Christian Bale’s brooding, growling Dark Knight set box office records this summer and Kevin Conroy’s voice work as Batman is beloved by animation fans, but tonight a new man dons the cape and cowl – Diedrich Bader.

Bader, known for his work on The Drew Carey Show, Office Space and Napoleon Dynamite, voices Batman in an all-new Cartoon Network show, Batman: The Brave and The Bold. Based on the popular comic book series, The Brave and The Bold teams Batman up with a variety of other superheroes to battle common foes.

We recently talked to Bader about becoming Batman, learning from Scott Bakula and hearing fans shout “two chicks at the same time.”

You are originally from Alexandria, VA, but moved to France when you were two. That’s obviously quite a unique experience, what was it like growing up in France?

It’s actually probably what made me an actor, the kind of alienation that I felt from moving from an English-speaking country to a French-speaking country. It was confusing because I had basically just learned English, then all of the sudden I was dropped into a totally different language.

That actually really helped me be an actor because I started fixating on movies. I really wanted to go to the movies all of the time and so I started loving silent movies because then there wasn’t this language problem and I really became enamored of the great silence, including Harpo Marx, who was one of my favorites.

How long were you in France?

About four years. A little more than four years.

Where do you call home now?

I live in Los Angeles; Hancock Park.

You mentioned that your experience in France and love of movies helped make you an actor, but when exactly did you decide this is what you wanted to do for a living?

When I was four. When I was four I decided I wanted to be an actor. Before that, I wanted to be a spider monkey.

You know what’s really cool about that? I’m actually a guest star on Ben 10. I just did the ADR session for it yesterday, where I play a spider monkey. So it’s kind of come full circle.

So was being a spider monkey everything you hoped it would be?

It was. Even better.

When did you actually pursue acting as a career? You weren’t going out on auditions at four, were you?

No, I didn’t want to be a pro until, actually I was hoping to go all the way through art school and then start my professional career. I didn’t want to do it in high school at the local stages or anything like that, even though I had some drama teachers that wanted me to do it, but I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to have as normal a childhood as I possibly could.

I started actually when I was 20 because I met a casting director at a dinner party in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was there on vacation with my parents. The next thing I knew I was cast in a pilot riding a horse and dressed like a cowboy. It was actually really cool.

That sounds like it would be a good first gig.

Oh, it was fantastic. I got to dress like a cowboy and decide how I’m gonna wear my guns.

How did you wear your guns?

I had two guns and I did the cross-draw.

That’s a classic look.

So once you made the decision to pursue acting, did you work fairly steadily early on?

You know, I always think that I’m not working very much, but if I look back on it there are these what I consider enormous spans of like three or four weeks where I’m not actually working. When I first got here, after I got this pilot, I moved back to North Carolina and I tried to go back to the School of the Arts and I just couldn’t hack it. So I moved out to Los Angeles and I had a really dry period of about five weeks where I showed up and the people who did the pilot I had done before had another pilot. They gave me a call and I went in and I got it.

After that, I just started working. I’ve been very, very lucky. One of the nice things is to have a second career, really, although it’s kind of part and parcel, is animation because when I’m not working on camera, I’m working on animation. It’s really fun.

Now that I’ve kind of intentionally scaled down my on-camera work, the animation has been a nice supplement for me to be able to continue to act. As I say to my kids, it’s more than what I do, it’s who I am. I am an actor. It would be difficult for me not to do it. But I have to pick how I’m going to do it in order to also do another thing that I am, a dad.

Early on in your career, you had small roles in shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Quantum Leap, Cheers and Fraiser. More recently, you’ve had guest roles on shows like Reno 911, Monk and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Are these guest roles a way to keep working or do you enjoy being a journeyman actor?

I like going on to somebody else’s set and I love not being the star. First of all, let me say that because being the star is way too much work. But I love going in and seeing people’s sets and what their vibe is and I just love being a guest. I love the craft service table. I love a whole new crew to get to know and to see how everybody else works. Every set is different. I learn so much from being on different sets. Every day that I work, I learn.

Are the other actors usually pretty accommodating to you when you come in for a guest role?

For the most part. There are some sets that are really horribly dysfunctional. But there are others that are just really well-oiled machines and there are others that are just incredibly pleasant to work on.

I think the most pleasant set I was on was Scott Bakula’s show, Quantum Leap. I mean, this was a long time ago but that was just a really, really functional set. Everybody was really happy, Scott was a great lead. He was just a really nice guy and he kept everything really positive. It was fun.

Scott Bakula always seemed like a really nice guy. It’s good to hear that he lives up to it in real life.

Oh my god, what a mensch. And you know, I actually learned a lot from him being on that show. Every morning that he came in, when he was first called in, he would shake the hands of every single crew member and say their name. I learned a lot from that. It was something that I always tried to do on The Drew Carey Show, just to say good morning to everybody and to welcome the guest cast to the show. It’s also what I’m trying to do on Batman, too.

It’s more than just coming in and doing your job. If you are going to be a regular on a show, you have to welcome people and you have to respect everyone in the crew. It’s something that you don’t naturally think of – even if you are a pleasant person, you don’t naturally think of saying hello to literally everyone. But it’s something that should be done. It creates a great environment.

Of course, in 1995 you became part of The Drew Carey Show, playing Oswald. What was it like being a part of that show for such a long time and what was it like to see it come to an end in 2004?

It was sad when it ended. You know, we had a really good time together. I think that was pretty evident on camera. What was interesting too about the executive producer of that show was that he would keep takes where we were obviously laughing out of character at each other. We really made each other laugh and we hung out a lot together. We went on vacations together. It was an amazing close cast. So it was tough for us when it first broke up. It still is actually. I miss the show. I particularly miss working with Ryan Stiles, who is just such a genius and so pleasant to work with.

Do you still keep in touch with the people from the show?

Yeah, from time to time. Mostly I hang out with Kathy Kinney. Ryan moved just outside of Seattle at this beautiful place, actually, but you know it’s a haul. He comes into town to do some work on Two and a Half Men and we see each other then.

Many people know you from your role as Lawrence in Office Space. What was it like being a part of that film and how often do people come up to you quoting your “two chicks at the same time” line?

I get it at least once a week. It’s crazy.

Do you still enjoy hearing it?

I think it’s hilarious. It’s fantastic. Fans are great. I don’t understand why anybody has any problem with it. Besides, if there is a line that you don’t want to say or can’t live with, don’t take the part. Nobody’s forcing you to.

So I’m delighted to be a part of Office Space and the fact that it’s had this incredibly long life afterwards is just amazing.

Are you surprised by that? Did you think it would be a hit at the time or did you have no idea?

I didn’t know if it was going to be a hit at the time. It’s just when I read the script, I really wanted to be a part of it. Just like Napoleon Dynamite, I didn’t know. You never know. You just have to go with what you really want to be a part of and what’s going to be really exciting and fun for you.

The mistakes I have made are when I’ve done larger studio pictures that I thought would make money. So what I’ve learned over the career is do the stuff that you really want to do.

You mentioned Napoleon Dynamite, we would imagine you get quite a few quotes thrown at you from that movie as well.

Especially from kids between eight and 16. For them, they’ve seen it like a million times. The time that I knew Napoleon was going to be a hit, I was actually in a voiceover session and there was a kid that was a regular on this little kid show that I used to do. He recognized me as Rex Kwan Do and knew every single line. And it was in the theaters. So I realized he had seen it that many times and I thought to myself, “Oh my goodness, this is going to be a hit.”

You’ve been a part of Batman Beyond, The Zeta Project, The Batman and now you have the lead role in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. What is it like to finally get to take the lead and be Batman?

It was a big buildup to finally be the Batman. It ended up really working perfectly for me because this is a very different take on Batman. It’s not The Batman where it’s very dark or Kevin Conroy’s, which was really fabulous too. This is Batman with a sense of humor. Now, it’s dry and wry and ironic, but it’s got comedy in it that is genuinely funny, not really dark. The guest stars are generally comedic guest stars like Tom Kenny plays Plastic Man and John DiMaggio is on there as Aquaman. Guys that are really genuinely funny.

It’s not a comedy show; it’s an action show, but it’s an action show with genuine laughs in it. That’s kind of what’s exciting about it. And it’s also the colors are so saturated and the animation is so fluid. Any real fan of animation I think will really dig it because it’s totally 2D. We’re not trying for any kind of digital look at all.

It’s certainly a unique look to the show – one that is quite different from the look of shows like Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond.

It’s a throwback to the comic book that it’s based on. I think it’s really cool. I think people are ready for a new style of animation, especially when it concerns Batman. Also, for real fans – we get paired up every week with a different hero and also too different bad guys. It’s going to be fun for real fans because it’s going to go deep into the DC lexicon and find characters that we haven’t seen for a really long time. So if you are a real fan of the true Batman, it’s beyond the rogues’ gallery. It’s really diving into the depths of characters that we can find.

You mentioned Kevin Conroy who is very well known and highly regarded for being the voice of Batman in a number of animated shows. And, of course, in The Dark Knight, Christian Bale has taken some flack for his growling, angry Batman voice. Did you play around with different voices and styles to find the voice of Batman in The Brave and The Bold?

What I did was when Batman talks as Batman, he has the Batman voice, so he has the growl which is kind of the classic Batman established by Keaton and then carried on by Conroy. But when he speaks in voiceover, I figured that’s actually Bruce Wayne, so that’s the difference. Batman is really kind of a character that Bruce Wayne plays in order for him to maintain his identity.

Will we ever see him as Bruce Wayne in the show?

There’s no Bruce Wayne. He’s always Batman. That was established with the comic book The Brave and The Bold.

For people who are unfamiliar with the comic book it’s based on, what else can they expect from the show?

As I said, you’re going to find bad guys that you haven’t seen before unless you are a real comic book fan or you have the DC Encyclopedia. One of the nice things about it, because they pair up each week with a different superhero, these guys because they have to work as partners, it’s like a big brother relationship or two brothers. It’s kind of a fractious relationship where they get to find each other’s strengths and weaknesses and compliment each other and sort of learn about each other and about themselves.

That’s the nice arc about it – without an overriding moral to it, there is an overriding moral to it. It’s not encapsulated at the end, where he says, “Well, the moral this week is …” I think it’s really nice writing in that it has a theme every episode, so that’s kind of fun. I think people will really like it and one of the nice things about it is you can watch it with your kids, so it kind of broadens the demographic away from the darkness of The Dark Knight and back towards the original Batman.

Obviously you can’t give too much away, but what other superheroes can we expect to see Batman teaming up with?

Well, you saw Blue Beetle. There’s going to be Plastic Man and Aquaman and Red Tornado and Green Lantern and those are just the bigger guys. There are also much more obscure guys that you’re going to have to tune in every week. There are guys that you haven’t seen and who haven’t been actually even in comic books since the 60s. So for real true fans of comic books, it’s going to be a thrill. I can tell you that when we were at Comic-Con and we showed some of the more obscure characters that we’re dusting off, people were literally screaming.

That’s good to be pretty cool.

It was really fun. What a thrill it was. And that was actually the first time that I saw the animation too and our animation style is so different. It’s such a quantum leap from the other Batman and from anything else on really. It’s really hard to describe, but it has a little of the anime feel to it too. I think it’s really cool.

That’s one of the things about voiceover is that you don’t really know how it’s going to look at the end. So when you finally see the final product and you like it, it’s fantastic.

You mentioned that one of the superheroes Batman will be teaming up with is Aquaman. It has always seemed like comic book fans don’t really like Aquaman, like he’s almost the black sheep of the DC Comics Universe.

He’s had a rough ride, Aquaman. It’s true. We totally remedy that. First of all, he’s voiced by John DiMaggio, who is a real character and just a great voiceover actor. He brings a theatricality to Aquaman and it’s kind of a different take on Aquaman than I certainly have ever seen before. He’s got a really deep and rich character – a guy who loves to tell the story of himself. He’s a great dramatist and likes to title his own adventures. It’s a really fun take on him. With that kind of character contrasted by Batman’s dry and ironic wit makes some really fun episodes.

What is the process like recording your lines for Batman? Do all of the actors record their lines together at the same time or are you alone in a sound booth?

At Disney they tend to do that, but at Warner Bros., especially with Andrea Romano who is the casting director and also the dialogue director on Batman: The Brave and The Bold, she does a thing which most people don’t do, which is she does it like a radio play and we all sit down and rehearse it together so that you get the tone of the show.

Because this is Batman, it’s primarily an action-adventure show, but has a sense of humor that could be interpreted as being broad, it’s good for everybody to be together and hear overall what the tone is and talk about it before we actually start recording it.

And when we record it, we record it as a radio play, so we’re all kind of together and we go through it. We do it act by act, then they listen to the act and see what pickup we need to do and do whatever line they feel missed the boat and we go all the way through like that. It’s really fun.

It seems like that would make a difference in the work.

It really does, literally because you have to listen to the other actor. It’s funny, real fans of animation are going to be kind of surprised by the people we’ve pulled in from on-camera work. I can’t tell you any of them unfortunately, but it’s going to be fun for them to see who we ended up getting.

But it was always interesting to have a lot of people that did on-camera work come into the studio. Because we’re all together and reading it as a play, a lot of on-camera actors think that we’re really acting together and so they want to look at you and they always end up getting off microphone. So it’s really difficult to record a guy who is used to doing on-camera work because they really want it to happen in the room. And it can happen in the room, but you have to imagine in your head all of the different characters and keep your mouth on microphone. So it was always interesting to work with two different groups. The voiceover world, especially in series animation, there’s not a lot of bleed over between them.

Do you get to improvise at all when recording your lines?

I did right at the beginning because there wasn’t quite a consistent voice. Then the writers really listened - the show takes off and they write towards you, you don’t have to do it anymore. But Tom Kenny came on and had complete free reign. His Plastic Man is hilarious. He improvised all over the place and they took almost all of it. He had a lot of room.

Is there a different set of challenges for you doing the voiceover work and on-screen acting? Do you approach the two differently?

Oh yeah, you have to approach them differently. Definitely. You make choices in animation that you wouldn’t be able to make in on-camera work because you would just be too broad. But if you were to act the same way as an on-camera actor in voiceover, it just wouldn’t be enough stuff. Because it’s animation and because the suspension of disbelief is so enormous that literally a cartoon character you’re supposed to imbue with an actual life, you have to put more kind of vim into it. So you would have line readings that you would do for animation that is as I said much broader than you would do on camera.

Are you someone who watches your own work when it airs or do you tend to avoid it?

I’ll watch the animation. It’s fun.

So you won’t watch your live action work?

Not very much.

I watch playback on the set. Sometimes they’ll have a video machine hooked up to the camera as sort of a directorial tool to watch what just happened and see if you have all of the takes you need. So on the set I’ll watch and make sure that my eyeline is fine and that it’s working. I find that I learn a lot from watching playback. And then I get to go do another take based on what I just learned. So I’m always interested in that.

But when it finally all cuts together, I don’t tend to watch it that much. I’ve kind of already learned and sort of moved on. I don’t look anything like the young Sean Connery and I’m always disappointed.

We would imagine it’s a little surreal to see yourself as a cartoon Batman.

It’s totally cool. It’s really cool. The most surreal voiceover was The Country Bears. I did a voice for one of the bears in The Country Bears movie a while ago, which is a kids’ movie. To see my voice in a bear was actually the most surreal.

Are you focusing mostly on children’s shows these days?

Yeah, I’m doing mostly off-camera voiceover work right now because my kids are very little and this is a very precious time, so I’m kind of focusing on that – stuff that would be fun for them to watch so that they understand why I have to work when I do. And as they grow, I’ll do older and older stuff.

Are they into it? Do they think it’s cool that dad is Batman?

I have a five-year-old boy, so what do you think? He’s in heaven. I brought home the action figure of my Batman, which isn’t going to be released by Mattel for a while. So really, he’s the first little boy in North America to get this toy and I thought the heavens had opened. His face took on this expression of pure angelicism. He was so happy in that one moment; it was just incredible. So yeah, he’s excited about it. And every time the preview comes up for Batman, he jumps up and down. He’s really pumped.

Tell us something most people don’t know about you.

You know, I don’t know. I haven’t really done my research on the net and I’ve always kind of been an open book. I think if there’s one thing I want people to know about me, it’s that I really love what I do and I really love getting a positive response from people. There are a lot of actors who don’t like fans and I absolutely adore them. So that’s something I want people to know about me.

What would you be doing for a living if you never got into acting?

As I said, before I wanted to be an actor, I wanted to be a spider monkey, so I would imagine I’d be some sort of spider monkey or a three-toed sloth. That’s really closer to who I really am, so maybe that.

What does the future hold for you?

Hopefully Batman will get picked up and I get to continue to be Batman. That would be a great thing for me. I would really enjoy that. More animation work and just plodding along, doing my actor thing and in a couple of years trying to get back into the on-camera world.

Has Cartoon Network given you any indication on whether or not the show will be picked up?

As far as I know, Cartoon Network is really excited about the show and I know Mattel is really excited about the line of toys. They’re really cool. I got a good look at all of the new stuff that they’re putting out and they’re really fun action figures. I know my kid, he loves collecting action figures, so for him, having a brand new line of Batman – everybody’s being re-imagined – Plastic Man and Aquaman and all of those guys, Blue Beetle. So it’s going to be a really fun line.

The show is really strong. What’s really cool about it is that in the beginning we were close to where we wanted to be. That’s the great thing about series and the kind of pointless thing about pilots. A pilot is the first episode of a prospective series, I don’t know if your readership knows this or not.

Anyway, in a pilot, you never really know what the show is. In this show too, we really developed. We had such an arc. It’s funny now doing the voiceover pickup work for various lines from Batman and hearing the Batman that I was doing at the very beginning because it’s so different and it’s grown so much and it’s really interesting to hear where it is now. Now we’re in such a good comfort zone that I really hope we get picked up because this year will be really strong and next year will be even stronger. I’m excited about it.

Interviewed by Joel Murphy. Batman: The Brave and The Bold airs tonight at 8 p.m. on The Cartoon Network.

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The economy is in dire straights, the war in Iraq seems endless and American cities continue to get hit by natural disasters. Let’s face it, the news isn’t very easy to digest these days. That’s why it helps to have a broadcaster who can offer you a spoonful of sugar to help the awful news go down - someone like Buzz Burbank.

We recently had a chance to catch up with Burbank, a veteran broadcaster who became well-known for his role on the nationally syndicated Don and Mike Show and is now an integral part of the Mike O’Meara Show.

You are originally from Wichita, Kansas, but you have spent quite a lot of time in the D.C./Virginia area. Do you call Virginia home?

Well, having been here almost 17 years now, sure it’s absolutely home. And I do like it here. I like it very, very much. It’s been good to me.

How exactly did you get into broadcasting, and when did you decide this is what you wanted to do for a living?

I think I probably knew it as soon as I was old enough to sit upright in front of a television set and studied it and tried to figure out how they do things and just became fascinated with the medium of television, as well as radio, which was obviously a lot different then. But I liked both and I was fascinated by both and at a very young age felt I had a basic understanding of them.

Once you made the decision, how tough was it to break into the business?

They always needed help at the local college radio station, especially during the summer. Just being out of high school and being interested in that, I went there one day to hang out with a friend of mine who was doing a DJ show there and it was almost time for the news and the newsman hadn’t shown up yet. So I thought, “It will be a favor to this poor character, whoever’s overslept, if I begin organizing and collating the news stories for him or her” and so I began putting together a newscast. And it came close to airtime and still no one showed up to do the news, so I did it.

Upon completion of the newscast, the program director of this college radio station appeared at the door and said, “Who are you?” And so I started doing that and eventually was fortunate enough to get hired at the Top 40 radio station I grew up listening to, that all my friends listened to. So that was kind of a big deal and I was again fortunate enough to do well there.

Was it pretty smooth sailing from there?

Yeah, mostly. The hardest part of my career would be being unemployed for seven months in Chicago. Now, bear in mind that I had an incredibly lucky career up to that point. I guess that’s sort of obvious from starting out in Wichita and, as we did then at least, working our way up in market size. I was very pleased and proud to be there. But then, after a good, long nine-year run in Chicago, it was apparent that it was over. So I was unemployed for seven months. That was very hard.

Now, compared to other careers, other guys have been unemployed more than that, but for them maybe in smaller chunks. Seven months will eat on you and make you begin to ask yourself, “Should I even be doing this?”

Did you ever seriously consider giving it up?

Well, not because I wanted to, but it became a point where somehow I was going to have to put food on my table, so yeah I considered careers at Radio Shack and all of those other things one might do if one couldn’t get a job in radio, I guess.

Radio Shack still had “radio” in the name at least.

Yes, exactly. I really, because I’ve been kind of a gadget freak, I already knew where everything was anyway. I’ve been offered a job more than once at a Radio Shack. I’m proud of that. I have that to hang my hat on.

What turned it around for you in Chicago? What ended your seven-month drought?

It’s funny because again my career has been being a news guy basically. But toward the end in Chicago, I co-hosted a morning show. So I got a little taste of what that was like and it was a sort of learn while you earn and it could have been more successful obviously than it was. Anyway, I was soon enough out of there.

So I sent out audition tapes, both as a newsman and as a DJ. I had ads for each career and I had tapes for each career. Depending on who responded to the ad would determine which tape I sent them. I ended up doing a morning show in Albany, up against Todd Pettengill, who now of course works with [Scott] Shannon, or did anyway.

That’s how I was rescued from that seven month abyss was I got a DJ show for a year or so at a station in Albany. That got me by. That station was ultimately taken over by the bank, which was ultimately taken over by the FDIC, so it was my first federal job as a DJ. And that quickly folded. That was about the time I called Don Geronimo and said, “Help!” And he said, “Well, we just started a new show at WJFK, let’s share the wealth. Come on down.” One thing lead to another and that’s of course kind of a funny story in itself, but that’s how I ended up here.

How did you meet Don Geronimo and when did you two begin working together?

I love this story and I’m proud to tell this. I worked with a revolving door of DJs in Chicago, whereupon I learned the most talented ones were insane. But I worked with some great ones, I worked with some big names who were maybe were past their prime, like Dick Biondi. Dick Biondi was past his prime, but was brought back because he was a name in Chicago and elsewhere, but recognized in Chicago. They thought that would help the station. It didn’t particularly because he didn’t fit the contemporary format.

But one of those revolving door DJs was Don Geronimo, who was far and away the fastest, best, most talented disc jockey I’d ever heard, much less worked with. The thing that made me fall in love with Don was a very Letterman-esque thing that he said because it was irreverent at a time when radio stations insisted on every word out of your mouth being positive. He said over the intro of a record: “All the same songs, just in a different order - that’s the secret to our success.”

That cracked me up. I just thought it was the best thing I ever heard a DJ say and he had many more like it and it was an attitude about him. It was just terrific; just great. He was inspiring to work with - just so fast and tight and funny and sharp and the most professional DJ I’d ever seen.

I was lucky enough to work with him for a little over a year. We worked for, in my estimation, a rather difficult program director. Don was soon out of there. They put out the usual memo saying he’s not to be let back into the building and while all that was going on, I was busy running all of his drop-ins, all of his tapes - many of the ones he used towards the end of that part of his career were rescued by me from B96 WBBM-FM in Chicago, a CBS station, and run off on the large reels which I later gave him so that he still had tapes that might have otherwise been lost.

So what is it like for you now to look back on those days - the pre-Don and Mike phase of your career?

Hmmm, when I got into it; it was sort of at the tail end of Boss Radio in the very early 1970s when I really started in commercial radio. First newscast I ever did, I did it my way; I was me. I just do what I do. The DJ tapped on the glass or hit the intercom and said, “What’s your middle initial?” I said “J.” I was going by Mike Elston at the time, which is of course my name. And he said, “Start using it. From now on, be Michael J. Elston.” For the longest time I was Michael J. Elston. That’s sort of one era of radio - my first radio job at KLEO in Wichita. Best program director ever, by the way, for a small market, Gary Mack, who today is the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the Dealy Plaza in Dallas. That was always a passion, an interest of his.

Second job in radio was at WNOE in New Orleans and that was an amazing place. I was lucky enough to work with radio names that some folks might recognize like Buzz Bennett and Tom Birch and Kevin Metheny - “Pig Breath” I believe is what Howard Stern called him when they were together later. But all of these were rising stars, brilliant people who were passionate about radio and it was really sort of a miracle, an accident that these people should all come together in the same place at the same time. And it was in this wonderful, laid back setting of New Orleans. The NAB convention was there that year and Doubleday heard me and whisked me off to Minneapolis, where I worked for a bit with Gary Stevens and John Sebastian.

Then, from there, off to Philadelphia where I worked for what used to be “Wibbage,” WIBG became Wizard 100, worked with The Magic Christian and more Kevin Metheny there. That didn’t do so well, it sort of went disco.

Then it was off to San Diego, that was just mainly for the experience of living in San Diego. That’s where I got to know Shotgun Tom Kelly, if anybody recognizes that name. A lot of these are old radio names, but I’m an old radio guy, so these are the people I met along the way. And they were, in their own way, at various times, big deals I guess, if you score that way.

From San Diego, it was straight to Chicago; hired by Bonneville and worked for them at very milk toast - it was milk toast by “music everybody can agree on” standards; it was even less offensive than that. But I worked there for a while, had some fun with them. Then ultimately, Karen Hand hired me, she was the news director at BBM-FM CBS in Chicago and brought me over there to do it because, as it turns out - everything ties together - she had worked with Tom Birch, the guy I worked with in New Orleans and he played her a tape of how he thought radio news ought to sound and it was my tape. Then suddenly, in Chicago, she had an opportunity to hire me, so she did and we worked together. We were, in my estimation, the best tag team radio news kids ever. We were fast and tight and contemporary and fairly intelligent. I mean, we did a pretty damn good job. I hear tapes occasionally and I’m shocked and impressed. We really were cranking out some beautiful Top 40 newscasts in those days.

From Chicago, after a good nine years there with the CBS and Bonneville experiences combined, then off to Albany where you picked up the story from there.

At what point did you become Buzz Burbank? How did you get that moniker?

When I arrived here. It was a name that Don had used as a pen name, if you will, online. It was just a handle that he used online. He told me that it was a name he always had in the back of his mind to use if for some reason he couldn’t use Don Geronimo, he would have become Buzz Burbank.

I was resistant to accepting a name and I always when I thought of Buzz thought of the astronaut with the crew cut and I’m not a crew cut kind of guy, so I didn’t really think the name fit. But I was grateful to have a job, so I accepted the moniker and it stuck. And now I answer to both. It’s as much my name now and in fact the bank has me on file as Buzz Burbank, as well as Michael J. Elston.

The purpose of it was we had three Mikes on the show - Mike Sorce was Don Geronimo, Mike O’Meara was obviously himself and Mike Elston. We just couldn’t have another Mike, so Buzz Burbank it was. Like I said, it stuck and now I’m rather fond of it. It’s been good to me.

The Don and Mike Show went through several different phases - it began as a morning zoo show with David Haines as the newsman.

David Haines - there’s a guy whose footsteps I’m proud to have followed in. I know how beloved he was professionally and personally and I’ve heard his work and I think he was great. In some ways, he was a holdover from that Boss Radio, but he was just so well-known and beloved in this market that I’m honored to have followed in his footsteps. I was also proud to say at the end of it all that I was Don and Mike’s anchor guy longer than all of their other anchors put together by a considerable margin. I was glad to ultimately be the guy and of course we all miss David Haines, but again an honor to follow in his footsteps.

Once you became a part of the Don and Mike Show, how do you think the show changed from beginning to end? How did it evolve?

It’s much harder from the inside to be able to assess that. The longer I do this, the more I realize until you heard it back, you have no idea what it sounded like. So it’s really hard to say. I know it was great and wild and fun and pushing the limits. We were right there on the wave of shock jockery, in the middle of it all. That was one phase of it.

This was such a new world to me. Never had I been a part of any show like this before. When I joined the show in December ‘91, Don and Mike had this incredible chemistry. They could communicate without speaking and they just knew what the other guy was going to do. They knew what to expect from one another and the timing was impeccable. As a professional observer, you think to yourself, “Geez, I don’t want to get in the way. I don’t want to derail that. They’re doing something here and if I say something, it’s just going to screw it up.” So you tend to hang back and I’d never seen or heard anything like it, so for me the early years are fuzzy because I was just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. What kind of a show are we doing here?

But I quickly saw an extremely successful show - people seemed to be rabidly enthusiastic about this. It not only has numbers but it’s almost as if we asked them to do something, they’d do it. And in many cases they did. I’d never beheld such power before. I’d never seen anything like it or experienced anything like it. So there was that sort of aspect of just getting to know it and trying to figure out what it was and how it worked and what my role in it might be.

Of course, in the early days, I was just reading straight news because I didn’t know what the hell else to do. That was what I thought they hired me for; I was just trying to get it done and fit in as best I could and try to catch up and catch on. Having not lived here, having not really heard their show - Don and I had only worked together for a year 10 or 15 years prior to that, so I had no idea what I was walking into.

And then there was the sort of height where there was the sort of G. Gordon Liddy phase as JFK was developing as a really interesting radio station. To sort of help my income, I was working on the Liddy show as well and then there was a rivalry between the G. Gordon Liddy Show and the Don and Mike Show. You would think in that situation, “Well, I’m in the catbird seat. Boys bid high, bid to buy.” But you also dance with the one who brought you, so my loyalty had to be with the Don and Mike Show and ultimately it’s not that good to be fought over. I thought it would be; I was wrong.

But anyway, that was interesting and ironic since one of the earliest stories I covered in radio journalism was Watergate. G. Gordon Liddy represented all that was evil. The very concept of doing news on his radio show, it just seemed bizarre to say the least.

He certainly isn’t aligned with your view of the world.

No, I tried to put a happy face on it. I mean, I did. And it worked well. We actually had some good times and I don’t know. I still have mixed feelings about G. Gordon Liddy. I think there’s a nice guy in there somewhere. I’m pretty sure there is. But then, that’s my attitude generally.

He certainly was a fascinating guy.

Well, he was a crook and he wasn’t a very good one. And he was misguided and motivated by silly political ideas, but yeah an interesting character to be sure. Did he occasionally get one right? Yeah, he did. Was it interesting to know him and work with him? Absolutely. So I certainly don’t regret it and I certainly harbor no ill feelings, except of course politically.

You mentioned that early on with the Don and Mike Show you just read the news and gradually you got a larger role on the show. Was there an effort to work you in or did you just begin to find more places to speak up?

Don always encouraged me. In a way, that’s like encouraging a kid to step out on a railroad track. Perhaps I didn’t always embrace that encouragement as much as a braver person might have. I don’t like to go where I’m not welcome and certainly I don’t like to derail anything, so I have this unfortunate tendency to hang back, or at least I did in those days. Obviously, I’m in a different situation now that requires me to push myself in the other direction.

I thought it was wise, since this really wasn’t my sandbox, to tread lightly. But I have to say, almost from the beginning, Don said, “I’m leaving your mic on. Speak up at any time.” Obviously, as you may know, towards the end, by the time we were in the final few years of the show, sometimes people would even call and say, “Hi Don and Mike and Buzz,” so I really felt like I was more a part of it and that was a wonderful thing. That made me very, very proud.

One interesting dynamic on the old show was when Don and Mike would constantly interrupt your news to add in their own comments. Often times, it was hard to tell whether or not you were legitimately frustrated.

(Laughs.) Well, there were days. But no, mostly I got it. I realized first of all, after Reagan, radio stations didn’t even have to have news anymore. There was a time when I had a guaranteed job and now suddenly I’m an option, I’m an accessory.

And for a comedy show to pick up a news guy - now I’ve always sort of been program-oriented, tried to be colloquial in my news. I’ve always been a different kind of news guy, so I guess that would fit. But they really didn’t even have to have me. He just saw something in me and wanted me to be a part of this thing. It was the big time for him; he was very excited about it. They got a really good deal at what turned out to be really fertile soil at WJFK and for whatever reason, he brought me on board. So I was just grateful to be there.

I do take pride in my writing and sometimes you get on a little bit of a roll, you’re about to paint a picture, you’re leading up to what you think is, in your limited newsman sense of humor, a punchline and sort of get derailed. Well, sometimes I would be missing the bigger picture on that, which is we’re really here to entertain people. That’s the whole purpose of this show in the first place. If I can get away with educating and informing people somehow in the process of that, then now we’ve done something maybe really good.

And it was fun too. And I never minded any interruption that involved getting into the topic, whether it was via humorous sketch or sincere discussion. It made no difference to me. Even funny tapes and noises if they illustrate the story, if they underscore something about what we were talking about - oh man, that’s just the best. I love that.

One of the funniest segments on the Don and Mike Show was “Buzz makes the sexy call.” How did that idea come about and how much fun was it to do those segments?

Well, of course they’re fun. Obviously, if you get into radio it’s because you’re lacking something in your life and you need love and there’s something psychologically wrong with you. That’s why you do it in the first place. So when given an opportunity to collect love, you jump at that opportunity and that’s what this was.

I don’t really get it. I understand I’m told I have a decent voice. Women seem to like it. And this was a radio station that was aimed primarily at men, so this is really an odd thing. I don’t know what it is. It’s a little embarrassing. On one hand, I’m both proud and embarrassed about the fact that women seem to like me and like my voice.

So Don wanted to exploit that and we did and I guess it was funny. In some ways, it’s a little like seeing Alan Kalter on The Late Show with David Letterman say something sexy or romantic to a woman who is a public figure. It’s got an air of silliness about it that’s a lot of fun too.

Earlier this year, Don Geronimo retired and you became part of the Mike O’Meara Show. What was it like making the transition over to the new show?

I’ve got to tell you honestly, the thing Mike and I have both heard from people - and it’s funny, it makes me smile - they say, “You know, I was skeptical at first.”

Our response has become, “So were we.”

People will say, “I didn’t think you guys were going to be able to do it.”

And we would say, “Neither did we.”

Now, that’s not true. It’s not that we didn’t have confidence. We’re all experienced broadcasters and we’ve been doing this for a little while with Don’s help, so we kind of figured we were going to be okay. But you don’t really know for sure until you strap on those wings and step off the cliff. Doggone if it didn’t fly. That was just great.

And of course we owe everything really to Don, who set the table. Here’s the thing about Don and how this ties in to what we’re doing now. He made this happen. He brought Mike along and he brought me along and he brought Robb along and even Joe Ardinger, brought them along and made them radio personalities whether they were or not. And furthermore instructed his, like me, Kool-Aid drinking audience to like us. He told people in his own way to like us. And they did, just as they did a lot of other things he suggested.

And so, he put us up there and he made people like us. Of course, obviously we each have our own individual little talents that we brought to the table, but if Don hadn’t laid this all out for us, I’m not so sure we’d be seeing the kind of really fortunate success that we’re seeing so far and already.

Take me through a typical day on the Mike O’Meara Show. What time do you get into the office? What type of prep do you do before the show? How do you put together your news segments?

I may be anal retentive, obsessive compulsive. I do too much. I work too hard. I care too much. I hit my desk here at home at 7:30 in the morning. I look at well over a thousand headlines every day and probably more than that; I couldn’t begin to count them. Anything that’s remotely interesting, I go into. Anything that looks like it might be something, I copy and paste until I get a library of material.

Then I make a list of the stories I have and I really pride myself on finding stories that go together and maybe say something more in combination then they would say separately. A lot of times, one of those stories will be a story you will hear on all the media, but I think I might be the only guy that day with the accompanying story. I do silly stories as well as serious stuff. When I do a silly story, there’s one agenda and that is to paint a picture of who we are as a people; a story that says something about us or at least a large segment of us. So silly as it may be, I try to find some meaning to it.

I really carefully construct all of this. I look for a flow and what stories should go where - not only what should be the lead and what should be the kicker, but what the flow should be in between and what the theme of the day is.

How often do you carefully construct a newscast only to have a caller try to scoop you or to have one of your stories come up earlier in the show?

It happens occasionally. Depending on what it is - if somebody calls in and I think this is something Mike and the rest of us would like to discuss right now, I’ll quietly and happily blow off the story I was planning on doing in favor of the better discussion of it now, especially early in the show when we have time.

This is one of the perils of doing the news at the end of a four-hour show and taking calls in between. There’s a decent chance - although our audience is funny; they try to play by the rules. Most of them who would be inclined to call will try not to because they’ve been scolded so severely in the past for trying to scoop us. We try to tell them, “Look, we have a wire service. We have the Internet. We have television. We’re aware of these things.” I can’t think of a time when someone has genuinely tipped us off to something that we didn’t know. So they’ve come to know that and they’re very well-behaved. (Laughs.) The audience is very well-behaved in this regard.

One of the new features on the Mike O’Meara Show is your BYOB Fridays. Do you worry about accidentally saying something you shouldn’t while doing those broadcasts and how long do you think your liver can make it doing those shows?

You know what? It gets dumped and it’s fine. The audience, for whatever reason, seems to love this. They love the BYOB Friday. Just on a joking note - our employer requires us to drink. We have no choice in the matter and because they have an excellent health plan, they should be able to dry us out should anything go wrong. So far, we’re learning to pace ourselves, at least I am, because I don’t like feeling like crap after the show or the next day.

But what it does - and here’s what it reminds me of, I think Mike to a certain extent too - it goes back to The Tonight Show in the late ’60s and early ’70s, where George Gobel, Dean Martin and all these guys would come on and they would be drinking in the green room before they went on and they might even bring the drink out on stage with them. But they kept it clean, they kept it within parameters. It was sillier, it was looser and that’s the sort of aura that we’re going for on Fridays. And there’s just no accounting for people’s taste. People love it, they embrace it enthusiastically. So I guess until it kills one of us, we are going to keep doing them.

On the radio, you’ve often been depicted as a pothead. Obviously, there is a separation between your radio persona and your personal life. Do fans often approach you wanting to smoke weed with Buzz Burbank?

Yeah and bless their hearts because I know they mean well and I love them, but I generally go as far and as quickly as I can in the opposite direction. Again, I know they mean well and I’m touched, I really am, but I just don’t want to be a part of that. That’s just probably not a good idea.

You have begun assembling a collection of Buzz Babes - attractive women who serve as spokesmodels for the Mike O’Meara Show. How many Buzz Babes are you up to at this point?

About a dozen. Can I give you a rough number like that? Because honestly there are always two or three that are in or out. They can make it one week, but maybe not another week. It’s sort of a flexible number. We really would like to have 12 because that’s how you make a good calendar.

Honestly, we would have been happy with four or five. We didn’t know what to expect. But the way these women - smart women, seriously, I’m not being facetious here - have stepped up and have enthusiastically been a part of this, it blows me away. It’s amazing. Many of them are professional women with careers and they’re just as serious as a heart attack about that and they’re very good at what they do. But this is something that they wanted to do. And they’re babes. It’s just the best. Again, it underscores that I’m the luckiest boy alive.

How long until you take over for Hugh Heffner?

We’re losing Hugh; he’s getting older. Not that I’m a spring chicken, but somebody has got to carry the mantle and so far, somehow I’m lucking into the gig.

I’m very lucky and very pleased at the enthusiasm. It practically runs itself now. It’s just great; it’s just the best thing ever. Who doesn’t want to be surrounded by beautiful women? For whatever reason, they want to be there and go out and represent the show. They’re all just as serious as they can be about that and yet we have a tremendous time. And I’ve never put a hand or a lip or any other body part on any of them, for the record.

How does your wife feel about the Buzz Babes?

She couldn’t be better. Again, luckiest guy in the world. She understands that first and foremost, I come home every night - I always do, I always have and I always will. This is my life mate, this is my partner, this is the person I come home to. She’s also a realist. She knows men like women and perhaps her husband in particular. She’s just very great. She’s not threatened.

Does she listen to the show often?

As much as she can. She works too; works at a medical office. So when she gets off work, like a lot of people, she hears anything after five or so. Which means I can say just about anything before five. (Laughs.)

How long do you think you will continue to do the Mike O’Meara Show?

Until Mike’s heart attack. (Laughs.) Then we’ll call it something else.

No, for as long as we’re having fun. Mike said this going in and I really liked this philosophy a lot. He said this to me off the air before we started the show. He said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go in there and we’re going to do our job and we’re going to have fun. Then we’re going to go home.” He said, “We’re going to keep doing that for as long as it’s fun and is any kind of acceptable level of success.” So I think that’s the plan and so far, so good because we’re having fun and the numbers indicate success, so I guess we’re going forward for as long as we can get away with it.

In addition to your work on The Mike O’Meara Show, you also do a bit of voiceover work. Do you enjoy that work?

I do, it’s just dumb, but I love narrating instructional and institutional videos. I recorded something recently for the Loudon County Sheriff’s Department on the proper use of the Push Bumper. I loved it. I ended up recording it before the lieutenant got to the studio because I was short on time and there was a miscommunication about the time of the session and I was worried about running out of time. So I said, “Tell you what, let’s go ahead and lay this down and have the guy listen to it when he gets here and if he needs changes, we’ll make changes. But at least we’ll have some of it done.”

So the guy shows up and he listens to it and says, “It’s perfect. I was going to underline some words in the script that I wanted you to emphasize, but you’ve already emphasized the right words properly. I wouldn’t change a thing. We’ll take it exactly the way it is.”

I said, “Well listen, if you want to do more of these, it’s my pleasure. I’d be honored to do it.”

This is something I wanted to do. I give back so little to the community. It’s something I didn’t charge them for and wouldn’t and don’t want to. It isn’t about that. Plus, it’s good to have friends in law enforcement.

But I did this video and they were very pleased with it. I said, “I love doing this.” Jason Veazey, also a well-known name in this market, was producing this piece for us. And Jason said, “You know why Buzz enjoys this so much? It’s because it reminds him of the film strips he saw in school as a kid.” And you know what? Jason is absolutely right. It’s fun being that guy. So I get a charge out of that, but it’s not very meaty; there’s not a lot of substance to it. You’re just being a pretty voice at best. But it’s just something that ever since I was that little kid sitting in front of the TV fascinated me.

What goals have you set for your career?

I’m open to anything. I actually think I’m capable of a lot. Maybe a lot of us do have that and maybe a lot of that is an inflated sense of ourselves. Do I think I could be in a movie and be pretty good at is as an actor? Yes, I do. I think I’m a pretty good writer. I love to write. I hope to do more writing in the future.

Right now my writing is like an assignment. It’s very focused and there really isn’t a lot of room to wander and not a lot of energy left over at the end of the day to wander on your own. Someday, when I have time, I’d like to put more into that.

There’s really no limit to what I’d like to do. What will realistically get done remains to be seen, but I’m open to just about anything. If it involves broadcast, performing, writing, that all fascinates me. Every level of it.

What would you be doing for a living if you never got in to broadcasting?

If a greater education had been more clearly and readily available to me, I don’t think there’s any doubt I would be an attorney. I think I would be a trial lawyer and I think I would be a really good one. That’s what I think.

It’s not something I crave or something I regret, saying, “Damn, I wish I’d been a lawyer.” I don’t experience that. But I think that would be another appropriate calling for me that I would do really well at.

Tell us something not many people know about you.

This is a good one - I know this sounds hokey, but I like children. The truth is I do. The reason I say that is not to be a politician, but because I have a reputation for not liking children. The truth is I do, in fact, like children very much. My next door neighbor adopted a little girl from Russia. She’s about three now and she yells hello to Uncle Buzz when he pulls up in the driveway every evening. Uncle Buzz finds that delightful, if I may speak in the third person.

What does the future hold for you?

Oh man. More of this I hope. For now, I’m very content with this. I just want to keep doing this until I guess something bigger, better or more interesting comes along and that’s going to have to be pretty impressive because sometimes even I forget how hugely successful and lucky we are to be syndicated, to be on these stations. And they’re not all big markets, but how cool is it to be on in Wichita, the hometown where you started your career?

My last newscast in Wichita, I’d been sort of a well-known personality in that small pond for a while and in my farewell broadcast, I said, “But I’ll be back, if I have to use ABC, NBC or CBS to get here.” And I’m back in Wichita on CBS Radio and that’s just pretty cool.

From a kid growing up in Kansas, sitting in front of his little black and white TV thinking about doing something like this, this is a big deal to me. I’m really very pleased and amazed and grateful for all of that.

Interviewed by Joel Murphy. To find out more about the Mike O’Meara Show, visit the official site.

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You may know John Michael Higgins from his comedic roles, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t serious about acting. From his first love, the theatre, to his breakout role as David Letterman in The Late Shift and his memorable roles in Christopher Guest’s films, Higgins is a hard working actor who has honed his craft since he was a child.

Starting tonight, he can be seen on the new NBC sitcom Kath and Kim. We recently caught up with Higgins to talk about his new show, life as a journeyman actor and his tendency to create quartets to pass the time on set.

Where are you originally from and where do you call home now?

I live in Los Angeles right now and have for about 10 years. I’m not quite from anywhere. My dad was in the Navy, so I moved a whole lot – about once a year until college. But most of my family ended up living in D.C., so when I think of home, I think of going back there to see them. Although I have a lot living in Seattle and Portland now too, so I’m all over the place.

How exactly did you get into acting, and when did you decide this is what you wanted to do for a living?

Well, when I was very young, I was basically an actor. It was pretty clear; nothing I chose, it sort of chose me. This is earliest memory stuff. And eventually, I ended up working as a child actor – stage actor – mostly in D.C. actually in places like what is now the Round House Theatre in Bethesda. When I started in 1972 or ‘73 or something like that, it was called Street 70 and I worked there for a long time, all the way through high school. I was doing shows and teaching. I taught a lot of children’s theatre and other types of theatre acting and improvisation.

Then I went to college and when I got out of college, I went to New York and I was a New York stage actor for 15, almost 20 years doing just a ton of theatre. I’ve got a resume all the way down my arm, basically all of the plays. And that’s what I was basically until I was cast in the HBO movie, The Late Shift, where I played David Letterman. And from that point on, I was doing a lot more film and television and eventually I moved out here.

When you were doing the theatre work, did you always have a job or were there long periods of unemployment? Did you ever think about giving it up and pursuing something else?

I was a lucky actor. I’ve never had another job and I’ve been acting professionally since I was probably nine or 10. I’m 45 now.

So you have literally never had another job?

I’ve never had another job. I mean, unless you count teaching, but I was working while I was teaching. In other words, yes I taught, but I taught theatre, I taught acting. And I was always working at the same time. I was always doing a show at night.

No, I’ve been very fortunate; I’ve always worked. You know, there have been dry spells certainly. When I was coming up in New York right out of college, I’d go for several months or something without a job and eventually get one. I never really considered leaving the business. I would occasionally consider leaving the business because I would feel like it was unjust. I remember I did a show on Broadway many years ago, Le Bete. It was clearly the best show on Broadway; it was a great, great show. It was a great moment in American theatre and it got trounced by The New York Times, so it closed and I just thought, “What’s the point?” I almost quit at that point. I thought, “Well, it’s clearly not a meritocracy and all I can offer is merit, if I can even offer that.” So, that’s as close as I ever got to quitting.

You played David Letterman on The Late Shift. What was it like portraying such a well-known personality? You mentioned before that it was a big break for you, so what was it like to play Letterman early in your career?

It was a great opportunity, but it was a scary opportunity. The only reason I played Letterman and not somebody that you could actually name or pick out of a lineup was because the job was basically too scary for anyone else to do. They couldn’t get any famous people to do it; Letterman’s a very powerful man. He didn’t like the project from the beginning. People already established in the business – what’s the point of jeopardizing anything for what, a TV movie, you know?

Eventually they went through the lookalikes and the impersonators and they just didn’t play the scenes well enough, I guess. So they scraped the bottom of the barrel and went to New York and actually got an actor, which is always the last choice for these guys. So there I was. I was probably in the bottom of the last list of the last casting session of the last call of that film, I have no doubt.

But doing the job itself wasn’t particularly difficult, even though it was tricky to play a living famous person. I actually find that in film and television, I’ve done a lot of things that aren’t particularly easy, but compared to almost anything I’ve done in the theatre are a walk in the park. I think theatre is genuinely difficult and requires an enormous amount of skill and patience to do well. I’m not totally convinced that’s true of film and television.

So the job itself was not too difficult for me, but what I was very bad at was the attendant hoopla – the press and the response to it; basically the various controversies I’d get myself involved in just because it involved famous people. I didn’t know what the press was or what they did. They were never part of my life, so I probably didn’t handle that very well. I just didn’t know quite what to say.

I took the job because I needed to fix the steering column on my Subaru, that’s why I took the job. I didn’t take the job to stick it to anybody or to make a statement of any sort. I took it because I needed to pay my rent. It was a very different world. No one else working on that job was paying their rent, you know what I mean, and I was number one on the call sheet.

Was there a lot of fallout for you from doing that film as your career progressed? Or after the initial attention died down, were you able to simply move on?

It wasn’t terrible easy to move on again because the performance was such a specific thing. It was some kind of odd impersonation/performance, so somebody would get interested in me – I won’t name names, but a producer would get interested in and bring me to his network and the network execs would say, “What do we need a Letterman impersonator for?” I did run in to a bit of that.

I think, strangely you know, the product of “actor” is not a very hot one in Hollywood. What people want is for you to be something. “It’s the guy who does that.” “Oh that’s the guy who looks like that.” “This is the guy who says that funny phrase over and over.” I’m not that creature. I blossom when I’m in character. I want to play things that are very different from myself. That’s just the way I’m built. And it’s not anything that is particularly appealing to Hollywood. I’ve done very well in Hollywood. You know, you can read my resume – it’s a very odd collection of characters and projects and I’m very different from one thing to the next.

That’s certainly true. Looking at your resume, you have been on episodes of Seinfeld, Monk, Cybill, The George Carlin Show and Mad About You. Did you set out to be a journeyman actor playing different characters on a variety of shows?

I think that’s where my skills lay. I think that’s just what I am. I would see a funny role crop up. Oh, “he’s an Armenian soccer player who turned into a basket weaver” – and I’d think, “Well, that’s interesting.” As opposed to “He’s the nice guy who gets the girl” – that held no interest for me whatsoever. Zero. It’s just how I’m built as a performer, I guess.

What’s surprising to me about my career at this point is that I was never a comedian, per say. Now I’m considered a comedian. In other words, Hollywood has figured me out to their satisfaction – which is that I’m a comedian. I’m a comedic actor who does comedy. This was never the case in my career for the last 30 years. I did comedy, but it was certainly not to the exclusion of everything else and it certainly wasn’t the majority of my work. The majority of my work was not comedy; certainly on stage it was mostly classics – Shakespeare, Shaw. Large parts in those things. That’s what’s been surprising about my Hollywood years – all those shows you just mentioned are comedies.

Many people know you from your work on the Christopher Guest films Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. For someone like yourself with such an accomplished theatre background, we would imagine it would be a lot of fun to get to improvise and be able to play around with your character in a Christopher Guest film.

Chris Guest and I have always sort of been simpatico about what we find to be good entertainment. I think improvisation’s never been an issue for me or a problem or something I’m frightened of or something like that. I think Chris has always been someone who is more attracted to accurate behavior than he is to a joke. And I think that’s where my skills lay, not so much in jokes and broad comedy, but in sort of some kind of astute observation of human behavior and hopefully it’s astute enough that it becomes funny when put into the right context. I think that’s what he’s interested in; that’s what I do and that’s what a lot of the people in his little rep company do, if I can use that word.

And also, I think having done a lot of theatre, I’m basically unafraid. Certainly one of the best things theatre can teach an actor is a kind of fearlessness. At eight o’clock, you have to walk out on that stage, whether you’re ill or ready or know your lines or figured out the six bits that happen after the dinner scene. You have to go out there; you have to make it work or you’ll die. Everyone will hate you. And you figure it out. And in film, you can make a thousand mistakes and all it does is cost people who are in another building money. You might get fired, I suppose, but the consequences on your performance are minimal. You can always just stop, start over, keep doing it until it works.

I think in theatre you become kind of a gunslinger. You’re unafraid and you’ve got to fight the battle. I think to some extent Chris Guest has been able to preserve that high jump in his work. When you show up on Chris Guest’s set, there’s not going to be a lot of takes. We’re not going to be there all day.

We’re not going to do more than two or three takes. You’ve got to hit it. You’ve got to hit the ground running and you’ve got to nail it or the scene will probably not be shown. If it doesn’t work, it will go. If you’re not funny that day, well there it goes. If you’re not truthful that day, if you didn’t do anything of value to the story and the characters, it probably won’t be in. It’s some weird middle ground between theatre and film, I think, Chris’ films.

Have you heard of any future Christopher Guest projects?

Well, Chris is always thinking of things he’d like to do and he doesn’t hurry. He doesn’t do things that he doesn’t want to do. When he has a good idea, something that he thinks would work, he calls us up. I have no doubt that he’s thinking of something as we speak and just figuring it out.

I compare it to like the beginning of Mission: Impossible. Like a task presents itself to Chris in some way and he goes through his 8×10s and pulls out Martin Landau. Just like in Mission: Impossible, he always pulls out the same 8×10s and there’s his little team. And then they all put their masks on and go and overthrow Zamboobia. In other words, Martin Landau doesn’t know what the task is until he gets the phone call.

Speaking of Christopher Guest films, you and Michael McKean make an oddly sweet couple in Best in Show.

Thank you, I appreciate it. Actually, that was interesting for us because when Chris talked to us about it, we only ever had a little chat. I think we had a lunch with Chris and Eugene Levy. The four of us were like, “Well, what should these guys be and what should it be like?” And Chris sort of knew that he wanted us to be in light colors – not just what we’re wearing, but that we’re happy people because all of the other couples are so miserable in that movie. I don’t think Michael – I think I can speak for him – we both kind of looked at each other like, “Ugh.” It’s hard for a comedian to play a happy person. They’re not very funny. Pathology and dread, that’s funny; anger, fear – those are funny. But happiness is hard to make funny.

I think basically what McKean and I figured out is that we would be the type of couple that you find funny. They are funny people, which is dangerous always because you run the risk of not being a funny person. But I think that the couple we played is a couple of guys who actually you wouldn’t mind spending some time with. It would probably be a lot of fun because they say funny things and have a funny attitude about life. They’re ridiculous in their way, with the kimonos and all that stuff, but get in line. Get in line behind me, for one thing. We’re all ridiculous.

I actually really relished the chance to play – that they were gay was an extra thing. I liked the idea of playing a gay couple that their motor wasn’t the same motor that you see in all gay couples in Hollywood films and television, which is some kind of tired, cynical, ironic, self-hating whatever, you know? I’m actually proud of the relationship that we showed in that movie. It’s more like the relationships that I know about, my friends who are gay.

You also played Wayne Jarvis on Arrested Development, a show which many fans were sad to see canceled. What was it like working on that show and were you surprised that it was axed by Fox?

The first answer is yes, I loved working on that show. It’s a rare instance of a show that I find, without qualification, funny. I can always make excuses for shows. For me, mostly with television I’m like, “For a show that’s XYZ, it’s not so bad. It’s actually kind of funny.” But you don’t have to qualify Arrested Development at all. It’s simply funny.

That’s Mitch Hurwitz. Mitch is a great writer and he has a great grasp of character and relationship in his head. He can really lay it out and go to places that seem almost too broad to go and it totally works. I think it works because he’s really done the hard work of drawing relationships with the characters and that the characters need and want things, as opposed to hitting poses and making funny attitudes. That’s why that show is a success. A total artistic success. As a business success, I guess it wasn’t a success. Well, it ran for several seasons, but that’s the great mystery. You throw these shows out and if the public doesn’t respond I guess in giant numbers, then they go away.

You know, it’s sentimental; it’s romantic to think that television is anything but what it is – a billboard. And if it’s not drawing the eyeballs, then it goes. You try a different billboard. It’s that simple. There have been great, great billboards on television; some of them approach art. As far as comedy is concerned – comedic art – I’d put Arrested Development somewhere near there. It’s a completely stand-alone property and I think the short answer is it’s too good to be a billboard. It didn’t fit.

It’s a great show and it will live forever; I’m sure of that. If sitcoms are able to live forever in some format or medium, that’s going to be one of them.

There are a lot of fans of the show who would like to see an Arrested Development movie to bring closure to the show. Do you think something like that will ever happen?

I don’t know. I believe all that would come down to just business decisions having to do with the major players. Most of those people have gone on to more fabulous careers than the ones they had when they started Arrested Development and that’s as it should be. If they want to go and revisit, that would be entirely either a proclivity of theirs or a good business decision. And there’s no way to guess if those things exist in those players and those producers.

Would you be open do doing something?

Oh, I wouldn’t mind. My guy in that show was such a footnote in a way. I loved the character; I had a great time doing it, but it’s nothing that takes a whole lot out of my skin. It’s not a great hardship. For me, it would just be an amusing week of work or something if I were to do a film version of it.

I don’t know though, Mitch would have to look at it and the big question he would have to ask is: Is Arrested Development defined by its context? In other words, would it work as anything other than a half hour shot in the arm - 22 minutes or whatever it is? I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s a question that a lot of people should ask themselves before they make movie versions of television shows. We’ve seen the dead bodies along that road and most of them it’s because they were driving in the wrong car at the wrong speed. Mitch is too smart.

We read that you do vocal arrangements for many of the projects you have worked on. Is it true that you also did the vocal arrangement and sang back-up for Ed Helms’ “Take A Chance on Me” performance on NBC’s The Office?

That is true. I wrote the vocal arrangement for “Take A Chance” and I sang it too on the phone behind him. Yes, I write vocal arrangements, it’s something I’ve always done since college; I led my college group and I’m still very interested in harmony. I’m actually not particularly interested in a capella harmony of the sort you are talking about, although I end up doing it a lot.

But Ed called me, he and I worked on Evan Almighty together and we sang a lot together on that set. Any set that I’m on, if I’m on it for more than a week or two, I will quickly – even just listening to you, the first thing I do is hear your voice and figure out what part you sing. Then I figure out who can actually sing in the cast and then I put together generally a quartet or something to sing to kill the downtime, of which there’s a lot.

So Ed was somebody who I sang with on the Evan Almighty set and he ended up doing The Office and he called me up and said, “We have to do this thing, would you come in here?” And I got my friend Tom Gallop, whose a wonderful comedic actor himself, he used to be on Will and Grace, he’s a great bass singer. It was just the three of us I guess, me and Ed and Tom, ran out to the Valley where they shoot The Office and honestly it was about 10 minutes in Ed’s trailer, quickly put the arrangement together and ran out onto the set and recorded it live on the set actually. We didn’t pre-record it. They were playing the scene and they had the phones set up and Tom and I were in an office, a real office nearby, one of the writers’ offices, on a speakerphone which went to the set. And somebody gave us a cue. We couldn’t even see Ed, I don’t think, on the monitor or anything, we just sang it.

I had no idea at that time, it turned out to be kind of a big thing. Ed called me and said it’s all over the Internet. I’m very pleased, but I did it sort of anonymously. I don’t even think I took a credit or anything. But I’ve done a lot of vocal arrangements for movies. I did all of the vocal arrangements in A Mighty Wind, which are pretty complex actually, and the ones for The Breakup, where I ended up doing a whole a capella group. I don’t know if you saw the movie, but I’m a guy whose in an a capella group and I annoy Vince Vaughn by singing loudly in his face. I wrote a bunch of arrangements for that group in the movie. Most of that stuff was cut out. But I actually hardly remember making that movie. I really remember doing the recording of all those arrangements that I did with this six, seven boy group that we sort of cherry-picked to sing those vocal arrangements.

So I’ve always been an arranger. If I had it to do over again, I think that’s probably what I would have ended up doing, being a real arranger. Although they don’t really exist anymore. That whole world is dead and gone. Vocal arranging I suppose is still around, but I don’t know, it’s all so computerized now. My heroes are the big arrangers from the late 50s and the early 60s; they’re like geniuses, what they knew about music and what they knew about orchestras. And it’s gone, it’s all gone.

You are now on Kath and Kim. What can you tell us about the show and your role on it?

It’s a show I’m very proud of actually. I find it really funny and I don’t think I’d be doing it if I didn’t. It’s four characters. It’s a small cast, which is very appealing to me. When I watch television, I find that I get lost. It’s hard to tell people apart for me. They look the same and they all sort of are the same in some funny way. They all have the same values and the same amount of money.

Especially on like these teen dramas on The CW, literally all of the young actors look exactly the same.

I know. I find those shows perfectly opaque. Like I look at them and for the life of me, it’s like looking at a brick wall. I just can’t make heads or tails out of it. It could just be a generational thing. Maybe I’m done.

But I like Kath and Kim because the four characters are very, very distinct. And it’s limited to four, so you can actually wrap your head around it. Molly Shannon, of whom I’m a big fan both on and off screen, is Kath, this woman of a certain age who is trying to get her life back together and her daughter moves in after a disaster starter marriage that lasted six months. And her daughter moves in and it’s just horrible, Selma Blair plays that part. And her husband’s Mikey Day. Mikey’s a really talented guy, he’s about half my age, which is annoying. He’s a huge talent; he’s like a myna bird with impersonations and a fantastic improviser. The best news is that he’s a very good actor. He just goes right into the scene. He doesn’t really do the jokes, he just plays the scene, which makes it 10 times funnier, of course. So that’s a great cast and the showrunner is brilliant, Michelle Nader, she’s really the thing that drew me to it in a big way in the first place.

So I’m really thrilled. I think the show is quite funny. I saw the pilot and I saw episode two and I don’t know what there is to object to. I honestly don’t. It’s very funny, got great designs, it’s very interesting to look at and it’s got people who are just suburban people who aren’t particularly clever, aren’t particularly glamorous, just trying to make it through in some way or another and being basically wrong about everything that they do. So it appeals to me.

Were you familiar with the original Australian Kath and Kim before signing on to be a part of the American version?

I haven’t seen it, but I understand it’s a huge, huge success in Australia – six, seven years. And they’re very protective and enamored of it in Australia. They don’t like the idea of somebody remaking it. But they didn’t have all of that money waived at them.

Was it a faithful remake of the Australian version or were a lot of changes made to the American version?

Again, I’m speaking out of school since I haven’t seen the Australian version, but my understanding of the American version – and basically it works this way with something like The Office – is that the American television season is so much longer, we have to do 23 episodes as opposed to 12 or even six sometimes on the BBC, which is ridiculous. They can go very broad in places that would be hard for the American audience to – you end up burning the characters up like a match if you go too broad too often because you’ve got a long haul ahead of you. It’s like blowing all of your best jokes right at the beginning of a dinner party.

So the American versions are generally more character driven than situation driven. I’m not saying that Australians don’t have great characters, I’m sure they do. It’s just a different way of stretching out the story – stretching a story into 23 chapters instead of 12 or whatever they do. So I think the American versions have more downtime as it were in the story, where people just talk to each other and say things that aren’t particularly funny or live their lives, as opposed to the constant jalopy ride – Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride from beginning of an episode to the end.

What other projects are you working on? Are you doing any theatre work or are you mainly just focusing on Kath and Kim?

Well, right now the show is really taking up a lot of time. It’s a single camera show, so it takes forever to shoot and the schedule is hideous. That’s just the way it is if you’re not working with multiple cameras, that’s the gig. I always have my hand in theatre. My wife is a theatre actor, she’s currently doing shows, so I go down there and watch a lot and I direct more in theatre than I used to if the gig is shorter and I can stay active in film and television without taking too long of a break.

I’m currently also doing this spokesman type job for DirecTV. I’m doing DirecTV spots. Chris Guest directed those, so he and I are doing those together.

But that’s about it right now. I’m always sort of looking ahead a bit. So right now this show is taking up more time than most projects ever have. I haven’t done a whole lot of long runs as a television series regular. I’ve been mostly doing films for the last few years and those are just brief jobs that take a couple of months and you’re done. This is like a real job. I have to show up every day, all day. So it’s a little different.

What goals have you set for your career? Are there particular directions you would like to see your career head?

It’s hard to do that. As long as I’ve been in this career, the only constant is that I’m constantly surprised by the direction in which it goes. I seem to have very little control over that. I do choose projects to some extent. I won’t do things I don’t want to do. But is that a way of control or sort of a half-measure of control? People who can actually choose their projects are countable on a hand and I’m not one of them.

I can’t just sit in a chair in Montana and say, “I want to do this. I want to do that.” I’m still a working actor. I’m not auditioning as much as I did at other parts of my career; things come to me more now. But there I said it, things come to me. I have a hundred ideas of things I want to do that would be projects that are generated by me, which I’m always working on, so that is basically the best way to control your career and I’ll be doing more of that. And I actually do want to do much more directing actually; in theatre, not so much film and television. Theatre directing is very interesting to me and I hope I can remain enough of a success in film and television that I can afford to do it.

Tell us something most people don’t know about you.

I’m very conservative. Not politically so much, but as a person. People I think are surprised to find me as sober and dry as I am, given the types of characters that I play. I’m not sure why that worked out that way, but it’s always what I hear when people meet me. After a couple days, they say, “You know, I’m very surprised to find you this way.” Every now and then I’ll play a character like that; Arrested Development is obviously a very serious, dry, almost dead person. (Laughs.) But I think that’s the thing people are always surprised by.

What does the future hold for you?

I’m very happily married with two beautiful children. When I think of the future, I think of them. I think of continuing to have a fulfilled, happy relationship with my wife and children. That’s the most important thing in my life; nothing even approaches it in importance. I don’t know, it’s kind of a sappy answer, but it’s a truthful one.

Interviewed by Interviewed by Joel Murphy. Kath and Kim premieres tonight at 8:30 p.m. on NBC.

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After 40 years in the business and more than 100 films under his belt, to say that Malcolm McDowell has had a long and successful career would be an understatement. The charismatic star of classic films like A Clockwork Orange and Caligula now finds himself doing voiceover work for shows like Metalocalypse and playing Daniel Linderman on the hit series Heroes.

We recently were caught up with McDowell to discuss his distinguished career, his golf game and how it feels to play the role of the villain.

You are originally from Leeds, England.

I was born there. I spent all of six weeks of my life there before being carted off with my father who was in the RAF [Royal Air Force] to the east coast of Yorkshire where he was flying bombers over Germany.

Where do you call home now?

California.

How long have you lived there?

Almost 30 years.

How exactly did you get into acting, and when did you decide this is what you wanted to do for a living?

I acted at school. I went to quite a progressive school which was an all-male boarding school – I guess you’d call it a private school; we called it a public school – and had a good education. Part of the education required you to do plays – musicals and Shakespeare. We had a musical production at Christmas time and then a Shakespeare production in the summer.

That’s how I started. I guess I played all of the great parts in Shakespeare before I left school and then I always thought, “Well, I guess I could find my way into acting somehow,” which I did.

Once you made the decision to pursue acting, was it fairly easy to break into the business? Did you ever think about giving it up and pursuing something else?

You know, the decision was made for me. I was offered a job and I leapt at it to go into weekly rep. That’s where all young actors started in those days, in repertory theatre – one play ever week. I mean, it seems crazy now because how good could that be, you know?

It was pretty awful, but it really gave me a chance to play a great spectrum of parts and to learn how to act at somebody else’s expense. That’s what it did and it was actually tremendous to get out before the public working as an actor, even if it wasn’t in very good quality stuff because at least you were doing it. And so that became my drama school, really. That’s how I started. It was really bizarre.

When did you start getting comfortable with acting?

By the time I came to do my first film, after four years of being a theatre actor and doing television. I did a series, which was a really good learning experience – you get a lot of time before a camera. Doing stuff like that. By the time I came to do my first lead in a movie, which coincided with being my first, I was very lucky, I was ready for it or as ready as you ever can be.

Also, I happened to get cast by a brilliant director, Lindsay Anderson, so working with him was eye-opening and extraordinary and we became friends for the rest of his life.

I’ve just done a film about him, called Never Apologize. It’s opened in England and it was played at the Cannes Film Festival. It showed in New York about a month ago at the Lincoln Center, it opened for a week. And it will find its way onto DVD or it may even get a few theatrical engagements, we hope.

What else can you tell us about Never Apologize?

I’m very proud of this one man show that is now a film. There is a website called NeverApologize.com. My good friend and collaborator Mike Kaplan directed the piece and did a beautiful job putting it all together. And it was something that I could give back to my dear friend who died; it was 14 years ago that he died.

It was something that I could do to make people aware of who he was and to hopefully inspire people to go find the movies. And since I did it, I have to tell you that Criterion put out a beautiful copy of If…., which is fabulous, and then Warner’s put out an incredibly beautiful copy of O Lucky Man!, which were two of the great films I did with Lindsay Anderson, so they are available. I think it only was because of me doing this show about him. So everything that I tried to accomplish with that I think panned out pretty well. In fact, as we speak, the film is playing in a theater in the West End of London. I think it’s just one performance a day, but still people are getting to see it and I’m very excited by that.

It’s something that I did really just for love of doing it. I had no idea that a) they would ever film it or b) that anyone really would ever see it outside of the Edinburgh Festival, which is where I started it. In Edinburgh they have this incredible festival every year and I said I would do it for the festival and it just sort of mushroomed out from there.

Obviously, people remember you from your iconic work as Alex in A Clockwork Orange. What did you take away from that experience and what stands out to you about the film all these years later?

Well, what tremendous staying power it has. I mean, I made a classic movie. I didn’t know it at the time that it was going to be so iconoclastic. But who knew? I knew it was a good film – that I knew – but you never know quite how good.

Was there ever a point where you started to realize, “Wow, this thing is going to be around for a while”?

No, you never feel that. That’s something that comes much later. But you do feel “this is an amazing film” and what a great director, I’m doing some good work – that’s what I felt. Of course, I didn’t think we’d be discussing it 37 years later.

Why do you think it has endured for so long?

Because I think the themes are universal and Kubrick was so brilliant that he set it in the future, so it doesn’t really date. And the theme is a universal theme – the freedom of man to choose how he decides to lead his life without government interference. That’s basically the bottom line of what it’s about. That’s still very pertinent, in fact more so today.

You were also the lead in the infamous Caligula. What made you decide to be a part of that movie and to be a part of what we would imagine was a rather unique filming experience?

It was. The reason that I got involved was because of Gore Vidal, who wrote the script. And Gore Vidal was a man of letters, one of the best novelists in America. And when Gore called me up, I was very excited because Gore Vidal’s Caligula, it could have been a lot of fun.

Now subsequent to that, we started shooting and Gore had a big row with I guess the producers, I don’t know who, I wasn’t really a party to it, I was just the actor who was trying to make it work. But he decided to withdrawal his name and that was the end of it. Honestly I don’t know quite what happened, but he withdrew. Of course, by that time, it was too late for me to do anything because I was already set and we were shooting.

So was it chaotic filming it at that point?

It was. I mean, I’d say it was chaotic. We did some good work in that film, believe it or not. There are still sequences of it that are incredible. It doesn’t really hold together brilliantly I think as a terrific film, it’s sort of very flawed. The cuts are a bit weird and I don’t know what happened with the editing. It went through many processes and many editors and Guccione had his cut and I don’t know what happened afterward. It was a bit of a mess.

But there are still pieces in it that I think are very good. And, you know, it’s sort of amazing to find these great actors – Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole – in this film of debauchery. But that’s what it was about and historians of that particular era say it’s a very accurate rendition of what was going on in Rome. It’s history.

And Gore did his research from this book by a historian called Suetonius and it sort of like William Shakespeare writing about Richard III. It’s very biased because of the reigning monarch so everything’s biased towards her family and I think in Suetonius it’s all very biased against people like Caligula because that was the other side. And so you’ve got him portrayed as a mad man and all of the rest of it, but I really don’t know whether he was mad. I mean, some of his actions were kind of ludicrous. Who knows? He may have been bipolar for all I know.

In 1994, you played Dr. Tolian Soran in Star Trek: Generations. What is it like to be the man who killed Captain Kirk? Star Trek fans are a loyal and devoted group – do Trekkies recognize you when you are out in public and have they given you a lot of grief over the years for killing Kirk?

They do and, you know what, I have to say they don’t give me any grief at all. They shake my hand and pat me on the back. I went to one of these conventions just this year in Vegas and I was kind of interested to see what reception I would get, but it was fantastic. I think everyone had sort of realized that some great things come to an end and they go on in another direction. He’s a great guy and I like to think I freed him up to get on to Boston Legal.

But, you know, he has a great sense of humor and he can laugh about it. I like him; I’m very fond of Bill and I think he’s a very charismatic actor. A lot of the success of Star Trek is down to him. Well, the two of them [William Shatner and Patrick Stewart], they were fantastic actors really and in sort of a cheesy thing that sort of had cardboard sets in the beginning. The great thing was – and I think a bit like Heroes that I’m in now, which is sort of a modern-day version of it in a way – is that they are moral tales that they tell, which is I think what makes it last.

There have been rumors of a sequel to the Rob Zombie Halloween movie without Zombie’s involvement. Has anyone approached you about playing Loomis in a Halloween sequel? And if another movie is made, would you be interested in reprising your role?

Well, of course it would depend on the script. I’m sure it would be good though because the Weinsteins are nobody’s fool and they know the business like nobody knows the business. So they know that there are certain things you have to have. They also know to get a young, interesting director and Rob certainly is more than that. He’s a terrific director and has a real style, a definite style. That was a very shrewd move on their part and they’ll have to find a director that’s waiting in the wings to make his debut on the world – somebody really interesting like Rob was. And, you know, there are people out there like that just waiting to get a chance. It’s a franchise that’s there for the taking, as it were, to be reinvented.

Have you heard any talk of a sequel? Has anyone approached you?

I heard that they’re getting down to scripting the next one, but I know nothing about it. They, of course, don’t consult me. Why should they? I may not even be in it. I don’t know.

We would hope that they would bring you back. You were so great in the first film.

I would have thought that they would, but who knows? They may just decide, “Nah, forget it. Let’s go in another direction.” But, you know, the franchise is really Dr. Loomis and a mask. That’s the bottom line. But we’ll see. It’s quite a lovely character to play because he’s a very bad doctor; he’s really not the best.

And definitely a bad ass. He doesn’t let himself get pushed around.

Oh no. That’s what makes him so much fun.

As an actor, we would imagine that that role is a lot of fun to play.

Oh great, we had such a great time. Working with Rob is so relaxed and he’s such a gentleman. And Sheri Moon, she’s great too. I don’t know how I kept a straight face any day we worked. It was always fun to go to work and that’s how you want it.

You played Ari Gold’s former boss Terrance on Entourage. What was it like squaring off with Jeremy Piven?

I loved it. It was fun and beautifully written. I think the kids are fantastic. They never get any credit; it’s all Piven. But actually, they’re terrific. All of them, the four of them. And they have some great guest stars coming in - Debi Mazar is fabulous, what a great actress. Besides Piven, there’s a lot of really hugely talented people doing it and it’s a great show. Of course, it’s a chance of a lifetime for Piven; it’s one of those parts that define your career. He’ll always be remembered for it. And he does it; he’s great.

How did I enjoy it? I loved every minute of it. I had so much fun torturing him. It was great.

Is there any chance you will be returning to that show?

Probably not.

You voice the character Vater Orlaag on Metalocalypse and you have done voiceover work for Justice League, Batman: The Animated Series and many other animated shows. Do you enjoy the voiceover work as much as acting in front of the camera?

Oh, I love doing it. I love radio, for starters. I’ve always loved doing radio. And I just love doing voices. It’s fun and it doesn’t take long, so it appeals to me because of that. And you can get some really cool characters.

I’ve been doing quite a few videogames lately and they’re fun. I’ve had a lot of fun with those. And I’ve done this new Disney film called Bolt, which is coming out, about this superstar dog who is the superstar of a TV series and he can’t differentiate between real life and television. That’s been a lot of fun and Disney did an enormously great job on it, as they always do with those things. It’s fun to do. I really do enjoy that part of my career. I don’t do that much of it really, but I enjoy it.

Are you normally just alone in a room recording your lines?

With the Disney one, Bolt, actually the director was sitting right by the mic with me, which was absolutely fantastic because he would give little nuanced direction. Instead of it being through a two-way microphone thing in a booth, he was right there. So that was really nice. And I think he got the best out of the actors by doing that. I think that was a really great move.

We would imagine it’s tough to be there all alone delivering your lines with a director talking to you from outside the booth and without any other actors to play off of.

You’d be surprised. You just dive in and you do something that’s approximate and it works. You just dive in and do it. And amazingly, it usually works out pretty well. I don’t think I’ve had an instance where we all went, “Ooh, that’s terrible.”

Do you ever actually play the videogames that you are in?

No, I don’t like videogames. I keep them out of my house. I don’t want my young kids getting involved in videogames. It’s just a decision. I just don’t want kids to be sitting there like automatons playing these damn games for hours on end.

Actually, it’s my wife’s decision and she’s the boss. So I go along with that. But I enjoy doing them. In one of them recently I played the President of the United States and it was a lot of fun. Speeches like, “My fellow Americans, we are in a time of crisis …” Yeah, right. Turn on the TV, bud. We’re in a real time of crisis.

You are back as Daniel Linderman on season three of Heroes. It was surprising to see you resurface on that show.

Oh Danny boy. He’s back. Yes, it was a surprise to me too. But, you know, that’s the show, isn’t it? It’s full of surprises. I mean, my God, I watched it [on Monday] – I wasn’t in it, but I thought, I wasn’t sure whether I was in it or not. I just loved it. I think it’s terrific. They’re wonderful actors. What’s going on? I have no idea. But I’m hooked on it. It’s one of those things that you can’t put down.

In the season premiere, we learned that only Nathan Petrelli can see Linderman. Did the writers sit you down and explain what is going on with Linderman ahead of time or are they really secretive?

Yeah, I wish. Nobody does any explaining. I was doing a scene with Nathan. I noticed he had a speck on his beautiful black suit. I went over to flick it off his shoulder. They went, “Cut, what are you doing? No, no, you can’t touch him; you’re dead,” which made me roll about with laughter.

I went, “Oh, well do tell me next time.”

But it doesn’t really make any difference. I’m not the kind of actor that has to know. It doesn’t worry me. I just play what’s put in front of me – the scene. What we have to do in the scene to move it forward. I don’t really care if I’m a spirit or if I’m Daniel Linderman himself. Actually, I’ve come back as a very different character this year. It’s not really the one I played in the first season. In fact, there is a line coming up where I say, “I have to get back to you. I have to talk to my boss about that.”

And she goes: “Talk to your boss? I thought you were the guy.”

And he goes: “Well, I’m not that man I once was.”

Can you tell us anything else that’s in store for season three?

No, they won’t let you because they’ll rip my tongue out and feed it to the sea lions that are down in Monterey Aquarium. So I better not say anything. All I will say is I think it’s back to its very best this year. I’ve seen three shows, they have been terrific.

It’s unbelievable, they’re making full-blown movies every week and I don’t know how – well, I do know how they do it, money and hiring the best talent available in Hollywood. That’s how they do it. The best special effects people; amazing effects for a weekly show. It’s staggering. I think it’s absolutely amazing. And it’s just great to be part of that because everybody in the world watches the thing and that’s why I said I likened it in a sense to Star Trek in that it has a hardcore base fan who is obsessed with it.

They do the downloads, they play all those damn games, downloading stuff – all that which I’ve never done, but I understand it. It gives people a sort of secretive life. It’s something to do and we can really get into it. And actually, it’s really their own imagination. You give them just the broad strokes and then they take it over. And you go, “My god.” I’ve had people ask me stuff about Linderman and I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about.

Somebody said, “You’re one of the original 12.”

And I go, “That’s right, yeah. Am I? Yeah, yeah, I’m one of the original 12.”

It’s a fun thing and it’s great to be part of because it’s just a cool show.

We also don’t think that it’s a coincidence that fans were a bit disappointed with season two, then you’re back for season three and all of the sudden the show is off to a better start.

(Laughs.) It’s nothing to do with my reappearance, but I think that Tim Kring is an amazingly smart guy and all of the producers there are all very, very smart. They knew that they put their main character in a medieval rainforest or whatever in Japan for too many episodes; it’s like they lost their way a little bit. I don’t know. That’s what they said anyway. I’m only paraphrasing what they already said. But the scripts have been fantastic this year. I think they used the writers’ strike to retool, to rethink and they were ready when they came back.

You’ve played a lot of memorable villains in your career. A lot of actors have said that they really enjoy playing bad guys because it’s fun and very freeing as an actor. Is that the case with you?

Oh yeah, they’re fun parts. Listen, they’re great. They’re fun parts. You’ve got six scenes to make everybody hate you and you don’t have to come in every day. That’s the way I look at it now. I’m of a certain age. I don’t want to be grinding it out every day, 16, 18 hours a day. I’m at a time where I want to enjoy my life. So this kind of thing is perfect for me. It works very well.

Do any of your villain roles stand out to you as particularly fun to play?

Well I enjoyed very much a movie called Gangster No. 1, that’s about cockney gangsters from the East End of London, which is a classic movie now. It was made about eight years ago or something like that. It was the first movie that starred Paul Bettany. It’s a terrific film.

And then, I did another film, a small independent film about a serial killer in the Soviet Union called Evilenko. That’s an amazing film and I loved that.

And, of course, Linderman is a great villain.

You have had a long and diverse career, appearing in well over 100 films. Are there any roles left that you haven’t tackled that you have always wanted to play or actors or directors that you have wanted to work with?

You know, I haven’t done a musical and I have a pretty good voice. I did play a rock star in a movie that weirdly enough Allan Arkush directed called Get Crazy in the 80s. It’s a terrific