5 things you don’t know about Jason Alexander
[No. 26 in my 100 podcast series. Starting now, I decided to make the headlines reflect the content, rather than just the name of the podcast.]
This week, Jason Alexander was interviewed by Chris Hardwick on the Nerdist podcast. Here are five things from that conversation that you may not have known. Listen to the full episode here.
1. He’s a classically trained actor
“I wasn’t even particularly interested in comedy,” he said, until a professor steered him in that direction.
He called me in his office, and this was first semester assessment, and he said, ‘I know that your heart and soul is Hamlet. And you would be a profound Hamlet. But you will never play Hamlet. So you best get good at Falstaff.’ He was telling me in no uncertain terms, if you want a commercial career, any viable career, you gotta start looking at comedy. I was already losing my hair, I was always 20 pounds overweight… That’s when I started looking at comedy.”
2. He won a Tony at age 29
“All I ever wanted to do was New York theater. I had no aspirations for film or television,” he said. Then he realized his career dream when he won a Tony in 1989 at age 29 for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. “I remember going home that night thinking, well, now what do I dream about?” he said.
3. He starred in a musical-themed McDonald’s commercial
He danced around the street singing about the McDLT. “The hot stays hot and the cool stays cool!” The product failed to catch on. “What a terrible idea, what a terrible product, and I’m so proud to have represented it to America,” Alexander said.
4. Pretty Woman was not supposed to be a romantic comedy
Alexander’s role in Pretty Woman helped him land the part of George in Seinfeld. But the movie was different than the one he signed up for. “Pretty Woman the script was much darker than what we all saw. It was called 3,000 — that’s how much he pays her — and the depiction as a prostitute is more real, she’s a drug addict and they don’t end up at the end,” he said. When he showed up for the shoot, Richard Gere told him, “I don’t know what movie we’re making, but it’s not the one on the page.” The director filmed the actors improvising and when they didn’t know the camera was rolling to capture them goofing off, laughing and acting more comedic.
5. He didn’t think anyone would watch Seinfeld
Alexander said Seinfeld didn’t fit in with mainstream network TV when it came out. “The No. 1 comedy in American when we started was Alf. So I said, no one’s going to watch this. Initially, I was right. NBC tested the pilot and it was the worst test results up to that point of any half hour they had made.” NBC put the “dead” pilot on TV for one episode, and it got a great review from a TV guide critic. After that, NBC ordered four more episodes. The rest is history.
