Paul Reiser on His Eclectic Career: “The Things I Work the Hardest on Have the Least Impact”
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The post Paul Reiser on His Eclectic Career: “The Things I Work the Hardest on Have the Least Impact” appeared first on Consequence.
It’s hard to know where to start with Paul Reiser, because his is a story packed with unpredictable twists. Beginning his career as a stand-up comedian before breaking out as an actor in Barry Levinson’s Diner, he’s become a familiar face across film and TV for decades, just this year making appearances on Prime Video’s The Boys, Netflix’s Stranger Things, and Hulu’s Reboot.
So these days, what do people recognize him from, when they spot him on the street? As part of a wide-ranging conversation about his career, Reiser tells Consequence that right now, “It’s almost always broken down by age. If somebody under 20 knows me, it’s Stranger Things. If somebody 20 to 34 knows me, it’s The Boys. If it’s a couple in their fifties, it’s Mad About You, and if it’s a guy in their seventies it’s The Kominski Method.”
Reiser is currently touring as a stand-up around the country and notes that at his shows, “I can see in the audience that there’s little pockets of all of those kids who only know me from Stranger Things or The Boys might not know. Somebody told me, ‘They said, what? This guy Reiser, he did Stranger Things so now he thinks he’s a comedian?'”
Of course, Reiser was a comedian a long time before Stranger Things was conceived. “I had just not been out there for so long that when I go out as a stand-up, some people go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know he did that.’ Which is kinda funny to me.”
In fact, for many people it’s not comedy, or his recent TV work, but Aliens that comes to mind when Reiser’s name comes up. After all, his casting as Burke, the secretly nefarious company man who lures Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) back into danger, is an iconic element of James Cameron’s acclaimed sequel.
“It was definitely a surprise to be in that,” he says. “It was not anything that I would have foreseen and I think that was part of what Jim Cameron was going for — let’s get a guy that you won’t suspect, but then it’s sort of like the guest star in Star Trek — ‘Oh, that guy will be dead in half an hour.’ So as much as we might have thought, ‘Well, he is just an amenable, young funny guy,’ it’s like, ‘I don’t trust him.'”
Aliens (20th Century Fox)
While he’s not sure what kind of impact Aliens has had on his career, he does say that he imagines “it has something to do with why the Duffers called me for Stranger Things. Beyond that, I don’t think I’ve gotten work because of it, but what I have only come to really appreciate in the last five years or so is how deep and wide the impact of the film is. Certainly you see the movie’s effect on the films that have come since then — so many films emulate the mechanics of the film, the pacing of the film, the structure of the film, the special effects, the actual props and the weaponry. It was a hugely impactful film. I’ve met so many people who’ve done many, many things and they’ll go, ‘Oh man, Aliens.’ It was over 30 years ago, but you never know, you never know.”
Aliens fits into a general theme about Reiser’s work, where “generally the things that I work the hardest on have the least impact.” Meanwhile, he says, what does seem to stick are “things that I was just lucky enough to be a part of, that I had nothing to do with, really.”
As one example, he mentions Beverly Hills Cop: “In the first one I had, I don’t know, six lines and one of them, I ad-libbed because I didn’t know how to get out of the scene: ‘Oh, this is not my locker.’ I watched it recently with my son — it’s almost off-camera, it’s on the cut, it’s almost not even in the movie. And yet most people will come over and go, ‘Hey, this is not my locker!’ Or people will do a twist on it — I’ll be in an airport and someone will go, ‘Hey, that’s not my suitcase!’ You never know what resonates with people.”
Meanwhile, there’s There’s Johnny, a series Reiser co-created with David Steven Simon that was originally meant to premiere exclusively on NBCUniversal’s ill-fated comedy streaming service Seeso. Seeso shut down in August 2017, a few weeks before There’s Johnny’s scheduled release, and the seven-episode first season eventually debuted on Hulu; it’s now streaming on Peacock.
“Nineteen other people saw it, maybe,” Reiser says. “I worked for 15 years on and off to get that going and it was a labor of love. I loved how it came out and I loved the cast, and it was a little thing, it wasn’t widely seen. I’ve just come to really accept that that’s just the way it may often be — your most impactful, widest successes are not of your making. It’s just something else is bigger than you and that things that you work on may take off, or they may not.”
He continues, “I’ve been lucky that I’ve gotten to do both. I’ve gotten to join things that are already up and running, like The Kominski Method and Stranger Things and The Boys. They were doing just fine without me, so it was nice enough to join them. It was fun.”
Below, Reiser gets into his experience working on the revival of Mad About You, which reunited him and co-star Helen Hunt for a single season that aired as a Spectrum Original, and also says that he maybe knows how Stranger Things is going to end (even if he currently has no idea whether or not he’s in Season 5). He also talks about why he initially turned down playing the raunchy, Bob Evans-inspired character of The Legend on The Boys Season 3, because of some “rude stuff” in the script — and why he eventually agreed to take on the role.
With Reboot coming out now, let me ask you this — from your perspective, as someone who’s been through a full reboot experience before, how do you feel about reboot culture?
I don’t personally love it. I like things that when they’re finished, they’re finished. Having said that, I would certainly love to see an artist that I loved 30 years ago perform again, but I don’t want them to be 20 again. I’ve been at events where they’ve assembled the cast of some show, and usually all you hear is people go, “Oooh, he let himself go. Ooh, she put on weight, he lost some hair.” And I thought, I don’t ever want to be shuffled out like a circus act for people to go, “Ooh, they don’t look like they did in the original, you know?”
Helen [Hunt] and I have talked about this. We were very, very clear about never, ever doing any kind of [Mad About You] reunion. Not because we didn’t love [the show], but because we did love it. We loved how we finished it. We did every episode we wanted to do, we covered every story. We closed up the facilities in a beautiful one-hour that not only wrapped things up, but told the future.
We did that deliberately so we would never be tempted to come back. We’ve already told people what happened, so we’re done. But five or six years ago reboots were really becoming more of a common thing — we kept being approached and we said, “Well, we have to at least talk about it.”
We were both very protective of what we did for seven seasons. So the first thing was like, well, it would be really fun to play together again. Over the last 20 years, we had lunch all the time, we were in each other’s lives, so it wasn’t like we needed to reboot our friendship. But I thought playing together would be fun.
The thing that convinced us that it would be exciting and makes sense to do, was that we did the math. It’s 20 years since we’re off, give or take. Our infant that we finished the show with is now moving out. Well, that’s interesting because now we’re alone again, which is what the premise of the original pilot was. It’s just us. There’s no more wedding. There’s no hoopla. It’s just two people in four walls. Well, now it’s the same. We’re being left alone, but we’re older. We walk slower. We don’t hear as well. Our dreams have not necessarily all come true.
So we thought it’d be really fun to dig into that and write where are those people that we know and love? What do they look like 20 years later? That’s why I always sort of bristled at the idea of the word reboot, because in my head it conjures the image of, “Let’s pretend nothing changed, like we’re 32 again.” It’s like, no, we’re not. We’re in our sixties. We’re not the same people. What are those stories? So we said, “Let’s do it. We’ll just do it once.”
And we did 12, and the stories were getting the kid out of the house and mourning the loss of the kid being outta the house, even though she was five blocks away. Then the minute we get our footing and we find each other again, that kid comes back. So that was really fun.
I had just dropped my younger son off at school on the East Coast — writing about that almost as it was happening [to me], it killed me. I was like, “I don’t like this.” I mean, you want your little birdies to fly, but it was sad. It absolutely changed the nature of the relationship, my wife and I. Kids are sort of cartilage between the bones of the parents. The friction is insulated by the kids. You take out the kid, now it’s just bone on bone. You got a lot of friction.
I know that Spectrum Originals is now shutting down…
Is that true? Did we break them?
I think they had a change of strategy. But does it feel like you’re not necessarily gearing up for another round anytime soon?
Of Mad About You? No, no, no, not at all. But we knew that going in because we were hesitant to do it, and then we thought we’d rather gamble on yes than run away because, well, we’re not idiots. We’re not gonna make a bad show. And we’ll do it once, and we’ll have fun. And we had great fun. It was kind of stunning to us, how quickly we fell into place.
I was going through my pictures on my phone and I had a picture from three years ago on the set, and I went “Whose house is that? It looks so familiar,” and my wife went, “It’s the set.” It was the Buchman house. That’s why it looked familiar. It was weird, because some of the paintings on the wall were from my own house, so I was really confused, three years later, going, “Wait, that’s my painting. Did we live there?”
You’re keeping really busy with some very interesting shows these days — for example, I know you won’t tell me anything about Stranger Things Season 5…
I don’t know anything, I literally don’t. I don’t even know if I’m in it.
Nothing along the lines of “You know, keep your schedule free for…”?
No, I haven’t even gotten that, which makes me a little anxious. But they were very clever on many levels. Because Season 4 was just a beast, not for me, but for them — it was long and each episode was a big ass movie and everybody is sort of nebulous. Is Matthew Modine dead? Maybe not? Is Sam Owens dead? He didn’t look good, but you didn’t see him die. There was no burial. Where’s Eleven? It could go a lot of different ways.
I remember some ideas I heard floated early years ago about where they wanted to end the series. So I have a feeling I know where they’re going, but I don’t know if I play into it if at all.
Is that common, that members of the cast have an inkling of how it ends?
No, just somebody on the crew who had heard a rumor that was just like, “This story might go there.” I went, oh, that’s really sweet. But that was just idle talk, so they could be wrong or it could have been true and now the creative guys changed their mind. So it doesn’t mean anything.
But I know that when I’d started, the Duffer brothers sat down with me, just as Season 1 had dropped. They invited me to join for Season 2, and they were telling me about this character that I was to play. And I went, “Is he a good guy or bad guy?” And they went, “We don’t know.” I go, “You don’t know or you don’t want me to know?” They go, “No, we’re not sure.” I went, “But you know, don’t you?”
I think they didn’t quite know. Sometimes you have something in your head as a writer and then you get the actors and the way the scenes play, you go, “Let’s go this way. Let’s have fun with the fact that it’s a little yes. And a little no. He’s kind of creepy, but he did a nice thing.” I defend myself — I think Dr. Owens has been very protective of Eleven. But I was talking to somebody who likes me very much and they went, “I don’t trust you.” Like, really? Okay.
The Boys (Prime Video)
Talk to me a little bit about The Boys, just because it’s a really fun character. When you got that call, what was your reaction?
I got this thing and then my agent said, “It’s a really hot show. You should read the script.” And I read it and I was not familiar with the show, so I just read my scenes and I went, “I can’t do this.” There was some rude stuff in there. I literally said no.
They said, “Oh, it’s really big.” I’m like, yeah, no, I can’t, God bless him, let them be big — I can’t do this. Then I asked my son, who’s pretty hip and he knows everything. He watches everything like the day comes out. I said, “You ever heard of this show called The Boys?” He went, “Oh, it’s great. And you’ll hate it.”
When I watched it, it took me a minute to realize, “Oh, this is by design.” It’s comedically, darkly, funny, how graphic and how violent and how horrible the characters are. So once I understood where they were going, I was able to appreciate the quality. I mean, it’s not my cup of tea, it’s not what I would watch generally, but man, they’re good at it. So, I was impressed and I was tickled.
And again, it was a very limited thing — just a few days, here’s the character. And they said, “We can take out this line and this thing, you know, that bump you the wrong way.” Then they also let me play with it. So a lot of the stuff that was in there, we just came up with on the set. Looking at Jack Quaid, who’s seven years old, it was very easy to go, “What do you mean? You never heard of me? Read a book, kid.” It’s like, I meant it.
Can you recall what in the script originally made you say “no”?
Well, I don’t want to give it away, but some stuff that was in there — we first meet him in some very compromised positions… I just said, “I don’t think America needs to see that, or my family.” So, they took that out.
I’ll tell you one of my greatest discoveries. It was great fun and they were terrific and the cast was very welcoming. When you’re the new guy and you come in for a week, it’s kind of like you’re the new kid in high school. Like, where are you gonna sit at lunch? They were all so engaging and welcoming. But when we did the wardrobe and they brought this purple velvet smoking jacket, I went, “It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t know why I’m not wearing this all the time.” A smoking jacket. Imagine that somebody made that up, a whole piece of clothing just to smoke in.
To wrap up, you mentioned that you’ve done a lot of things that people haven’t seen. What’s one project that I should make sure to shout out in my article? One big thing you want people to watch and appreciate?
Well, I would certainly say go find There’s Johnny on Peacock. And you can’t go see it now, but I just finished a movie that I wrote and filmed in Ireland, it’s called The Problem with People. It stars myself and Colm Meaney and Jane Levy and it’s hopefully funny. It’s really special and that’s something else that I’ve been wanting to do for years, and had it almost ready to do right before COVID hit and then sat on it. So look for that hopefully in the spring.
Reboot is streaming now on Hulu.
Paul Reiser on His Eclectic Career: “The Things I Work the Hardest on Have the Least Impact”
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