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George and Oscar
I wasn’t even supposed to be in the thing. I was originally what they call a day player on Arrested Development, who turned into a two-day player, then a three-day player, and then—voilà—into a regular recurring member of the cast.
I had known about the Bluths for some time. Mitch Hurwitz and I have been friends for years, and we hung out at the same Starbucks in Pacific Palisades (where coincidentally Maura Pfefferman would live some years later). The odd thing is, Mitch and I both had lovely homes where we had lovely, well-appointed, quiet offices, but somehow both he and I were drawn to the noisy confines of our local and hugely entitled coffee shop, he with his yellow legal pad and me with some script or other.
The first thing you notice about Mitch is that he has a big gorgeous face topped by a huge forehead. I quickly learned it has to be that big because he’s so fucking bright. I honestly think he has two brains. And when Mitch has a “lock” on a project and is engaged, his eyes get wonderfully frenzied and he has this beatific, winning smile on his face. When Mitchie is writing, he beams with confidence and creativity, and just a little sweat on that big forehead.
Mitch and I worked on a show he created many years before called Everything’s Relative, and Mitch wrote every episode himself. I played the dad character, and the magical Jill Clayburgh played my wife. It was a wonderful show coproduced by the mega-successful producing team of Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas, whose hits included the groundbreaking Soap, Benson, and The Golden Girls. I think everyone was a little surprised that, with all this firepower, the show lasted…wait for it…four episodes.
Mitch didn’t hold it against me, and a couple of years later I got to do a big-screen romantic comedy with Jill, Never Again, so it was all good.
Anyway, one morning at our local Starbucks, Mitch told me about this family called the Bluths. I remember being secretly envious that I would not be a part of this glorious family, not only because he didn’t offer it to me but also because I was under contract to CBS for a pilot that I had just shot, and I was waiting for it to be picked up or not. I was not excited about it; I believe I played a dentist, and dentists as a group are not intrinsically comic material. (Except for mine. Hi, Dr. Ford!)
CUT TO: In early 2003, I was getting off a plane in Los Angeles from Prague, where I had been shooting Hellboy with director Guillermo del Toro. They give you another phone when you’re in Europe, so I hadn’t used my normal phone while I was away. There was a slew of messages waiting for me, but one stood out: “Hi, it’s Mitchie. Listen, pal, I’m wondering if you can come by. I’d love for you to do this thing for me.”
He was about to shoot the pilot about the very Bluth family we had discussed months before, and he wanted me to play George Bluth Sr. The character was intended to be in the pilot only, so I’d only be needed for a couple of days. Obviously, I said yes.
There’s a wonderful thing that happens when you know you’re a day player. I think everyone should go to work every day thinking they’re a day player. You know that at the end of the day, you can go on to the next job or you can go on safari. There’s a certain liberation to that. I was free as a bird. Also, the pilot was written by Mitch, and George Sr. was arguably one of the funniest characters ever dreamed up.
My very first scene was George Sr.’s retirement party on the boat. The first thing I had to do was welcome everybody and announce George’s successor as CEO of the Bluth Company. I was wearing sunglasses and a Stetson, and Jason Bateman was standing right in front of me. There was a band, and the drummer kept drumming when the director yelled, “Action!” He wouldn’t stop, so I yelled, “Hey, hey, fuckhead!” (This was not part of the scene, in case you’re looking for it on Netflix.) I looked over at Jason’s face. He was beaming.
That day, I met all the actors who played the Bluth children: Jason, Tony Hale, Portia de Rossi, and Will Arnett, and the son-in-law played by David Cross. Will is one of the funniest and most droll human beings ever created. Portia was extremely nice, and she was very touchy-feely with me, and I thought, Oh my gosh. She’s coming on to me.
(I’ll pause while you laugh.)
Men are idiots. They are a lower species. I thought she was all over me. I have never admitted this before now, not even to Portia. Hi, Portia! (Hi, Ellen!)
Here’s the really embarrassing part. This wasn’t the first time this happened to me. Back in the mid-’80s, I did an episode of The Twilight Zone with Helen Mirren, one of our greatest actresses and one of our greatest human beings. In one scene, we were to kiss. When the director yelled, “Action!” we kissed. And oh, what a kiss. It was very passionate. “Cut!” I walked over to my chair in a state. This is horrible. What are we going to say to Taylor Hackford? Helen is obviously in love with me. This is going to be so difficult. What am I going to do? It made no impression on me that Helen was sitting next to me as we were waiting to resume shooting and didn’t speak to me. Thirty minutes—not one word. When we set up the next shot—and “Action!”—she kissed me again. Do we talk to somebody?
Finally it hit me. Oh my God, she’s acting.
Again, lower species. Hi, Helen.
Anyway, back on the boat, I remember looking out and seeing David Cross as Lindsay’s husband, Tobias, wearing one of her frilly blouses for his pirate costume on a neighboring boat filled with gay men staging a protest about gay marriage at sea. It was so out of left field, I thought, Whatever this is, I need to be a part of it.
I went over to David Nevins—who is now the head of Showtime but he was with Ron Howard’s production company, Imagine Entertainment, then—and told him how much I loved the show. I got a sense that there was some murmuring backstage about my continuing in my role, but I was still waiting to hear about the non-hilarious-dentist show.
In the meantime, I returned to Prague to shoot the rest of Hellboy.
Late one night in my hotel room, my cell phone rang. It was my agent, Leslie Siebert at Gersh, calling to tell me two things:
“Your series did not get picked up.”
“Yes!” I shouted.
“Arrested wants you.”
“Yes!” I shouted even louder.
“How many do you want to do?”
“How many are they doing?”
“Thirteen.”
“I want to do thirteen!” I may have screamed.
So we made a deal. (I found out later that an executive at Fox said, “This moves forward with Jeffrey and David Cross,” who had also been hired just for the pilot.) My first year on that show consisted of driving over to the Fox movie studios, taking off my street clothes, putting on an orange jumpsuit, and filming. During the second episode, I was doing a prison scene in my jumpsuit and I’d added a black do-rag. “I love it here!” I said, shaking hands with a prisoner passing by. I looked over at Jason. Jason is like my son. I love Jason. I think there’s something up with Jason. We were doing the scene, and I couldn’t shake it: he was staring at my forehead during the entire scene. He has some sort of affliction. With every take, he did the same thing. What is going on?
He later confessed to me that it was the only way he could stop himself from laughing at George Sr.’s antics. We were bonded for life.
It was such a funny, edgy show. Just as Garry Shandling had given the audience credit, so too did Mitch. Arrested wasn’t just funny, it was smart. When David’s character was a Blue Man, he walked through the house in one scene, and then in a later scene you’d see a little smudge of blue on the wall where he’d been earlier. It was the kind of touch that made people hit Rewind.
And George Sr.? Well, they just don’t come more Darwinian. He would do anything—anything—to survive, even making himself look like Saddam Hussein and burying himself in the ground. I remember people on the film crew stifling their laughter as they lowered me into the ground and poured dirt over me, and I was giggling beneath the sand. I mean, who gets a job like this? Who gets to play catch with his son (Will) in a prison yard, both of us dressed in orange jumpsuits? Who gets to burn himself on a cornballer while doing a commercial? Or do a “chicken dance” joined by the whole family to humiliate his son? Or dress up as a Blue Man like his son-in-law to escape detection? (I was picking blue things from mysterious places in my body for weeks after shooting that scene.)
And who gets to do work like this twice in a lifetime? First The Larry Sanders Show, then Arrested Development? Just one of those would have been, as my grandpa would have said, dayenu.
Arrested turned into an embarrassment of riches when Oscar Bluth was born. Now I had two characters on the show. And Oscar was a testament to the creative genius of Mitch and the writing staff.
When we did flashback scenes to George’s hirsute younger days, I had to wear a wig. The makeup department had bought a cheap Darnell wig for me that a balding homeless person would have thrown away, so I insisted on a better one. They had a good one woven especially for the show. Here’s the thing with wigs, in case you’ve never had one: they don’t cut them. So the new wig went down to my shoulders. The makeup trailer was right next to the writers’ building, so when I tried it on, I stepped outside the trailer and looked up to the fourth floor balcony where Mitch was looking down at me. We asked him what length he wanted to cut it.
“Hold on a second,” he said, and called the writers out. There must have been fifteen of them all looking down at me.
As Mitch turned to go back to his office, he yelled down, “Don’t cut it,” and that was when George’s brother, Oscar Bluth, was born. George didn’t have a twin brother until that moment. That was the kind of electric spontaneity that show had, where the script could change on a dime. It was very freeing.
That’s not to say that the writing was easy. Every once in a while I’d wander over from the soundstage to the writers’ building to chat with Mitch or just grab a cup of coffee. I once saw Mitch and Jim Vallely, a dear friend of mine and a trusted compatriot of Mitch’s, in Mitch’s office where they were “breaking” a story. Mitch was lying on the couch, his right arm behind his head. Jim was standing over him with pencil and paper. Their discussion was very quiet and intense, and I realized that what seemed to flow so effortlessly from them was actually like a birth. There was enormous concentration in what they were doing. It was a total revelation to me.
Often people asked me, “You just made that up on the fly, right?” It was actually a very tightly scripted show, with little ad-libbing. The only time I remember doing it, in fact, was on that first day of shooting, before I knew I’d be a member of the cast. Mitch had this idea that I should get on the phone with my secretary as the SEC Boats approach to arrest George Sr. The call wasn’t in the script, so I just said to dead air, “Burn it, save it, burn it, save it. Why are you crying?” As a result of that call, the character of George Sr.’s secretary, Kitty Sanchez (played by Judy Greer), was born.
With great wisdom comes great silliness, and Mitch wasn’t afraid to be completely silly. The character Bob Loblaw? Bob Blah blah? Give me a break, that’s genius.
The one thing that was challenging for the cast was the timing of the script delivery each week. This was back in the days when scripts would be delivered to actors’ houses, cars leaving various production offices to drive all over Hollywood in the middle of the night so that the script would be in your mailbox or by your door when you woke up. Normally, you’d have a script at least a day or two before filming, maybe even a week. Mitch was writing right up to the last minute, so we usually didn’t get the scripts until the morning of shooting, which meant you prayed your scene wasn’t first up that day so you had a few hours to learn your lines. For some reason, I think it was Portia who usually led off. My Portia.
It was searingly intense making a show like this. The creation of something so wonderfully funny is very serious work, and we all took it very seriously. If you didn’t, woe unto you.
One week, my regular makeup person was out, and I had a substitute. After each shot, the makeup people would come over and touch you up. When the sub came over to me after the first “Cut,” she made that sad trombone sound wah-wah-wah. (Think Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer character on SNL.)
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, you know, that’s the end of the scene,” she said.
“You can never make that sound to me again,” I said. “Ever.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“This is hard,” I said.
We did another scene—“Cut!”—she came over to pat me down. “Wah-wah-wah.”
Clearly, not a lot of support here.
“Why? Why are you doing this?”
Another scene, another scene, she kept doing it.
“You have to go,” I finally said. I couldn’t have someone who didn’t get it.
Silly is not for the timid. Think: Steve Allen, David Letterman, Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, Gilda Radner, Richard Pryor, Ernie Kovacs, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer—and you get where I’m going. Silly is an exalted line that goes all the way back to Aristophanes, and it’s to be respected and it needs support. As Grandpa would say, “It’s not for pishers.”
The show was so strong, such a trailblazer, but the audience numbers didn’t reflect how popular the show really was, so we went the way of all television shows and were canceled after three seasons. Until we came back for Season Four—years later. Thanks to the genius of Mitch Hurwitz, I may well be playing George and Oscar Bluth until I’m dead. Or maybe after. Well, certainly after. I mean, streaming is eternal, right?