Ray Romano Says Martin Scorsese Had ‘No Idea’ Who He Was While Casting Him, Despite 9 Years of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ Fame: ‘It Was a Blessing’

Ray Romano starred in one of television’s biggest sitcoms for nine seasons and 210 episodes, but apparently Martin Scorsese was never watching “Everybody Loves Raymond.” During a recent interview on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast (via IndieWire), Raymond said that Scorsese had no idea who he was when casting him in the HBO series “Vinyl.”

“Scorsese did the pilot and I had to go on tape for him,” Romano said. “The cool thing was, I went on tape and the response we got back was, ‘Yeah, Marty likes it. He’s in the running. And Marty wants to know who he is. He’s never seen him,’ And my agent was like, ‘So he’s never seen the show?’ And they go, ‘No, no, no, he doesn’t know who the guy is,’ which was a blessing because he didn’t have to erase the sitcom character from his mind.”

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Romano continued, “I can buy that, that Martin Scorsese doesn’t watch television. So when he hired me, he liked what he saw.”

It’s hard to believe anyone in entertainment in the late 1990s and early 2000s wouldn’t recognize Romano given the staggering success of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” which aired on CBS from 1996 to 2005. The show won 15 Emmys during its run, including 10 for acting, and spent five seasons as one of the top 10 most-watched shows on television.

“Vinyl,” which Scorsese co-created along with Mick Jagger, Rich Cohen and Terence Winter, centered on a troubled music studio in the 1970s. Romano played one of the executives at the company. The cast included Bobby Cannavale and Olivia Wilde. Scorsese directed the show’s pilot episode. Romano called the role such a stretch that it worked in his favor that Scorsese had never heard of him.

“We do the pilot and I’m playing this guy from the ’70s, this music guy, and I’m snorting coke, this and that, and it’s a stretch for me but it’s fun as hell,” Romano said. “And then a year goes by, almost a year until they do the second episode. And I’m reading it and my character has to contemplate killing myself in his garage and breakdown crying. And I go to my agent: ‘Well, I don’t know if I can do this.’ And this is how compassionate he was: He goes, ‘Well you better do it!’ That’s the response. And that was the first time where I had something that heavy and I’m like, ‘Holy shit.’”

Romano listened to Coldplay’s “Fix You” in order to get into his character’s headspace, adding, “I surprised myself actually that I tapped into it and pulled it off. It was weird. It turned a corner for me, to attack that kind of scene.”

“Vinyl” was short-lived as HBO canceled the show after just one season, but Romano would go on to collaborate with Scorsese for a second time on the director’s Netflix mob drama “The Irishman.”

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