It’s an unpromising day to meet Richard Kind, as the first big rainstorm of the winter pounds Los Angeles. The Burbank golf club seems an odd place to meet for breakfast (8am sharp), with hundreds of crows thronging the 18th hole, but, inside the dining room, all is toasty and cozy, especially my beaming host, who exudes the particular warmth and bonhomie that underpins his work.
Now, you may not think you know Richard Kind, but really, you know Richard Kind. He is the indispensable ensemble member: rarely up front in TV or movies, but always crucial to the piece he’s in, always the consummate team player. He has been Larry David’s cousin Andy on Curb Your Enthusiasm, has played big supporting roles in Mad About You and Spin City, has done sterling voice work in Pixar movies including Cars and Inside Out, and was the slightly unhinged brother in A Serious Man. His face, built for comedy, with its wedge-shaped mouth and wide-eyed haplessness, always reminds me of a big, wet, happy dog. You are always delighted to see him, and he is exactly as lovable in person.
“Carol Burnett said to me one time: ‘You were born in the wrong era,’” he says. “I should have been around for vaudeville.” Kind’s friend, the director Greg Pritikin, tells me much the same thing, that Kind is a figure out of time, and that the skills he has so finely honed are classic mid-20th century Broadway: improvisation genius, all-round song-and-dance man, belter of show tunes when called upon, the perfect reactive comic actor.
“Lemme tell you how it is,” he says, digging into his porridge, “I’m a team player, but I want to play with better players – and I also want to win. I recognise, especially on TV, that I’m a satellite player, and someone like Mary Tyler Moore or a Jackie Gleason, Bob Newhart – they were the tentpole and everyone else around them got to whirl a lot, sometimes faster or slower.
“I don’t mind being that guy. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that it’s the best, because having the pressure of being the centre, the fame that comes with being Carol Burnett – even she can’t handle it! But anyone who gets into this to be famous – or gets into it for the money – they’ve gotta be out of their minds. I got lucky that” – he grasps his jaw – “with this face … I had to change the plan a little.”
Kind plays Rudy Giuliani in the Roger Ailes sexual-harassment-expose drama Bombshell, opposite John Lithgow as Ailes and his old Spin City castmate Connie Britton. It occurs to me that, for New Yorkers in the 80s, the two loudest and most infuriating voices in the city were Giuliani’s and Donald Trump’s. Now the whole world feels how they all felt then, I suggest.
“Well, Trump was always an idiot; he was and is a brutish man. As for Rudy Giuliani, we’ve all been able to watch him as he goes from Time’s man of the year to, let’s hope, man doing time. To play Giuliani, I didn’t even have to show up – makeup showed up, I almost didn’t have to do anything. That’s the performance. I didn’t really try to do an impersonation. When you listen to Giuliani, he’s very clipped, he almost sounds like Rod Steiger, so I did a little bit of Rod Steiger in a New York accent.”
This Christmas, Kind is coming to London for a variety show at the Royal Albert Hall, put together by movie and TV composer Michael Giacchino. Kind, a fellow Jersey boy, who broke hearts voicing doomed imaginary friend Bing Bong in Inside Out, will handle the singing and the badinage. Expect special guests such as Matt Lucas and Kermit the Frog, Christmas cheer and, Kind hints, possibly some cross-dressing, with Kind channelling Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers.
Kind, now 63, never planned to be an actor, but fell into the Chicago stage scene after studying law at university. It was the golden age of improvisation troupe Second City, where he stayed for nearly five years, alongside the likes of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mike Myers and Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson.
Despite all this, Kind still exhibits some of the glee of a man just dabbling. He tells me about the time he was in a play directed by Joanne Woodward. Backstage, on opening night, “suddenly some guy leaps on my back and yells: ‘Kid, you’re like a locomotive – once ya get started there’s no stopping ya!’ And it was Paul Newman! How do you live up to that?” And then he tells me about how Arthur Penn said he had “the balls of a blind burglar”. “That’s poetry!” he grins.
The Royal Albert Hall Christmas Variety Show takes place on 20 December. Bombshell is released in the US on 13 December 2019 and in the UK on 24 January 2020
