Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
You know him from memorable roles in “Diner,” “Mad About You” and “Stranger Things.”
This Saturday, Paul Reiser performs live at Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races in West Virginia, so load up a car of friends for a hilarious road trip across the DMV border.
“I guarantee if you come Saturday and you don’t have a good time, I will come back next year and take you to see somebody funnier,” Reiser told WTOP. “I just tell people what’s happening to me in my house with my family. … People know me from TV and don’t know that when I started, that’s all I wanted to do, to be a standup and I kind of got distracted.”
Born in New York City in 1956, Reiser studied piano and music composition at Binghamton University, where he also performed in campus theater productions and stand-up gigs.
His breakthrough role came in Barry Levinson’s Baltimore-based coming-of-age comedy “Diner” (1982), launching the careers of Mickey Rourke, Daniel Stern, Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, Timothy Daly and Ellen Barkin. His character memorably mocks the word “nuance,” so he made it the name of his production company Nuance Productions.
“I was surprised to have landed that role,” Reiser said. “I got to Baltimore, the other guys had all done something, but I had done nothing. … It was a road trip, we were all in Baltimore away from our homes, just 23, and idiots in a hotel having fun. We recently had an event commemorating the 40th anniversary and went out to dinner shaking our heads.”
This catapulted him to blockbuster action comedies, such as “Beverly Hills Cop” (1984) and “Beverly Hills Cop II” (1987), playing Det. Jeffrey Friedman across Eddie Murphy.
“I knew Eddie from the comedy clubs, so it was very easy to play,” Reiser said. “I had one scene, two scenes in that first one. That scene in the locker room where I have to get out, but they didn’t have any line written, so I just made that up, ‘This is not my locker.’ … More than any line in my career people come over to me and say, ‘Hey, this is not my locker!'”
He next played the greedy Carter Burke in James Cameron’s blockbuster “Aliens” (1986), co-starring Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley and the late Bill Paxton as Hudson.
“I went and met James Cameron and I’d seen ‘Terminator,’ so I knew that he was really talented, and I had seen [Ridley Scott’s] ‘Alien,’ and I read the script, which was fantastic,” Reiser said. “It’s rare that you can read a movie script and see the movie. This one you could really see it, so I was thrilled to get to do that because it’s not my usual sweet spot.”
Reiser entered our living rooms in “My Two Dads” (1987-1990), as he and co-star Greg Evigan raised an orphaned teenager. But his most iconic TV role came playing Paul Buchman with Helen Hunt in the beloved NBC sitcom “Mad About You” (1992-1999), which won 12 Primetime Emmy Awards.
“I was writing the pilot for ‘Mad About You,’ and I didn’t have any actors in mind,” Reiser said. “My wife is friends with a woman who is friends with Helen, they had a dinner party together and I met Helen. I thought Helen was funny and charming. As we were leaving, I said to my wife, ‘What do you think about her as you?’ She said she would be great.”
Over the past decade, he’s played Miles Teller’s dad in the Oscar-winning film “Whiplash” (2014), earned an Emmy nomination for “The Kominsky Method” (2018-2021) and wowed a new young generation as Dr. Sam Owens in Netflix’s “Stranger Things” (2016-present).
“Somebody told me that their kid, who’s a big ‘Stranger Things’ fan, said, ‘Wait a minute, Dr. Owens, the guy with the white lab coat is going to try to be funny?’ and I said, ‘Would you please tell him that he missed the memo?’ I know what I’m doing,” Reiser said.
Most recently, he’s starring in the self-aware Hulu comedy series “Reboot” (2022).
“I think it confuses people like, ‘It’s a reboot of what?’ No, it’s called ‘Reboot.’ It’s about an ’80s show sort of like ‘Full House’ or something that is rebooted,” Reiser said. “It’s Keegan-Michael Key, Johnny Knoxville, Judy Greer, Rachel Bloom — funny, funny people.”
For it all, Comedy Central ranked him one of the “100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.”
“They actually called it the ‘100 Greatest Comics of All Time‘ — that’s going back to like the 1200s, so that’s quite a swath,” Reiser said. “Even in Egypt, there were a couple of funny guys in Egypt and I beat them out, so I’m very proud of that. Live from the Nile!”
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
