- Clark Gregg’s wife, Jennifer Grey (”Dirty Dancing”) guest stars as Christine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) sets Richard (Gregg) up on a date with a gorgeous, passionate woman (Grey) who works out at her gym.
Actor Clark Gregg has been making audiences laugh as the ex-husband of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Christine in CBS’s hit sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine for years but did you know he’s also a screenwriter (having written the Harrison Ford-Michelle Pfeiffer thriller What Lies Beneath) and director (he wrote and directed the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke last year)? As Christine is into it’s fifth season on television and Gregg is set to reprise his role as Agent Coulson in Iron Man 2, I was able to get a few minutes of his time to talk about his experience on the sitcom (where his real-life wife Jennifer Grey is set to guest star in tonight’s episode, which I was able to screen and it’s hilarious! Not only is Grey fun but returning guest star Tom Foley continues to pine for Christine) and how he feels acting such Christine storylines as getting a sunburn on parts of his genitals.
Jim Halterman: Going way back, can you tell me where you grew up and when the acting bug bit?
Clark Gregg: The acting bug…the acting virus. [laughs] I moved around a lot. My Dad was in grad school and then he became a professor so by the time I was in high school I’d lived in six or seven cities by the time I was in high school. Mostly New England, Boston and Chicago and then I ended up going to high school in North Carolina because he was teaching at Duke.
JH: What was your first professional acting job?
CG: I mostly played soccer in high school and college but every once in awhile I’d wander over to the theater and manage to finagle myself into a show; I kind of liked it. I ended up in this great class at NYU taught by David Mamet with Bill Macy, Felicity Huffman and a bunch of other terrific actors in that class and we had formed our own company after school called The Atlantic Theater Company, and it’s still in existence today. One of my first paying equity job was through the Atlantic. One of our shows got involved in Lincoln Center in New York City.
JH: And your wife is appearing on this week’s episode ofChristine so my first question is why did it take so long?
CG: There was really no good reason. She and I had done a movie together in Canada a couple of years ago and her jobs are her jobs and my jobs are my jobs. She was kind of being a mom for a couple of years and then when she started doing some other things Kari just called up and said ‘Would you be willing to do this?’ and she said Yes. She’s a fan of the show but…
JH: Now have you seen Dirty Dancing? In TV Guide, there was a little blurb where you said you’ll have to see it.
CG: I was kidding. I don’t think I’d seen it all the way through until we got together but I’ve seen pieces of it on TV every Sunday.
JH: It’s on all the time, isn’t it? Talk to me about whenChristine came into your life. I know you had worked with Kari when you were both on Will & Grace.
CG: I met her there. I was working a lot as a screenwriter doing independent movies or whatever I could as an actor. I loved the script and I had had this great experience guest starring on Will & Grace and I had such a fun week. I remember at the time thinking ‘Wow, this is good! This sitcom experience is
really fun. There’s an audience so it’s like doing a play and the hours on some of them are really kind of sane. I knew who Kari was so when they called me with that and Julia, it was literally the first TV show I had auditioned for in five or six years and I went in and it just felt like a really good fit from the first moment.
JH: I’ve been a fan from the beginning but it’s always felt like the cast really gelled from the get-go.
CG: We felt like we were of the same family of actors. It just felt like ‘Yeah, these are my people’ just in terms of the way we worked and I thought everybody was so funny and I felt like it was a world that I didn’t have a lot of experience in so I felt like I was trying to catch up but I felt like a good fit right away but over the seasons every year it feels like it kind of gels a little bit more. We’ve felt like there’s a synergy between the cast and the writers that deepens. Whenever we come back and we just feel like it feels a little bit more fun and challenging in a good way than it was before.
JH: Are you ever surprised at what you see happen to Richard in the scripts? I mean, Richard recently sunburned his balls!
CG: It did at first. Now it’s like ‘What are they going to do to him now?’ I mean, just this year they’ve had me naked and then the sunburned balls. Julia is a great example of that. To me, she was a legend and somebody I admired and I’d seen the humiliating belly flops that she was willing to just hurl herself off during the first season. I just followed that lead. There’s a lot of fun, comedic stuff to be gotten from those belly flops so I’m always happy when they have me doing something insane.
JH: Your sunburned balls walk across the room was terrific!
CG: I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never actually sunburned that part of myself but I had to take a few minutes and do an exercise to think about what an awful feeling that must be.
JH: Being a part of this show for the last 5-6 years, what you have you learned working with this group of people?
CG: I guess the answer I would have to say is that if you’re having fun the odds are significantly increased that the audience will be having fun, too. I think if we find the way to crack the safe so no matter what we’re doing, we’re having a great time and it seems like the comedy kind of takes care of itself.
JH: That definitely comes through on the side of the viewer because I always feel like you’re having fun.
CG: We’re having the best time. I wish there was more scandal like on Grey’s Anatomy where we could say Hamish strangled Wanda last week but don’t tell anybody. It just doesn’t happen. It’s such a joy to come to work and get another funny script and have fun breaking it down and doing it.
JH: Do you have much of a chance to ad-lib or do you stick to the page?
CG: Just a little bit here and there but most of what you get is so funny…I wish I could ad-lib half as well and funny as what they write but I just don’t have those chops.
JH: You’ve written and directed, does doing a sitcom help you in those arenas at all?
CG: Yeah, you know when I got this job I had been writing a lot of theaters because of What Lies Beneath because that’s what people brought to me and dramas and the amount of my kind of weirdly happiness quotient jumped when I was doing comedy. It really changed what I wanted to do as a writer and director. It really feels like it swung the movieChoke, which I wrote and directed, it really made me more defined what was funny and the pain that was in that movie. And in the new script that I’m writing, it made me feel much more comfortable and focused on comedic stuff.
JH: Will you direct this new script, too?
CG: Yeah, it’s something I’m writing for myself to direct and hopefully there will be a part in there that I can act in too since I enjoy doing that.
JH: You’re in the Iron Man movies. Would you ever want to be in charge of a project like that?
CG: You know, my ego is grandiose enough that I’m sure that would appeal to me at some point. I’ve watched Jon Favreau, who is brilliant, putting together Iron Man and Iron Man 2…it’s so gigantic to me and so different – that 26-day independent film shoot that I directed – that it feels that somehow I’d have to learn a lot of different things in order to do but, yeah, it appeals to me. Why not?
JH: What else is coming up on Christine? Will Richard and new Christine reconcile?
CG: I don’t see how it could get any worse than it is right now. How much wreckage I’ve managed to inflict on that relationship but I think it’s clear that Richard doesn’t give up easily so I think you can expect that I’ll try one more suicidal attempt to get that relationship back on track.
The New Adventures of Old Christine airs every Wednesday night on CBS at 8/7c.
