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Richard Kind is the Platonic ideal of a character actor. When he shows up in something—as Larry David’s cousin in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” as Rudy Giuliani in “Bombshell”—you’re in for an “Oh, it’s that guy! I love that guy!” moment. With his Borscht Belt rhythms and his talent for tetchiness, Kind seems, at sixty-eight, like a throwback to Paul Lynde or Dom DeLuise: combustible comic personalities who added a dollop of whipped cream to the great pancake of show business. “I can’t be the Bob Newhart or Mary Tyler Moore, the maypole in a sitcom,” he told me recently. “I’m a satellite character.” Despite his hundreds of acting credits, from Stephen Sondheim musicals to Pixar cartoons, Kind has what one might call a Goldilocks level of fame: beloved by everyone in the know, but not too famous to get mobbed by fans, like his close friend George Clooney is.
Case in point: when we met at the second-floor café at Fairway, the Upper West Side market a few blocks from his apartment, he blended in, unbothered, with his fellow-nebbishes. “It’s the greatest,” he said, over a coffee and an avocado toast (topped with an egg ordered runny). “And I’ll walk home and one person will notice me.” It was a warm spring day, yet Kind showed up in a scratchy-looking plaid sweater that he filched from “Only Murders in the Building,” on which he plays a guy with antibiotic-resistant pink eye. (Much of his wardrobe is taken from sets.) “One time,” he went on, “I was walking with Brian d’Arcy James, and some guy comes up to me and goes, ‘Didn’t you used to run the porn stand on Thirty-fourth Street?’ ” He grinned wide. “There’s poetry to that.”
Kind’s latest gig, however, has given him what may be his biggest reach yet. On “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney,” the Netflix talk show streaming live on Wednesday nights, he’s the Ed McMahon-like announcer, playing a version of himself from behind a lectern. He and Mulaney have known each other for years—Kind voices Mulaney’s father on “Big Mouth,” and both appear in the classic “Documentary Now!” episode “Original Cast Album: Co-Op.” “Everybody’s Live” (which wraps up its first full season this month, after a six-episode trial run last year) ditches the traditional late-night format for something looser and stranger. Henry Winkler might share the stage with a funeral director, and callers weigh in on such subjects as cruises and whether dinosaur skeletons are put together incorrectly. Kind, baffled but game, gets roped into the dada humor. On one episode, he shows off his non-sequitur “party starters.” On another, we’re told that he has suffered a traumatic brain injury that makes him believe he’s Gene Simmons, from Kiss.
“He likes me! Crazy!” Kind said, of Mulaney, during our breakfast. (He was commuting between episodes of “Everybody’s Live,” in Los Angeles, and shooting “Only Murders” in New York.) At one point, a man approached him—not a fan, it turned out, but a former New Jersey firefighter, whom Kind called “my best friend here in town.” Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, covered his father’s jewelry store, the months that he and Clooney spent as roommates, and his enduring love of “Don Quixote.”
How would you describe your job on “Everybody’s Live,” or how was it described to you?
Nothing gets described to me. I’m not kidding. I didn’t know the show got picked up until I read it in The Hollywood Reporter. Isn’t that crazy? I called John and I said, “Truly, if you don’t want to use me, I totally understand. I won’t be insulted.” And he goes, “I’d be very insulted!” How do I describe it? Well, the easy way is: I’m Ed McMahon. But I’m not. Ed McMahon’s the most famous. Andy Richter and Alan Kalter were perfect examples of what I do.
Did you study those people?
Oh, God, no. You think I worked on this thing? When I act, I have a huge ego. I want to be the best in the scene. I usually don’t get a lot to do, but, when given a moment to shine, I really want to be good. Here, I just want to serve John. I don’t care about how I come off. I’m not going to win an Emmy. It’s John’s show. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just follow along. I was trained at Second City. I’m a really good “yes, and”-er.
The thing about the show is what I call the drive home. You finish with the show, and then on the drive home you go, “Why didn’t I say this?”
That’s what the French call esprit d’escalier—the wit of the staircase.
Yes, I’ve heard that before. O.K., Gene Simmons. I know Gene Simmons from Kiss. I don’t know what he looks like, I don’t know how he talks. So John showed me the Terry Gross interview. You remember the Terry Gross interview with him?
Is that when he tells her, “If you want to welcome me with open arms, I’m afraid you’re also going to have to welcome me with open legs”?
Yeah. Disgusting. So I just did that. When they went to “fire me”—this is the esprit d’escalier—I should have said, “You want to fire me and keep that asshole Richard Kind?” And then gone, “Fuck you. Fuck Netflix,” and walked off. That would have been such a meta moment, right in John’s wheelhouse. I may have had an inkling in my head, but I didn’t do it.
John had an interesting quote about you: “I don’t see dead air enough. Everything’s so tight. I just wanted Richard and I to have an exchange that is neither electric nor has a conclusion and sit in it.” There’s a kind of awkwardness built into the show.
Absolutely. People say, “I didn’t understand that thing.” I go, “Wait five minutes. We might serve up something different.” Throw it at the refrigerator, see if it sticks. I’m not used to that. Some people let the audience come to them—just be enigmatic. Not me. I go out to them. “Love me right away!” Not in this. I don’t know how to make the audience love me. I truly don’t know what I’m doing. You think I do. I don’t. And I keep it that way. I had a line: “Oh, it’s ‘Undercover Boss.’ ” I don’t know what it means!
“Undercover Boss” is a reality show where the boss goes undercover and talks to the employees.
So they told me! I didn’t know what I was saying. John knows things. Certain people are given twenty-five hours in a day. He writes, he performs, he tours, he reads books. Who the hell knows who Metz is! I didn’t talk to one person who knew who Metz was. He introduced them as “one of my favorite bands.” Where does he get the time to listen to Metz?
What about the people who call in? Have any particular calls stood out to you?
They all stand out, and I want to talk to all of them. I want to say a lot more during the show. I keep quiet, because what John will say is smarter and better than what I’m going to say.
There was the guy who called in saying he wrote dinosaur erotica.
I had lots of questions.
You seemed really interested in the woman who lives on a cruise full time.
Oh, that was fascinating. Have you been on a cruise? All you do is eat. There’s nothing else to do! I never eat three meals a day. There you eat five. And, when you go to town, all you can do there is go, “I gotta be back on the boat. My home is leaving!” I don’t understand how they can do that. All these people fascinate me.
Were you the kind of kid who fantasized about being on a talk show, or having a talk show?
No. I shouldn’t say that—I dreamt of stardom. Part of stardom was giving autographs, being on a talk show.
Was it a particular kind of stardom? Who did you idolize?
Robert Preston and Zero Mostel. Those were my heroes.
Well, you’ve played Max Bialystock, a Zero Mostel role, so now you need your revival of “The Music Man.”
I’ve done “The Music Man” in summer stock. I wasn’t a great Harold Hill, but I was a lot of fun. But Harold Hill should be an absolute Wasp, not Willy Loman. A Jew going in, asking for money for a musical instrument? Horrible!
Not gonna fly in Iowa.
They’d have reason to be Iowa stubborn. The other two I loved: George Segal and Elliott Gould. I couldn’t believe what they were doing. They were funny. They were Jewish. They were urban and romantic.
I love that moment in culture in the early seventies when Elliott Gould was the hottest guy in movies.
And I got to know him. First time I met him was in the waiting room of an audition. I’m going up against Elliott Gould, so right there—cut me off at the knees. I’m not going to be better than him! If you can get Elliott Gould, get Elliott Gould! We waited an exceptionally long time, maybe forty-five minutes. He started talking about how Hollywood was a dysfunctional Jewish family, and he had these theories. And he’s a nut! A crazy, crazy nut. Then I used to play poker with him, and he would bring his dog, who farted terribly. The worst farts in the world. He’d just sit there laughing. He’s a lovely man.
I’ve gotten to work with a lot of greats at the end of their run: Arthur Penn, Clint Eastwood, Hal Prince, Joanne Woodward as a director. Greats! People who raised me, made me who I am. Now I’m working with people who are relevant today. Everybody goes, “You’re having your moment.” I worked just as hard for years doing some crap, some good stuff—but not on such a big platform. Now I have an enormous platform.
You have something like three hundred acting credits. Is there something that you look back on and think, That was a real masterpiece I was in?
Oh, yeah. I did “Bounce,” with Sondheim, directed by Hal Prince. You say, Did I dream about being on a talk show? I dreamed about Sondheim! I’ll sing for anybody. Am I a good singer? Yeah. Am I a great singer? Not enough to be in a Sondheim musical. And I was.
That show, about the Mizner brothers, of the nineteen-twenties Florida real-estate boom, went through a lot of iterations—even a lot of titles—and never made it to Broadway. Did you sense Sondheim feeling frustrated?
Only with one thing. He had a number at the end, which was the real-estate crash. He felt he never got it. He just kept concentrating on that seven-minute run. There were other problems. And I spoke to [the book writer] John Weidman about them. I said, I think I have it solved. The first act should be bentwood chairs. No scenery. Everything done on the fly. Then, in the second act, they’re in their thirties. Life changes when you’re in your thirties. Your brain isn’t growing anymore. You had enough sex. You’ve dealt with all these people. You’re settling down, and life becomes a little tamer. That’s when the scenery comes in. That’s when you’re living in comfort. So it should have the huge difference of adolescence and youth and dreams versus the stability of your thirties and forties. In any case, I had my theories.
Because you’re a character actor who became notable later in life, I have trouble picturing you as a young person. What were you like as a child?
I was a fat kid. You gotta make friends in other ways, so I developed a sense of humor. Maybe all kids feel this way, but because I was a fat kid my insecurities came through. I always wanted to prove myself to my parents. It wasn’t until about seventh, eighth grade that I developed an intelligent sense of humor and could make them laugh. But, my parents’ friends, I thought that their kids were better than I was—they were better looking, better athletes, better students. So I used humor. I was very much loved by my parents, but my dad was a real sixties dad. Played golf, played gin, and saw us at four o’clock.
He had a jewelry shop in Princeton, right?
Beautiful store. His competition was Tiffany and Cartier. In Princeton, which is a very wealthy community, people could come to New York and buy their jewels, or they could trust my dad, who had access to all the suppliers that Tiffany had. Everybody thinks, Oh, my God, Tiffany! All they have is a lot of space. My dad wanted a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar necklace, he’d say, “Whattaya got?” And my dad was not cheap. Everything was very expensive, and he really took pride in what he had in the store, and in the store itself, and in the customers. He never haggled with them. If a thing cost five thousand dollars, it was five thousand dollars.
Did you pick up any of his expertise? Like, if I showed you three diamonds, could you rank which is the best one?
My dad wasn’t a jeweller. He knew jewels, but he was a great salesman. He was a Jewish man in a very non-Jewish town, and he could sell anything to anybody. But not like a flim-flam man. He would teach them about clarity and the carat and the cut of the stone and why it was beautiful. He never had big, gaudy stones in his store. They were always classy. He was the opposite of Harold Hill. Harold Hill was a flim-flam man.
And you worked there as a teen?
Yeah. It was a summer job. I was in the back with the sterling silver. My dad wouldn’t let me in with the jewels! I would sell Dunhill cigarette lighters and Tiffany keychains with the Elsa Peretti hearts, stuff like that. I wrapped gifts. I could put a watch band on a watch.
What other day jobs have you had over the years?
In the area of Bucks County that I lived in, there were pockets of forest behind the school, where vandals could hide. They had to thin out the forests, so, for a summer, I did hard labor cutting down trees. I was a woodsman!
You remember Bamberger’s? It was a department store. I worked in the china-and-crystal department. Dishes would come in boxed sets. If one piece had a little nick, the whole thing had to be destroyed. And I used to stand there like Charlton Heston throwing down the Ten Commandments. It’s the most fun, breaking plates and cups and glasses.
What about later, as a working actor? What were your survival jobs?
Across the street from Lincoln Center, there was a restaurant called the Saloon. All the waiters were on roller skates. De Niro came in. The food was great. So I worked there. I was not on roller skates. Everybody was always, like, “Why aren’t you on roller skates?” I’d go, “I’d prefer to keep the food on your plate and not on your lap.” They would laugh at that: ha, ha, ha. I worked there with Jennifer Grey, who later on played my wife in “Red Oaks.”
Was Jennifer Grey on skates?
Probably, knowing her. She’s so talented, I could see her on skates.
When was this era that you were living in New York?
’78 to ’82. Another good story: I was a waiter at the Russian Tea Room. I’d been there a few days, and one day Peter Benchley comes in—author of “Jaws.” He lived in Princeton. He played tennis with my father. I’m waiting tables, and just as Peter Benchley’s leaving, I go, “Excuse me, Mr. Benchley, I just wanted to say hello. I’m Sam Kind’s son.” And the [manager]—shoulda been a Russian woman, but she was German—goes, “Vat are you doing talking viz ze customers?” I go, “He’s a friend of my father’s!” She goes, “You do not talk to ze customers.” And I was fired.
Oh, no!
It’s not so bad. It’s a better story than it was a job.
I read somewhere that you went to Studio 54. Were you tripping with Grace Jones?
I wish. I never did coke. I didn’t even see the famous people. I was probably wearing shorts and a Polo shirt. That’s what I always wore. I still do. In fact, it’s getting to shorts weather now, and I can only imagine with my pale legs what I look like in shorts.
What brought you to L.A.?
There’s a lot in between. I did a pilot while I was in Second City called “Bennett Brothers,” which is where I met George [Clooney]. Then I came back [to Chicago], and he said, “You gotta come out to L.A.” I was at Second City for four and a half years. Terrified to leave. I even developed a skin condition. I was so scared to leave the security of a weekly paycheck, the adoration in Chicago, working every night, loving what I was doing. Do you know what vitiligo is?
Oh, yeah, didn’t Michael Jackson have that?
I have it. Put out your hand. [We compare hands.] See how pale I am? I have no pigment. I have no melanin.
What happens if you stay out in the sun?
I get burned, but you don’t know it. I don’t get red.
You know, I’ve noticed something: a lot of your characters have very peculiar ailments.
Come at me! What?
In “A Serious Man,” you have a sebaceous cyst. In “Only Murders in the Building,” you have antibiotic-resistant pink eye.
Yes! Michael! When I hear new things, that delights me! Oh, my gosh! If you watch an old episode of “Scrubs,” I go into the hospital because I have a “yaba.” Whenever I see Zach Braff, he goes, “Yaba!”
What is that?
Who the hell knows. I played a hypochondriac. Oh, what a wonderful observation! Because—I’m throwing this out—I can complain with confidence.
Tell Mulaney to give you an ailment.
I got hit on the head and became Gene Simmons!
There you go. So, “Bennett Brothers,” the pilot you did with George Clooney—can you describe the plot?
An “Odd Couple” for guys in their thirties. We were brothers, and he was the younger, good-looking one, though I joke I was the good-looking one and our careers took a different path. He was the guy who got all the women, and I was the nebbishy guy. It was adorable. We all thought it was going to go. It didn’t go. What are you gonna do?
So how did George end up defecating in your cat’s litter box? It’s become one of his well-worn anecdotes.
How I remember it and how George remembers it is different. We were watching TV, and I said, “This is weird—the cat hasn’t taken a shit in three or four days.” He doesn’t think anything about it. And then he cleans out the litter box and decides to do this joke: George went and took a dump in the litter box. I came in and I went—I mean, a human shit is a human shit! It’s huge! And George at the time, among us friends, had a terrible gastro system. This was the worst shit ever.
Were you living together?
Yes. He was recently separated and-slash-or divorced from his lovely wife at the time, Talia Balsam, a great actress. He didn’t have a place to stay. I had a two-bedroom place, and he lived with me.
What you’re saying is, “Bennett Brothers” came true.
Yeah, I guess so. We were roommates for a couple of months, from maybe June until about February. Do you know the story about the Christmas tree? It’s a hilarious story. He’s living with me, it’s Christmastime. He says, “Can we get a Christmas tree?” I said, “George, you know I’m not that Jewish, but I just can’t have a Christmas tree. Put up holly. Put a wreath on the door. Anything. I just can’t have a Christmas tree.” Then we’re at the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax. There used to be a parking lot, and at Christmastime it was filled with Christmas trees. We’re having breakfast at the Farmers Market and then we’re going to some parties, and we go to Du-par’s and buy six pies: cherry pie, mince pie. We go out to the car, and he goes, “Come on, really? I can’t buy a tree?” I go, “George, I can’t do it.” He throws the pies at me in the parking lot! We were hilarious. We weren’t working at the time.
I guess you both got cast on big NBC shows around the same time, when he was on “ER” and you were on “Mad About You.”
I was only [a regular] on “Mad About You” one year. I got hired as a guest, along with Leila [Kenzle], on the pilot. We did about three or four episodes in a row. I went in and talked to the guy who ran Sony TV at the time, and I said, “Shouldn’t we have a contract?” I remember he got a phone call from his second-in-command from an airplane, and they just sat on the phone and chatted for twenty minutes while I’m sitting there. Do you remember airplane phones? They were, like, twelve dollars a minute. And I’m going, “That money should be mine! Don’t just jabber on the phone!” We got a raise, and we became regulars. Then I get a call in June from my manager that they’re not picking up my contract. But, look, I’ve got a wonderful career. You’ve got to look at the butterfly that flapped its wings twice in Thailand, and that’s why I am where I am today. Then I did “Spin City.”
I was a regular watcher of “Spin City.” Do you remember finding out that Michael J. Fox had Parkinson’s?
Very clearly. His hands would shake. We were told he was not well, that he had Lyme disease. Never clicked. In retrospect, he had to do two things that were physical. He had to pretend that he was a mime in a box. His body wouldn’t let him do it. He got so mad and walked off. I went, Jesus, I never thought of him as a prima donna! He was so angry at himself, but we didn’t know. Then he had to do a thing where he was pretending to screw in a light bulb. Couldn’t do it. Got mad again. In retrospect, how awful do I feel? How guilty? But I’ve reconciled with myself. I support not just him but his foundation, which does amazing work. My joke is: God gave him looks and talent and fame so that he could cure Parkinson’s. We were told a couple months before the world knew. It was horrible.
You said on “Everybody’s Live” recently that you have a Don Quixote collection at home. Can you tell me more about that?
I took a class at Northwestern about Cervantes, so I really know “Quixote,” or did at the time. Have you read “Quixote”? Do you know he never meets Dulcinea? He never meets Aldonza! Around that time, I was travelling. Every country has “Quixote” memorabilia, especially Spain, so I would buy little statuettes. Carol Burnett, for my birthday, gave me a two-volume set of “Quixote” with beautiful etchings. It must be from the early nineteen-hundreds. I have a Dalí limited-edition [print] of Quixote. I have the wooden statuettes, ceramic things.
Do you identify with Don Quixote?
Sure!
In what way?
I’m a dreamer. Wouldn’t you love the world to be better? ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
