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Tag: always great

  • Richard Kind Just Doesn’t Want to Be Left Out

    Richard Kind Just Doesn’t Want to Be Left Out

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    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.”

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    Jason Diamond

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  • Walton Goggins on Tarantino, ‘Justified,’ and His Fearless Career

    Walton Goggins on Tarantino, ‘Justified,’ and His Fearless Career

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    Welcome to Always Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Walton Goggins talks about his memorable roles on TV favorites like The Shield, Justified, and George & Tammy—as well as everything in between. 

    When Walton Goggins first auditioned for Quentin Tarantino a little over a decade ago, he was asked to pick between a few Django Unchained characters. He chose one; he performed it well. Then Tarantino started wrapping things up, but Goggins said he wasn’t leaving—he told the iconic director that he was going to read every role on those script pages. “I said, ‘Man, I don’t even care if I get this job, I don’t care if I get to work with you—I’m here with you now, and I’m getting to say your words. I’m going to say as many words as I possibly can,’” Goggins says. “He could have easily said, ‘All right, dude, you’ve got to get out of here.’ But I stayed in there for another 45 minutes reading [maybe] 10 scenes. He not only let me do it—he celebrated it, and he read every other role in the scene with me.”

    Goggins ultimately secured the small, memorable part of the malevolent Billy Crash in the Oscar-winning epic, a collaboration that’d lead to a meatier role in Tarantino’s next film, The Hateful Eight. The auditioning experience also speaks to Goggins’s unique tenacity as a performer—willing to go big, to try anything and give himself a real shot. Fame never really interested him; the idea of building a career had barely taken shape by the time he moved to LA from the South in the early ’90s to make a go at acting professionally. “I genuinely just wanted to understand what it was I was trying to ask myself to do—I was ready for a big life adventure,” he says—speaking to the memory of deciding to make a life out of performance. But the sentiment extends decades later to that moment standing opposite Tarantino too. 

    Like any young unknown, Goggins came up against typecasting and limited opportunities in his early years. In his wild, Emmy-nominated ride—through beloved TV series like Justified and The Shield; gonzo comic detours in Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones; and now, shifts between rich smaller parts in major projects (George & Tammy) and true lead roles (the upcoming Fallout)—he’s proven that sometimes, it takes very nicely not taking no for an answer to prove just how far you can go.

    Born in Alabama and raised in Georgia, Goggins left college at 19 and drove across the country with his father to start his new life. The trip took 10 days, and by the time he’d reached the outskirts of Los Angeles County, he felt overwhelmed by the world he was walking into. “Storytelling and acting was always my passion, but I didn’t even want to be good at it—I just really wanted to understand it,” he says. He scraped together guest-acting gigs, and worked however he could to break through. One piece of advice, shared with him on a set, stuck most firmly: “You see this camera? This camera is your friend. It’s not something to be intimidated by…. There’s no magic to it.”

    It’s not hard to see how that resonated with him—if nothing else, Goggins is never an actor who seems intimidated by the demands of the day. He goes there, catching everything with his eyes and never reacting like you’d expect. At 24 years old, he nabbed a colorful small part in the Robert Duvall vehicle The Apostle, as a deeply lonely young man who gets saved by a preacher. It’s a bold performance that announces a fresh talent. “I had people whispering in my ear, ‘This is your shot, man; you’re going to be something; you’re going to work,’” Goggins says. “Then I remember getting so fucking caught up in my own insecurity, and I was asking this producer, ‘I need to get a publicist? How do I capitalize on this? What do I do? Oh, my God, it’s going to be my one shot and it’s going to be over.’” The producer replied calmly that getting a spotlight in an Oscar-nominated Duvall movie was the win for Goggins—and that if he didn’t carry that over into whatever came next, a lot of heartache and disappointment awaited.

    Good advice, since for many years, Goggins played more parts like this—standing out in substantial projects without necessarily being the face of the thing. In many of these situations, Goggins was cast as racists. “If you’re Italian from New York, you’re going to play a mobster; if you’re white from the South, you’re going to play a redneck,” Goggins says. “You have to work your way outside of that box, but at least you have a sandbox to actually play in.” When he was cast in FX’s acclaimed police drama The Shield as racist cop Shane Vendrell, he really got that room. Airing at the dawn of prestige serialized TV, it provided the unexpected—for basic cable, unprecedented, really—opportunity to chart a narrative arc over 80-plus episodes. Goggins played modes ranging from monstrous to devoted to tragic. “That defining moment is when you show up and you’re not auditioning for Redneck Number Two or Redneck Number Three,” he says. The moment had come. 

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    David Canfield

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  • The Reinvention of Noma Dumezweni

    The Reinvention of Noma Dumezweni

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    While walking through Borough Market one day, she ran into an old friend, Benedict Wong. He updated her on his life. “He said his old agents [weren’t] working for him as an East Asian actor—always being put in these boxes—and they just made one mistake too many so he had to let them go,” she says. “He could see I was [questioning] the business, and he said, ‘Just hold onto your art…. You need to come out of yourself and look at all the work you’ve done.’” Dumezweni found inspiration to persevere. So, jump-cut to a little over a year ago, when Dumezweni and Wong ran into each other again. “He said, ‘I’ve finally got agents again,’” she recalls. “I went, ‘Shut the fuck up.’… Watching his lovely gorgeousness in the Marvel world, I freaked out—like, ‘What? You’ve only just done it?’”

    When Dumezweni got Cursed Child in 2016, her life changed. She had to navigate the exposure, initially quite ugly, of being a Black actress taking on a role previously cast as white. J.K. Rowling strongly defended the decision at the time on social media, a major show of support that Dumezweni felt from the author throughout. “I really like Jo, the person I’ve met a few times,” she says. When asked about Rowling’s more recent public comments about gender, widely criticized as transphobic, Dumezweni strongly defends queer rights, saying, “The trans conversation has now become the bogeyman for any [political] excuse,” but demurs beyond that: “I cannot speak to the trans conversation in relation to J.K. I can speak to my love for the stories.” 

    However, she says of Max’s upcoming Harry Potter series, “For me that’s too soon. It’s too soon! We need another generation. It’s almost like the kids have got to be grandparents for the TV series to come out again.” She has a burner Twitter account, through which she gauged reactions to the recent announcement of the show: “Looking at that conversation of ‘Is Hermione going to be Black? What’s canon?’—that’s why it’s too close. It’s all too close.”

    As part of the Broadway transfer for Cursed Child, Hollywood discovered Dumezweni. Casting directors Tiffany Little Canfield and Bernard Telsey saw the show, then brought her in to read for Mary Poppins Returns, directed by Rob Marshall; she nabbed the role of Penny Farthing. (“Jump-cut”: Marshall then cast her in The Little Mermaid. More on that later.) As Cursed Child wrapped its run, she realized her child’s education was going well in New York, and considered staying. Then she booked the Manhattan-set The Undoing. “Well, look at the universe,” Dumezweni remembers thinking. “It wants us to stay.”

    On David E. Kelley’s The Undoing, Dumezweni played Haley, the stern defense attorney for Hugh Grant’s Jonathan Fraser, an oncologist standing trial for murder. In every scene, she owned that courtroom: withering and persuasive and darkly, sometimes morbidly funny. Memes of the character dominated social media as the show gained steam. “It was such a shock,” Dumezweni says. “I was so fucking nervous. I thought I was going to be fired on that job, because I was so—I got into my head.” She looked around at people like Grant and Nicole Kidman and thought to herself, “I’m just an absolute minnow.” But she felt even greater pressure portraying an American, sensitive to the debate around Black British actors taking on US roles: “If I’m being honest, it was when the African American women said, ‘Yeah, we know Haley, we like her’…that I went, ‘I did okay.’”

    The Undoing was, like The Watcher, a suspenseful story centered on rich white people. With The Watcher, though, she had more confidence, figuring P.I. Theodora Birch out as a kind of quasi-narrator, and running with that interpretation as she brilliantly charged through chunks of exposition. But once Hilton Als’s Instagram ode was posted, her mindset shifted. As Dumezweni describes it, “These opportunities are brilliant for work, but then you go, Oh, but now let’s start looking outside: How were the optics of that?” 

    Allow me a jump-cut to earlier in the conversation, when Dumezweni says to me, “This world of TV and film is gorgeous, money is lovely, but it’s quite lonely…. You go sit in your trailer, or maybe chat a little with people, but everyone’s on their phone and then you’re done. You’re done.” I wonder if this loneliness is related to Dumezweni’s conflicted feelings about making projects in which she plays the most notable, if not only, Black character—however sizable the part. “We have to be brave and say no to things sometimes,” she says. “There are still risks to be taken, and the risk is not working on something that you want.”

    Which brings us, maybe, to the present. Later this month, The Little Mermaid will hit theaters, years after Dumezweni’s initial casting. She originated a new character, mother (as in, queen) to Jonah Hauer-King’s Prince Eric, and relished each day at work. “I can’t fucking believe that I’m in a Disney movie, because that’s not the narrative I told myself,” she says. “And I think it’s a thing of beauty.” She felt its bigness making it—the A-list craftspeople behind every element of production, the groundbreaking nature of Halle Bailey in the lead role.

    While she waits for its release, she’s in production on another Kelley series, Presumed Innocent, toplined by Jake Gyllenhaal. When that script came her way, she balked. “I remember reading the word judge—and I was like, ‘Oh, judge.’ It’s always Black and brown people playing judges,” she says. Her manager convinced her to keep reading, and it hooked her. The role is “salty, slightly odd.” Fresh. Jump-cut to her post-Watcher epiphany. “There’s a little bit of a worry in me that Judge Lydia Lyttle is part of that,” she says. “But we’ve got Ruth Negga there, we’ve got O-T Fagbenle. There are enough of us—different versions of Blackness.”

    Dumezweni says she doesn’t feel herself going “deeper” with this part—for her as an actor, “It feels lateral.” The other day, her mom texted, asking how things were going in LA. That may be the impetus for the question she keeps coming back to as we chat: “What’s it all about?” As Dumezweni has learned what is possible for herself—a trip to the Tonys, an HBO showcase, a Disney breakout—she has learned, perhaps, that making change for oneself is possible too. “I don’t want to get complacent about this gig, because it’s been hard-won,” she says. “But my choices will determine whether I do or not. That’s what I’m sitting in.”

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    David Canfield

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  • Zahn McClarnon’s Epic, Groundbreaking Hollywood Story

    Zahn McClarnon’s Epic, Groundbreaking Hollywood Story

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    Welcome to Always Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Zahn McClarnon revisits his life across dozens of TV shows—leading to two of his biggest showcases yet, in Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs.

    If three makes a trend, then how lucky are we to live in the time of the Zahn McClarnon Episode. The Denver-born actor has been a mainstay on the small screen ever since he moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s, but only recently did prestige TV seem to figure out just how good he was. 

    We can give some credit to Noah Hawley, who cast him for Fargo’s second season in an initially small role that turned pivotal at the story’s bloody climax. A few years later, McClarnon started recurring on Westworld before pulling off career-best work in his stunning season two showcase, “Kiksuya,” bringing knowledge of his Lakota heritage to the rich portrait of his mysterious character, Akecheta. This TV season then completed the trifecta in Reservation Dogs’ surrealist spectacular “This Is Where the Plot Thickens,” in which McClarnon’s Lighthorseman Big goes on a hell of a psychedelic trip. 

    “I’ve been on cloud nine for the last decade,” McClarnon tells me over Zoom, that iconic, evocative face of the small screen sneaking in a grin.

    And that aforementioned trio doesn’t even take into account the biggest career leap McClarnon has taken of late: His first lead role, in AMC’s Dark Winds. The psychological thriller smartly embraces conventions of the cop drama while forging its own path in its focus on two Navajo police officers (McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon) investigating a murder in the ’70s Southwest. Putting a fresh spin on classic genre fare, the show is a great metaphor for how a perennial, oft underused scene-stealer has enhanced popular shows for decades. With pretty much every gripping hour of Dark Winds operating as its own kind of Zahn McClarnon Episode, it’s also the ultimate example of what happens when a Hollywood journeyman finally gets his due.

    Dark Winds.

    By Michael Moriatis/Stalwart Productions/AMC.

    When McClarnon moved to Los Angeles, more than 30 years ago, he synced up with the American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts—a collective of Native American actors from tribes all over the country who’d meet up at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, go out on the same auditions, and lift each other up through disappointments and breakthroughs. McClarnon arrived with nearly nothing in his pockets; the roles for people who looked like him were limited, and of what was available, even less unique. “But immediately, because there’s such a small pool of Native talent, it wasn’t like I was going up against 150 people at an audition,” he says. “It was more like a half a dozen or a dozen depending on the age range…it wasn’t as tough as I think most people had [it]. I wasn’t going up against the Tom Cruises.”

    For better and for worse, McClarnon filled a Hollywood niche. “I got typecast right away,” he says. “It was usually the bad kid or the gangbanger.” But he found some unusual opportunity within that. In 1992, he won a lead role in the Baywatch episode “Showdown at Malibu Beach High,” playing an activist student at the school where Pamela Anderson’s C.J. has just accepted a position, and which is planning to sell off sacred land. He says it was actually a backdoor pilot meant to spin off into a Malibu High series vehicle for Anderson, who’d joined Baywatch that season, but didn’t move forward. 

    The episode still marked a turning point. A few years later, McClarnon booked a recurring role on the Old West–set Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman as Walks on Cloud, the son of Cloud Dancing (Larry Sellers). “It was stereotypical Native stuff, but that’s all that we really had back then,” McClarnon says. “Unfortunately at that time, as a guest-star actor, you weren’t allowed to really voice your opinion on these things.” Still, he found a surprising mentor in Dr. Quinn star Jane Seymour. “She pulled me into her trailer once, sat me down, and talked to me about the business a little bit,” McClarnon says. “It inspired me so much that an actress of that stature, a number one on a TV show, would do that—pull me aside and talk to me about the pitfalls.” They recently saw each other for the first time in 30 years. “I thanked her for helping me jump-start my career,” he says.

    Longmire.

    By John Golden Britt / Netflix.

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    David Canfield

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  • Stephen Root’s Incredible Career of Comedy, Tragedy, and ‘Barry’

    Stephen Root’s Incredible Career of Comedy, Tragedy, and ‘Barry’

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    Welcome to Always Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Stephen Root reflects on his journey from Broadway to Hollywood—and from silly sitcoms to gritty HBO hits, including Barry and the final season of Succession. 

    HBO has plenty of star power, but on one particular Sunday night this April, the network was ruled by a single character actor. We all expected to see Stephen Root as part of the final-season debut of Barry, in which he stars as the titular antihero’s mentor turned antagonist, Fuches. But an hour before that dark comedy’s season premiere got going, Root reprised another role in another beloved series on its way out, Succession. As political donor Ron Petkus, he returned to eulogize Logan Roy (Brian Cox) in exceedingly flattering terms at the late patriarch’s wake, to the great horror of his children. They’re wildly different roles, and Root, as ever, shines in both. “To be able to do all that in one night was pretty great,” he says with a smile over Zoom. “I think that’s the best it’ll ever get—don’t you?”

    From our vantage point, it’s been pretty great for a while. This may not even be the first time Root has taken over a night of TV in such a manner. (One will have to check the TV Guide archives.) On HBO alone, of late he’s appeared in True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, The Newsroom, All the Way, Veep, and Perry Mason; within that 15-year timespan, he’s also done Fargo, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Big Bang Theory, The Good Wife, Raising Hope, Fringe, Justified, Californication, and many, many more. That’s to say nothing of the independent movie credits he’s racked up, or his beloved voice work on King of the Hill and other animated series. Root has acquired the reputation of a guy who can get just about any kind of job done; he’s proven equally adept and comfortable in the silliest of sitcoms and the gravest of dramas.

    Still, with small roles come specific types on either end of those spectrums. In Barry, for the first time, Root has gotten a chance to use everything he’s got in one package—a layered, funny-scary performance that’s netted him his first (very overdue) Emmy nomination and the sort of character arc too rarely afforded to actors of his profile. “I feel like the luckiest guy ever, at this late in my career, to be able to have something that special,” Root says. Call it the happy result of 35 years of hustle.

    Succession.

    From the Everett Collection.

    After attending college in Florida, Root came to New York in the mid-’80s with stage training, specifically Shakespeare, and an offer to do a whole bunch of plays on the road. He was known for playing the Bard’s clowns and jesters, and wound up touring for nine months with the National Shakespeare Company. After returning to New York, he nabbed back-to-back starring roles on Broadway, in So Long on Lonely Street and All My Sons; he later joined the national tour of Driving Miss Daisy opposite Julie Harris. 

    He moved to LA at the beginning of the ’90s; his mentality had shifted to the screen, to booking as many jobs as possible, given that he had a new child to take care of. In 1991 alone, he amassed eight screen credits, establishing a particular sitcom niche in series like Home Improvement and Davis Rules. “The mash-up of a sitcom, which is audience and camera—I felt comfortable in front of an audience, having done theater forever,” Root says. “I was doing so many auditions for sitcoms that I think all the casting directors around town saw me as a quirky guy. It’s a strength of mine to do quirky guys, but when you get put into that little slot for a year or two, then it becomes sedentary.”

    That familiar, complex industry bargain was highlighted most by Root’s breakout turn in NewsRadio, the critical darling that ran from 1995–1999. Root’s chummy, conspiratorial, micromanaging billionaire boss Jimmy James dominates just about every scene he’s in—despite the killer ensemble, including Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney—and cemented him as a comedy pro and a brilliant blowhard. He now cites his favorite episode as “Super Karate Monkey Death Car,” in which James boldly reads from the very poorly translated Japanese rerelease of his memoir at an author event; Root sells every note of the book’s ingenious stupidity, and many critics now regard it as one of one of the great sitcom episodes ever. But the show never had much of a chance to break out. “The NBC programmer hated us for reasons we don’t know,” Root says. “We had seven [schedule] moves in all, so it really didn’t have a chance to become a staple like a regular Thursday night NBC show would’ve been able to do.” Keep in mind, the show aired on the same network as Friends and Seinfeld, in the same years both were on the air.

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    David Canfield

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