South Beach Sessions - Jon Cryer

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Welcome to South Beach Sessions.

We're out on the West Coast, and we are with someone who's been a TV sitcom star.

You were a bit of a child prodigy, practically born on off-Broadway, right?

Born off-Broadway?

Now that you mention it, yes.

I've rarely been referred to as a prodigy.

I tend to think of like Mozart.

Okay, so that's my level of prodigy.

Not quite at Mozart,

just yet.

Fair enough.

But knew you were going to be an actor.

John Pryor is what I should have said.

I'm sorry.

I haven't actually said your name.

There we go.

Because you objected immediately to Prodigy.

But

you weren't going to be an actor from the very beginning.

Yes.

You had no choice.

I had no choice.

Yeah, no.

My parents were performers.

My mother's also a writer and composer.

And so I grew up kind of backstage and in it.

I actually

had a weird thing recently.

You're a paid professional.

I'm going to put the microphone in front of you.

Don't make love to the microphone.

Okay.

So

I recently had an odd situation where a friend of mine recommended a memoir of

an avant-garde producer from the 60s, 70s, and 80s guy named Albert Poland.

It's called Stages is the memoir.

And he said, you got to read this because your parents are all over it.

I was like, I'm sorry.

And it turns out, my parents, obviously, being very active active in off-Broadway and some amount of avant-garde stuff at the time, it is so strange to read a memoir that deals with your parents as people,

you know, because you don't picture them that way.

You know, so it's revealing all these things that I had not, you know, had not expected.

What'd you learn?

Well, the biggest thing I learned was, like, my parents were divorced when I was four.

My dad is David Cryer.

He's an actor, been on Broadway and off Broadway.

He ended up doing Phantom of the Opera on tour for 19 years.

Well, no, 17 years on tour and then two years more on Broadway.

So, I mean, that's how ingrained it is.

You had no chance.

I had no choice.

But I always wondered, it's like, I have no recollection of him before my parents divorced.

Almost none.

I have a couple of incidents that I remember.

And in reading the book, I now understand why.

It's because he had, as a producer and a star, embarked on a huge tour

that

on and off he was on for approximately four years.

And that's why I didn't see him.

And obviously,

we've gotten to know each other over the years,

but it was interesting to read this book and suddenly go, oh, there's this big chunk of my life that now makes a lot more sense.

What a fascinating read that must have been.

How much?

I'm not done.

I'm only a third of it the way through.

I'm already going, Jesus Christ.

So

it's wild,

but it's been fun.

What else did you learn?

Mostly, well, that my mom, my mom

is a Gretchen Cryer.

She's,

as I said, a writer, a playwright, and a composer, and an actress.

And

she had,

and

the author characterizes her as pessimistic but funny, which was never my experience of my mother.

My mother was always just unfailingly optimistic.

That was just a part of who she was.

And

to hear that somebody perceived her completely the opposite was

remarkable to me.

And I got to have a talk with her about that.

I was like, what was going down when you were hanging with Albert?

I don't know.

You mentioned incidents.

Before four years old, you have something ingrained there in your life.

I mean, there's a few things.

There's

a time when

I remember I bit him

as a joke.

I'm using air quotes.

And

that it was one of my first sort of pranks as a human being.

And I thought it was hilarious, and he did not.

So

that's a moment that I recall.

But

by the way, just in the future, as a prank, it's not a great one.

It's not a great one.

No, through a child's eyes, though, where I

would.

It's hilarious.

Absolutely.

I can understand the confusion there.

But you are, so you were a child actor from what age?

How early were you on a stage?

Well, my very first job was, I was four years old and was in a commercial for multivitamins called Zest Tabs.

They were basically once

Flintstone vitamin, they were basically

the antecedent to Flintstones.

And once they realized with Zest Tabs that vitamins packed with sugar were very successful in the marketplace, then they came out with Flintstones and

then they specifically branded it toward children.

You interrupted my introduction of you to say you weren't Mozart.

And at four years old, you were out here selling Zest Tabs, poisoning the children with sugar.

They're poisoning America's children.

You know, again, I didn't say that I did it well,

which

is, I think, what you need to be a prodigy.

No, in fact, on the day of the commercial shoot, apparently, I broke out in hives that were incredibly visible.

And literally

the production had to just wait for like four hours till my skin cleared.

That's the opposite of Motes.

Exactly.

You were right to correct my introduction, actually.

You're welcome.

Did you actually, are you being self-deprecating or were there actual hives?

Because I were 100% actual hives.

So you were nervous, scared?

I was very nervous.

I was very nervous.

How much pressure was there in the house?

None, really.

All I had to do was stand there.

I didn't even have a line.

Basically, my mother had booked the commercial.

She was an actress,

and it was a great gig.

And

she needed to be, the whole theme of the Zest Tabs commercial was, and the kids like them too,

because they're packed with sugar.

And so she just needed a boy and a girl to be standing next to her.

And

she asked my sister and I, and my sister ran screaming from the room, wanted nothing to do with show business.

But I was like, yeah, let's do this because it sounded interesting to me.

But of course, my nerves overtook me on the day.

The crazy thing was the girl who was with me in the thing was named Jennifer.

And many, many years later,

we were sitting at a play.

We were going to see the Little Foxes that Elizabeth Taylor was in.

And

the mom recognizes my mom and says, oh, here's Jennifer.

And we were both grown people at that point.

But it was lovely to see her again.

Teenage icon more acceptable to you?

Yes,

okay, I'm an icon.

You've talked me into it.

What was the life like between four?

and Pretty in Pink?

Not much happened.

No,

between four,

you know, I didn't really try to work, obviously, after that, but I was always fascinated with TV.

I loved TV.

Absolutely.

It was the bane of my mother's existence that I was just glued to it.

I had a little Sony TV that was way, the screen was about three inches by two and a half inches.

No, maybe four inches by two and a half inches.

Black and white.

But of course, the thing was probably 12 or 13 pounds.

What were you consuming?

You were just addicted to it?

I was addicted to it.

Mostly sitcoms, loved them, loved sitcoms, loved, you know, all the MASH and, you know, and Mary Teller Moore and Rhoda and Good Times and All in the Family, all that stuff.

And I remember, though, I remember the moment that I thought that my

horizons expanded quite a bit was I was watching Carburnett Show, which I believe was on Saturday nights, I believe, or was it Sundays?

I don't know.

And then there was the news, and then there was this weird show that I couldn't tell what the hell they were doing because I didn't know.

Like, there was this guy doing a weird voice, and he

sounded like he was foreign, but you couldn't quite understand him.

And then he would play the Mighty Mouse theme and lip-sync along to it, and it was hilarious.

And I was like, who is this guy?

And it turns out the show was Saturday Night Live,

you know, and so it was, it was, was,

I remember that moment that comedy kind of changed.

And it was really,

it was remarkable.

You happen to be watching at the moment that it changed, where live television is,

comedy is coming to live television.

What level of awareness and gratitude did you have while starring for 10 years on America's number one television show that you were now the thing that was in that box in your childhood that you were obsessing over, that you were right in the center of its golden age.

Yeah, it didn't, it didn't, it didn't occur to me like that because I was too suspicious by that point.

I was not,

you're always sure that another shoe is going to drop and this is all going to go away.

It's very,

and in the end, and it's funny because about eight seasons in, a certain co-star went a little bonkers.

So,

so, you know, it's

a hell of a run, though.

It was a hell of a run.

And no, I did, I knew how lucky I was.

It doesn't sound like it, though.

It sounds like you're saying.

There's always a part of you as an actor that's like, this can end at any moment, because it can.

But when CBS bought two and a half men and they ordered 13 episodes, which is the normal amount, and then when they gave us the time slot after Everybody Loves Raymond, which at the time was sort of at the height of its popularity.

And once they did that, I said, oh, okay,

you know, I think this thing is going to

be.

Are you sure?

Are you lying to me about like sometimes, very often, success doesn't feel like success to the successful because they always crave more.

They want more.

They think it's going to fail soon.

They don't get to enjoy it while they're doing it because they're competitive or whatever the reasons are.

No, I absolutely enjoyed it while I did it.

And situation comedies are like in front of an audience, multi-camera comedies are the best job you can ever have.

They're amazing because

you know, the hours are normal.

They're predictable.

If you want to have a family, you can have a family.

You have copious amounts of time off.

I mean, we would shoot three weeks and then take a week off every month.

And then we had all of the summer off.

So,

you know, for actors, they're very sought-after jobs because of that.

Also, it's just really fun working with the writers.

And, you know, you get a lot of rewrites.

That's the hardest part of it.

But again, it's incredibly fun because they're figuring out what you can do well and you're giving them the best that you can.

So no, I felt very,

no, I knew that it was a great situation and I loved that.

And I didn't feel,

it was interesting because working with Charlie Sheen, you know, he's obviously, you know, he was already a huge star at that point.

And I found he could be, I remember like the first couple of seasons, we didn't get any Emmy nominations and he would just, you know, quietly seethe about it.

I mean, it was sort of jokey.

He turned to me at one point, he said, It's all about exclusion and inclusion.

And I was like, Okay,

if that's what it's about.

I think he just wanted to be invited to the party, you know.

But

I found that

one of the things that, you know, having been in this business since I was four,

you do realize that

you can make yourself incredibly miserable if that's the way you choose to live your life.

But you can choose that.

And you can just as easily choose not to.

Well, where'd you learn that?

I suspect from watching my parents.

My parents very early on

had been through,

you know, had been through tough stuff.

And I remember my mother,

she was a playwright, and she'd written shows that were, she'd written several off-Broadway shows.

And

you never know how they're going to be received by the New York critics.

The New York Times is like the big one.

That's like, you know, it's,

you know, a lot of

artists in New York just hate the New York Times because of the power they wield.

It's not necessarily that they're awful or

their reviews are not

quality or whatever.

But I remember my mom had had a couple of hits off Broadway,

and then she did this incredibly autobiographical show called I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road.

And she'd worked so hard on it for years.

And it was this incredible part of her.

It was, you know, as I said, it was very much about her life.

And

it opened at the public theater and got one of the worst reviews in the New York Times that I had read.

I mean, and I remember just my mom just being decimated by it, just

absolutely decimated.

um

but

she was decimated for a day uh and then she got up and went back to work uh and uh the show ended up uh running for six weeks um joe papp who ran the public theater at that time decided to give it another few weeks and by the end of that extra four weeks it was selling out uh it ended up moving to off-Broadway and running for three years and was the most successful thing my mother did

and

you know, that was a huge lesson for me because I got to see that

even in something you perceive as just an utter defeat, there's always a little something

that can turn these things around.

How old were you and what do you remember of the details of the decimation?

I was 13

and I

was 78.

So yeah, 13.

It's pretty crushing to have to put something that personal into the world if you're an artist and just leave yourself splayed open vulnerably for the critic and then have your worst nightmare read

whatever she was reading.

Yeah, it's awful.

I mean, people in the theater are always like, you know, screw them.

And, you know, we always, you know, they always put on a brave face because it's always,

the theater is always kind of a silly.

It's a ridiculous thing.

We're pretending.

We're grown-ups pretending things.

We get that.

You know, so on some level, we understand this is all ridiculous folly to begin with.

But

again,

as you said, it was an incredibly personal thing for her.

So yeah, I remember her in her bedroom with the, you know, the blinds drawn and just crying, just crying it out, you know.

And that was one of the first times I recall really understanding my mom's vulnerability.

You know, when you understand a parent's vulnerability, it's very different.

So.

You'd never seen that from her?

No, no.

Not Not that, you know, she never cried or anything, but just

that, the bridge, the link being that clear to a 13-year-old between mom cares about this thing.

And also, I was 13, so I could perceive the context of it a lot more.

I understood how much she worked on it.

I understood what a big deal it was.

And it was for the public theater, which in New York is just an institution, just a revered place to work.

So I really got it.

But again, at 13, what great life wisdom, excuse me for interrupting you, but what great life wisdom to have at 13 years old?

I can choose to have a different experience with whatever comes my way.

I could choose misery or I can choose a different path.

I do have that.

For you to say that you've learned it now at 60 and remember it from 13, that's a long time.

I'm just beginning to learn that.

I'm in therapy.

I'm not even kidding you when I say like two months ago, I said to my therapist some form of, well, what if I just choose to experience this stuff differently than I'm experiencing it?

That was two months ago.

And this is the first thing you've done since.

This interview.

This right here is what I'm doing with that inspiration.

I'm choosing to enjoy this horrible time.

Well,

I'm glad, you know,

again, because I've been in this industry, which is stupid, this industry is the most ridiculous, just, you know,

I mean, part of what's fun about it is it's just ridiculous.

You know, and

that was always the sort of the deal.

The deal, if you're going to get into this industry, it's going to be stupid and it's going to be unfair.

And you can't expect it to be fair, because if you do, that will make you insane.

And so,

you know, I've been able to come at things with an enormous amount of positivity and let things go the same way.

You know, I've managed to not

bring a lot of bitterness into my life.

And also, in many respects, I've been incredibly lucky.

I mean, that I've gotten more than one opportunity to ever be on a TV show, that I've gotten more than one opportunity to ever be in a movie, to be on Broadway.

I mean, these are all amazing things.

So I, you know,

you know,

it's not hard to be grateful for them.

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So between four years old and pretty in pink, you're just,

you know, you're going to be an actor.

This is what you're going to do as a career.

It's not going to be about schooling.

It's not going to be about anything else.

This is who I am, and I'm this from four years old.

Well, I didn't really definitively understand it as a career and as a pursuit until I was around 12.

I I was pretty late.

And no, around 12, a friend of mine was going to a theater camp in upstate New York.

And I was like, okay, I want to do that.

And my mom, who was not a wealthy person, had to scrape together.

It was a pretty expensive camp as summer camps go.

And

so she scraped the money together.

And I went to a place called Stagedoor Manor in upstate New York.

And, you know, at that point, so many kids in that place geared toward professional theater.

They were thinking, I am, that's, and, and I just 100% fell into place with that.

I was like, yeah, I'm doing that too.

And I had also hoped to, you know, I wanted to be an actor, but I also wanted, was thinking about being a feature film director.

I loved films and stuff like that.

But I really loved performing, and that was what seemed to

seem to be the place of the most comfort for me.

How about confidence in in just going through the teen years?

Oh, my God.

Well, okay, first of all, at Sager Manor,

there was 40 guys and 230 girls.

So, first of all, it was much easier for guys to get really good parts, which is unfair, and that's the way the business is, and finally turning around, by the way.

But it's been 50 years, you know, and it's much or way longer than that culturally.

So, the guys would get a lot of really great roles.

Also, half of the guys were not straight.

So

if you were looking to date girls, this was a fish in a barrel situation.

So I got so much confidence.

Also, because it was

a place where weird things were status symbols, you know, like if you got that great part, all of a sudden you had status, you know, and

that meant nothing at my school.

This is the coolest you've ever been.

This is indisputably, this is as handsome and as sexy and as amazing as you've ever been.

Yep.

This is a rocket day.

This is it.

But it was great.

It was an amazing experience.

It made me who I am.

Did you have any idea,

could you have at that age an understanding of what John Hughes was or how good he was at what he was doing with Pretty in Pink?

16 Candles was the first thing of his I saw.

He was a writer for National Lampoon before that.

And I recall, and my older friend, the one who had gone to the summer camp

before me,

he used to get National Lampoons from his older brother.

And I used to read the National Lampoons because there was some nudity in them.

I'm going to be 100% honest here.

I think that's what I'm saying.

It's important that this is what they come here to do.

That's what right here.

The porn that you found in your comedy magazines.

This is the kind of expose that they expect from me.

Yes, yes.

This is going to be breaking the internet tomorrow.

You're talking about John Pryor.

Red Nash Lampoon for the naked ladies.

At any rate,

but John Hughes had some of his earliest writings published there, and I noticed them.

There were a few pieces that I thought were really, really funny.

So when 16 Candles came out,

amongst the young actors, everybody was like, wow, this guy's great.

And I remember I auditioned for 16 Candles, did not even get close, did not even get a call back.

But when

Pretty and Pink came around, obviously I did a little better.

And by that time, I had already booked, I was doing Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway, the Neil Simon play.

So, you know, obviously I'd

had a lot more experience.

I read that your mother, after that movie came out, all it was was on her answering machine, teenage girls calling and giggling because they found your mother somehow.

Yeah, well, they used to have a thing called the phone book

where

people listed their names and their phone numbers.

And it was just there in a big

and my mother was just in there.

And by the way, my mother, until they stopped making phone books, my mother was in the phone book.

So, yeah, she got a lot of calls.

What can you tell us about that entire experience that people might not know?

About

the pretty and pink experience.

Oh, that people might not know?

Hmm.

Well,

you know, movies are, high school movies are weird because you

most of the people that make them are out of high school.

They're not in it anymore.

So for us, it was really important to

capture

still being in it and really feeling like

really bringing some authenticity to it.

And they shot in high school around, actually a high school in Hancock Park

that I just drove by on the way to the studio today.

As a matter of fact, I was like, oh, we shot there.

But

what was unusual for Pretty and Pink and still is incredibly rarely done was we had an enormous amount of rehearsal.

The director, Howie Deutsch,

had us get together and really tried to spend a lot of time just letting us get comfortable with the dynamic.

And he really encouraged Molly and I to hang out and, you know, and

have a real social shorthand with each other.

And

he was okay that Andrew and I didn't get along.

Apparently,

according to him, now he said, oh, I wanted you guys to hate each other.

And I was like, oh, mission accomplished.

He said, yeah, part of the reason I cast you guys was that there was always tension between you guys.

And that worked for the movie.

I was like, oh, you're an evil genius, Howie Deutsch.

Or we just ended up hating each other.

I don't know.

The funny thing was,

he's not a bad guy.

I found out later that he was going through a lot of really rough stuff at that time.

I'm sorry to be smiling.

I need to take the smile out of my mind.

Take the smile out of my head.

Wipe that off your head.

I was just smiling about the idea of the tension being real.

Oh, yeah.

The idea of you actually hating somebody.

When you walked in here, I'm like, that person's not physically fundamentally capable of hate.

Well, listen, mister.

You're about to hear me unload.

Well, no, the thing about it was, I come from the theater.

And I don't know if you've, have you ever been involved in theatrical productions?

I know a lot of people who come from the theater, so I have some fluency in the language.

Got it.

They're fun people.

They're the fun people.

My son went to college, but even though it was an engineering school, I said, hang out with the theater kids because they're the fun ones.

Especially the ones who know that it's silly and ridiculous and what a wonderful way to make a living and aren't like flatulent with self-involvement.

100%.

So I was used to that feeling in the theater that you get that sort of camaraderie and that trust that you build when you're working with other performers and

writers and all that stuff.

And that wasn't there at all with Andrew.

As I said, I later found out that he was already having issues with alcohol.

He had a very rough relationship with his dad that he was going through a very rough period at that time.

So in retrospect, I understand why he was remote and he was not looking for,

he didn't need a best friend at that point.

He didn't need me to be his friend.

He was just,

he was doing the job, you know?

So I,

but I took it as,

what's up his ass, you know?

And

so I did not, I did not get what he was going through at all.

And Molly

was always

a person who

didn't feel the need to be an extrovert either.

She made real efforts to, she like invited me out with her friends and stuff and said, hey, come see, I'm seeing a band tonight, want to come see you.

I mean, she made a lot of efforts

to make sure we had.

It doesn't sound like a lot of fun, though.

It's okay.

You're not speaking negatively of it.

You're just speaking honestly of what the situation was.

It doesn't seem like it was the making of it if you're rehearsing all the time and now you're doing it with a couple of people around whom

there's not total perfect chemistry of like where you know where

arm in arm.

No, no, I just don't want I don't want it to, you know, Molly was great.

I had issues with Andrew at the time.

Absolutely.

He and I, by the way, have talked many times, and he's lovely, and

he did the Bratz documentary, and we had a great time doing that.

I'm not trying to get you to show you.

I'm not trying to get you to show me the

dirty underbelly of the making and pretty and big.

Here it comes.

No, but, you know, but I did have fun

because I had a great time hanging out with Annie Potts, and I had a great time with Jimmy Spader.

Please stop yelling at me.

Please stop calling me.

I had a great time.

You need to understand that fun was had.

At any rate.

You scandalous journalists trying to gotcha me

as I knew you'd try to do.

I thought you'd do it with the Charlie Sheen questions.

Instead, you're doing it with pretty interesting.

You're trashing poor Andrew McCarthy.

No, I will not trash Andrew McCarthy.

We're nipping that in the bust.

You're incapable of hate.

We've already established that.

Exactly.

So, what do you think your career is going to be as you enter this phase?

As you're

heading into Pretty and Pink, and what do your wildest dreams look like?

Oh, oh, at that point,

well, I had a good feeling about Pretty and Pink because Breakfast Club had since come out.

Breakfast Club came out just after I booked Pretty and Pink, and it was

an atom bomb in terms of teenagers in america uh and so i thought oh okay we're

this this could

happen to us too you know so so i had a good feeling about the the the thing resonating with people right away um

and then after that i you know my in my vision of my career was i i really wanted to do a million different things i didn't want to just be the funny sidekick i want you know uh uh i just wanted to find a bunch of characters that i really enjoyed

And I did that.

But interestingly,

I had a string of just bomb movies, just movies that, not in the good sense, they weren't debomb.

They just bombed.

And they were all incredible learning experiences.

And,

you know,

I

met a lot of wonderful people and learned a lot of wonderful things.

I mean, like, here's an example.

I did a movie called Dudes with Penelope Spheris.

She's a really iconoclastic director.

She directed all the decline of Western civilization documentaries.

And she had just done one of them when we did Dudes.

And it was a punk rock western.

So I was like, what the hell is this?

This is going to be fun and really interesting.

And it was, but the production was horribly troubled.

Just weather just ruined us for weeks.

And so we were always behind the eight ball.

And

the movie, you can really tell.

I mean, we had to recut whole huge chunks and we had to drop sequences and it was very frustrating.

But also, I was just learning how to be a leading man in that.

And

I,

you know, and like I said, it was

it was

It was a great way to make a lot of mistakes.

Unfortunately, the movie did not really work.

But like Penelope, the next thing she did was Wayne's World, you know, was this mega hit, you know?

So

I, you know,

just,

again, it's impossible for me to not feel gratitude because

I got to meet and see and learn from amazing people.

So you're able in the moment to treat those failures as learning with gratitude, or that's in retrospect?

You have to experience the pain.

You have to, you know, there is a mourning process that you have to go through because everybody had high hopes.

You don't get into a movie hoping that

it falls apart and doesn't work.

I mean, like Superman 4, you know,

I did the last Christopher Reeve Superman movie, and it's a mess.

You know, they ran out of money

before they even finished it.

So the movie doesn't even make rational sense in a lot of places.

And that makes me really sad.

And I did, I had to mourn it.

And it was a piece of my childhood because I had loved the original Superman the movie.

It had meant a great deal to me in terms of what movies were and what they could be.

And that I was a part of that was amazing.

But that I was a part of that that went down in flames, I did have to reckon with.

And

for a while, you know, I didn't, like, I didn't want to talk about it.

You know, people bring it up now and I enjoy talking about it.

But it did take me a while to mourn it.

And now I sort of, now that I understand all the background stuff that happened

behind the scenes,

you know, again, I just, I learn so much from it.

Do you know what it feels like?

Have you had the experience with whatever it is the perfect movie set is toward making a perfect movie in production so that things are humming along in whatever way they're supposed to hum along when an actor knows, as they very infrequently do, that they're in the middle of making a good movie.

I've not spoken to many actors who often know they're in the middle of a movie that for sure will be good.

That's tough.

I felt that way in Pretty and Pink.

I felt that way in Hot Shots, which was the first movie I did with Charlie Sheen.

But most of the time...

Those are hard to make.

Those sometimes you can't tell at all, That kind of movie,

whether they're going to string together all of the funny correctly.

Yeah, you're right.

It is to a certain extent.

That script was so terrifically

sustained in the humor.

I mean, it was so funny.

And, you know, as you were reading it, it was hilarious.

That we all did feel, who were working on it,

we had a great time every day.

And we did feel like, okay, the timing of this is great.

And then the and then the Gulf War broke out.

We were like, oh, okay, maybe the timing wasn't so great.

But it didn't stop the movie.

The movie ended up still being a huge hit.

But I,

you know,

those were like the closest to feeling like

this is going to work when we're on the set.

But like, I did a movie recently called Big Time Adolescence with Pete Davidson

and Sidney Sweeney and Machine Gun Kelly.

And it was a no-budget thing of a script that I liked, but it was a little kind of off-key coming-of-age thing.

And, you know, we shot it in Syracuse, New York, and

they didn't even have money for trailers.

I mean, literally, we would get dressed in,

they would rent out somebody's, you know, family room in their house, and we would get dressed and just, you know, wander over there.

And Pete was smoking enormous amounts of pot, and, you know, and then just commandeering a golf cart and driving around in Syracuse.

And

yet that one came out and was one of my favorite things I've ever done.

It's just this beautiful little perfect

teenage movie

that, you know, that's what I aspire to.

But again, while we were doing it, I had no idea.

You know, I'm just going to show up and do the best stuff I can do.

Well, speaking of having no idea, when you do the television show, who do you think you are to find out about your

life history, your family life history.

What do you learn?

Oh, oh my God.

Well,

I accepted the gig

because Lisa Kudreau literally,

she's a producer on it.

She literally just cornered me and was like, you should do the show.

And I'm like, okay, I'll do the show.

But if you've ever seen that show, you get great trips on that show.

They fly you amazing places.

And I was like hoping that it was like, this is going to be someplace great.

You know, Italy.

Let's go for Italy.

But I'm not Italian at all.

And the only thing they did let me know beforehand was that we were going to go to Scotland.

And I was like, oh, is my family,

is this sort of a brave heart situation?

Was my forefather a fierce warrior?

And they flew me to Scotland, and it turned out it was totally a braveheart situation.

My nine-times great-grandfather was an actual Scottish rebel.

He was captured.

He was sold to a company in the Massachusetts colony.

He was shipped as cargo from

England to Massachusetts.

And

the company, he worked for the company for several years.

The company went under, so he got freed from his indenture.

And he started as a farmer in Massachusetts.

And they went through my family, and we remained super duper Scottish, Scottish AF, as they say,

just very inbred

amongst these Scots that had come to the United States.

But it was,

they flew me to Scotland, then

they retraced his path from being captured

back

to England and and then

sending me across to Boston where he was brought to begin with and

took me to the place where he worked and where the company worked.

To understand

that kind of a journey

and realize that my family has been here before America, before the United States was

United States.

That warrior, though, would weep at what his descendant chose as a career.

He might.

But by the way, I did not say he was a good warrior.

He did not, he was captured.

He got captured very early on.

Apparently, in the particular battle,

it was very embarrassing because Oliver Cromwell sent the new model army after him, and they attacked at night, which apparently just wasn't done at the time.

You're just not supposed to do that.

And so he was taken totally by surprise and captured.

You were scared, okay, to say anything bad about Pretty and Pink behind the scenes.

And yet you take out one of your forefathers as a bad warrior.

He was a very good farmer.

He was a very good farmer.

It doesn't change that he would be ashamed of what you chose to do for a living.

Yeah, he probably would.

He probably would.

Was your mother, because she didn't exactly support you dropping out of college, right?

Did she?

I never went to college.

No, it was high school.

Okay.

Forgiveness.

I gave you extra education.

I knew that.

Nice try, mister.

But she wasn't supportive of that.

Or she wanted you to have a plan B, yes?

Yes, yes.

And I didn't actually have to end up dropping out of high school because I didn't actually get my first gig until like four weeks before high school ended.

So that ended up not being a problem.

But yeah, she was always, both my parents were

supportive.

They'd come up to the camp to see the shows I was in, stuff like that.

But I could tell they were, you know, that there was

a deep

concern because I was about to enter a business that was deeply unfair and could

really hurt.

It has devastated some people

if you don't

get the emotional equipment to handle

how ridiculous it is.

And how rejection feels.

Right.

Yeah.

Do you have that emotional equipment?

Like

you've developed it, right?

Yeah, I'm used to it.

I actually, interestingly,

in the last 20 or 20 years, I usually get offers instead of being asked to audition for things.

But I actually prefer to audition because I'd like to show them how this is going to be.

Because I've also had the experience of getting offered a part, taking it and showing up the first day, and realizing this is this may not be a perfect fit.

And

that's really scary.

So, I, you know, I don't,

you know, I, I, I,

you know, obviously there's things that I, I was like, oh, I wish that worked, you know.

Like a recent thing I auditioned for was Brian Cranston, they, when they did all the way, the LBJ

movie, um, uh, there was a part part in it that I really liked, and

I went in and I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I just didn't get it, you know.

And

that's what happens.

So, you know, you just have to

sort of,

you know,

I've been lucky enough that

one of the few good byproducts of having success early is you realize, okay,

I've been there.

I can achieve this.

It's possible.

So there is always that sort of

certainty that, you know, I did it.

I did it at one point.

I can probably do it again.

Helps, too, to have the knowledge that the business is unfair when you're starting because you come from a show business family.

You mentioned Lisa Kudreu.

You came close to getting Chandler in Friends?

No.

That's the thing,

is that it's interesting.

It's a fun story.

It's become this big narrative that I could have been Chandler.

Basically, unfortunately,

the reality of that narrative is I auditioned for Chandler, didn't get it.

That's boring.

That's not a fun narrative, but that is, in fact, what occurred.

But you don't know how close you were or weren't.

So I can make it close

to make my podcast more entertaining.

That makes it a lot more entertaining.

But you were just so you were right there, but you're just saying, no, it was just an audition.

I was thinking about it.

Are there any

extenuating circumstances to it, though, that give it that the reason that

it has a toe hold as a narrative was because I was in London when it happened.

I got literally in the middle of the night, Marta Kaufman called me.

I was doing a play there

and said, will you audition for this tomorrow morning?

I was like, it's 3 a.m.

here in London, just so you know, there's a time difference.

So she faxed me the pages, and the next morning I went in and read, and I don't don't think I was particularly good, but I did my best because I did love the pages.

And they sent the tape to the United States and it got stuck in customs.

So they never saw it before they made the thing.

However, but the reason is that a friend of mine,

one of my counselors from Summer Camp, ended up becoming a casting director for Warner Brothers.

And he was in on that whole process.

And he said, no, no, no, they wanted Matthew Perry very early on.

They had worked with him before on some other stuff.

And he's a flippant, he was a genius, you know.

So,

you know,

I would have had to been quite a dark horse to have gotten that.

Do you have an almost that stands out, like something that you were close to getting that ended up being that you really wanted, that was, that ended up being a big thing, and you either could have seen yourself in that, or you said, no, that person pretty much crushed it the way that they did it.

I have a fun story.

I was auditioning for

two movies at around the same time.

I was auditioning for No Small Affair,

which was

a movie that Columbia was doing.

And I auditioned for The Mask, a movie with Cher,

or no, not The Mask, Mask,

with Cher that was being directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

And I was a huge fan of Peter Bogdanovich, but I was very intimidated by him.

But he was.

God, that movie, you were young, oh, like Tracy.

Yeah, I was pretty young.

But, you know, it was about a kid.

You know, Mask is about a kid

with a very rare disease that deformed his face in particular.

And

I was auditioning both of those, for both of those, and they offered me no small affair.

one day and I was like, oh my God, I'm getting offered the lead in a big movie.

But Peter Bogdanovich's office was calling and saying, no, don't take it because we want you to meet Cher

for Mask.

And I was like, yeah, I got to take the bird in the hand here.

And Eric Stoltz ended up auditioning and getting it.

And Eric Stoltz is wonderful in that movie.

He's fantastic.

It's a great movie.

And it's a terrific movie.

I am sad because it's a terrific movie.

And No Small Affair is an okay movie.

But that's also a seminal role, right?

It's a very memorable role because there's never been anything like that before or since, really.

That is the biggest deformed star head character that there's been.

Elephant Man, arguably, but they're both terrific movies.

But they're both really, really good movies.

And

so that was the closest to a one-that-got away situation

because who knows if I'd met

Sherry.

Sorry, I'm still laughing at myself because of the eloquence involved with deformed headman character and your correction of the elephant man.

Take us to where it is you are in your life right before Two and a Half Men.

What is happening in your life then, and what do you think is going to become of your acting career?

Well, I had had

a spurt of successes.

I had had

Pretty and Pink, and I had done

a bunch of films after that, as I said, that were all troubled in various ways.

But then I did hotshots.

And so I was kind of, I was sort of back a little bit.

But then I started doing television, and I had two shows in a row that were on for a season and then canceled.

And that's actually worse than doing a pilot that nobody sees, that doesn't get picked up, because when you're on a show and

people see you and then they cancel it, the industry gets the perception that the public just didn't go for you, you know, and that happened to me twice.

So suddenly my career was stone cold after that.

That's silly, though.

You would expect more from leadership executives, producers.

They should know more than that about the industry they're in.

No,

everybody's guessing.

Everybody, you know, everything seems obvious in hindsight, you know.

But while you're making all these decisions,

everybody's looking for reasons to say no to things.

And that was their reason was, you know, he's, you know, he's gotten a couple of big shots and it didn't work.

And so things got very cold for me.

I remember there was a three-year stint where I only worked three weeks for the whole three years.

Are you agreeing with these people now?

He's cold.

Are you is doubt creeping in?

Is anything happening?

Yeah, doubt was creeping in and

yeah, and money was getting tight for the first time.

And I'd always made, I'd always way underspent my, you know,

because I got lucky early, I saved, you know, and I'd always, you know, live beneath my means.

But after a long time, you start running really low, you know.

And

oh, so you're wondering, is it over?

Or you're

thinking, I am not equipped for any other profession at this point.

So I wonder if this

will turn around.

Um, I still,

um, I still had a basic confidence in myself, and and I, I, I, I, I did a, uh, a weird thing, which was we used to have a thing called uh pilot season, which we don't even actually have anymore now that now that uh TV is so balkanized.

But there was a time when all of the shows were casting at once, and it was like a stampede for actors, and agents were nuts at this point because they were all trying to lock down their money for the next year, you know.

Um,

and uh, so

it's a crazy time for actors.

And I decided that instead of being picky about things, I was going to audition for everything.

Every part that I was vaguely right for.

I was going to audition because people don't, people have forgotten what I can do.

And so

I went out on everything.

And, you know, I was going to turn if the part was really wrong

or if I didn't like the script in the end, I'd say no.

But

what I ended up doing was I ended up getting nine offers that year, which is unheard of.

And I just kept turning them down because I knew I wasn't actually the right guy or the project just wasn't the right thing.

But you're also running out of money or not.

Money's getting low.

Or you're thinking about money in ways you haven't had to in a while.

Yeah, no,

I had

when my son was born,

I sprung for a very large house.

I bought Kathy Bates's house, as a matter of fact.

And

that, and I was starting to realize, okay, that was a mistake, and I'm going to have to, living here is not going to be a possibility.

So I was thinking, okay, I have the house to sell.

So, you know, I wasn't going to be destitute of

it.

But you're scared.

And

I was scared.

And that season,

it's one of the few times in show business where what I wanted wanted to do,

what I did intentionally, worked as I intended.

In that turning down on those things made people, just was like chum in the water, made people excited to see me.

And, you know, and so when I so in the last two shows of the season that we're casting were Two and a Half Men and Battlestar Galactica.

And I went on both of them and got

test offers on both of them the same day, and I had to choose one.

And because I'd worked with Chuck before, and I'd worked with Charlie before,

and Jim Burroughs was directing the pilot of Two and a Half Men,

I chose Two and a Half Men.

But by the way, I loved Battlestar Galactica.

I loved that show and would have felt incredibly lucky to be a part of that,

but was not meant to be for

whatever reason.

But that was one of the few times where, you know,

if I hadn't gotten it, I would have said, this was the dumbest, this is the dumbest tactic ever tried.

I should have taken four of those other jobs.

But in that particular case, it worked.

And I got the gig that was the right one.

It didn't work.

You expected it to be what?

Two and a half men?

Yes.

Well, what I loved about it was that the I enjoyed the script, but you know, it's the odd couple.

It's an odd couple script, but with a kid, you know.

So I thought,

in order to not be that,

it's really going to depend on what Charlie and I do.

And

after my first audition with Charlie,

I was like, oh, okay, this thing is going to kill.

This is really going to roll.

Yeah, but kill and be what it was, it still had to have exceeded your expectations.

Yes, it did.

By leaps and bounds.

Yeah, because I'd been on sitcoms that I thought were terrific in the past, but that just viewers didn't.

Number one for how long?

Oh, I don't know.

We only were number one for like two or three seasons only.

Only

because Everybody Loves Raymond was number one when we first started and it stayed that way for

two seasons behind Everybody Loves Raymond.

And then obviously,

it was easier for us

once they ended their run.

So you have huge chemistry with Charlie.

He's clean for how long?

Like, how many years are you guys working just effortlessly and well together?

He had been clean for two years when we started.

And he lasted another two years

before he and Denise split, and he clearly had started using again.

And those four years felt like the whole thing was humming, everything was going great.

You're on top of the world.

feels like success, enjoy going to work every day.

Yes.

Are you noticing when he's coming into work, oh, he's relapsed?

Like you.

No, no, he was at work.

He was really on top of it.

You know, when his marriage fell apart, obviously something was up and we were trying to, you know,

you know, marriages don't work sometimes.

And so I'm not going to say, oh, it's because

he's relapsed, you know, because I knew how important his sobriety was to him.

So I was hoping that wasn't it.

It took years before I realized, oh, he's using again,

because he was so functional at work.

He was really good at it.

And even up until the end, when it was getting, you know, when

he was acting out in public and getting arrested and all that stuff, it was still

on the set.

He was still

pretty much together.

I mean, the cracks were showing in the final season, but

he still performed when he needed to.

Were you mad at him?

Oh, sure.

Oh, sure.

The biggest, most compelling emotion is terror because I thought he was going to be dead.

We all did.

And that's what we were, you know, every day just waking up to.

And the second you open your phone, you're like, is this the day that I'm going to see that he's gone?

And by this time,

his dad had performed with us.

And, you know,

we were close with Brooke and

with everybody in his life,

with Ramon, his brother.

So

you perceive that it's not just your job

that's at stake.

It's this person, you know.

And

you feel so.

Friend, someone you care about, someone you love.

Yeah.

Terror.

Yeah.

So we were all really scared.

And yeah, there was some anger because

he was on top of the world.

The show

could have run way longer if he wanted to,

and he

was no reason for us

to stop

if he could keep it together.

But it was interesting because he would find things to be mad at in terms of the writing or stuff like that.

And

it was very frustrating because he acted like

he had no say in the writing and that the, you know, the

and the writers were incredibly differential to him.

All he had to do was say, hey, listen, this, you know, this feels kind of shallow.

I don't, this doesn't really make sense to me.

And they would have, you know, jumped over the moon for him.

But he just, he wouldn't say anything.

It was so weird because he complained to me backstage.

And then the second we were in rehearsal and we ran through the scene and it got laughs, he would just not say a word.

And I was like, but if you don't tell them,

they listen listen to you.

You're the star of the show, you know?

So it was very frustrating.

And

I didn't like, when he was starting to have his breakdowns, I didn't like the

attention that it was bringing to the show and to me.

Conversely, because all of a sudden, like the paparazzi were coming after me in the street, and I didn't like that at all.

So, you know, or like he'd go on the Alex Jones show and,

you know, talk about, you know, 9-11 was a setup or whatever.

And it's like, okay.

You know,

that was a fun argument in the makeup room.

But,

you know,

I'm really glad that

he really seems to have

turned over a new leaf.

And,

you know,

he's still chugging along.

Have you found healing and forgiveness from where your anger was?

Because you could, I mean, technically, you could have kept going for a really long time.

And I imagine once he left the show that you felt the weight of the loss in a way

that continuing it could have kept you still angry at him because you're doing a lesser version of the show that you wanted to be doing.

Yeah,

I

had some frustration, mostly with the sort of persona he adopted after the show, the Tigerblood persona.

I knew it was bullshit, and so hearing him just constantly spewing it was just like, shut up.

But

so,

you know,

so

at this point, I am, you know,

there's no point in maintaining anger about that kind of thing.

And I am happy that

he's doing well.

And he's reached out a couple of times.

I don't know that I'm comfortable

being a part of his life,

but I do wish him the best.

Oh, so you haven't, when he reaches out, you don't return the question?

I haven't as of yet.

You know, maybe the maybe there'll be a time when I'm cool with that.

I have failed to mention, by way of conclusion here, your new passion for the true crime podcast.

This is something that has consumed America.

All true crime podcasts, but yours is the man who calculated death.

Your involvement with this project means what to you, and why should people find it right now?

It's an amazing podcast.

It's one of the it it it's it's a true story that basically a friend of mine,

a friend of my wife's, actually, Suzanne Rico,

is a wonderful journalist.

She was an anchor person here on CBS News here in L.A.

And one day we were talking and she casually dropped that her grandfather was one of Hitler's most important scientists.

And I was like, I'm sorry,

you're going to have to back that one up, Suzanne.

Turns out, Suzanne's grandmother had been killed mysteriously in a bombing at the end of World War II.

And the family had always been sure that she was killed in revenge because her husband had created the V-1

buzz bomb, which was a transformative weapon in World War II.

Still, it's the first cruise missile.

It absolutely revolutionized warfare.

Her grandfather was a genius, but unfortunately, he was working for the Nazis, and he was a Nazi genius.

Just casually dropped that.

Just casually dropped that.

So Suzanne had been for the last few years,

her mother had passed away, and her mother had left an unfinished memoir.

So Suzanne had had, Suzanne's mother had asked her to finish it on her behalf.

So Suzanne had been researching her family, and she had all this on tape.

So she made it into an amazing podcast.

And so it's a little bit of true crime because she does solve the mystery of how it happened,

but it's just an amazing family history.

It's incredibly brave.

And

she made an amazing piece of work.

Your family's history could have been brave, but you said that your warrior

ancestor wasn't a good warrior.

That's going to be a different podcast.

That he was conquered, that no one knows if he actually knew how to fight in any way.

He may have been a coward.

John, thank you for the time.

I know that you have to leave.

Otherwise, I'd still be asking you questions.

Thank you for being with us.

The pleasure was mine.

Thank you.

It was mine.

It wasn't just yours.

No, it was mine.

I disagree.

I'm keeping the pleasure over here.

I've got just as much of the pleasure over here.

The pleasure.

I win again.

That's all that matters.

I am the pleasure king.

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