucket of bait, which is called chum. They call it chum. I don’t know why.” As Garlin told me, something about that line, and the way Kind delivers it, made even a group full of comedy greats break character and burst out laughing.

“Nobody screams as well as Richard.” Nick Kroll would know. He and his Big Mouth cocreators needed somebody who could really scream to play Marty Glouberman, father of pervy little weirdo Andrew (voiced by John Mulaney). Marty seems to live on the verge of an anger-induced heart attack at all times. Even when he’s talking he’s yelling. So naturally, Kroll says, “Richard was the first and only person we considered.”

That skill may have served Kind well if he’d followed his original plan. The actor grew up on the East Coast, then moved just outside of Chicago to major in prelaw at Northwestern. Then, like so many aspiring lawyers before him, Kind pivoted to acting. One of his professors—the late Frank Galati, a theater legend—told Kind that since his father wanted him to go into business, maybe he should consider producing instead. “I said, ‘No, no, no. It’s either I want to act or I want to be wealthy,’” Kind told him. Galati told his student that he could try, but warned him that acting might not be for him: “You’re not going to be successful until you’re 32,” he told Kind, “because Hollywood doesn’t want your type.”

Kind put that number in the front of his mind and got to work. He appeared in a short off-off Broadway play, then toured in a small musical, before landing in the same Second City group as Bonnie Hunt and future voice of Homer Simpson, Dan Castellaneta. When he turned 32, Kind started getting work on TV. Success came in small trickles on shows that lasted a season or two at best, then a steady stream when he got the role of Dr. Mark Devanow on Mad About You. By the mid-2000s, Kind was banking multiple roles a year, from a small part in his friend George Clooney’s 2002 directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, to Christopher Guest’s For Your Consideration, the first Cars movie to the first Garfield movie.

It was in 2002, during his run in the Broadway play The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife that Kind received a piece of advice that changed everything. Kind had been cast in the role originated by actor Tony Roberts. Before stepping away from the show, Robbins left Kind a note. “He said, ‘The secret to the part: Love your wife. If you love her, the audience will love you and they’ll love her.’ Absolutely right. And that’s something I’ve taken to every role: Even if you hate that person, the person you’re acting opposite, love them. And people will know it, almost subversively.”

Though Kind is the definition of booked and busy, there are still parts he longs to play—chief among them Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a part previously tackled by the likes of Al Pacino and Nathan Lane. In real life, Cohn was reprehensible right up until the end—but in the play, his death allows us to see the humanity in even the worst people. “That’s the kind of villain I love to do,” Kind says. “That’s my dream role.”