Live From New York - James H. Miller [256]
Things aren’t going well, but I’m a happy guy. I’ve been separated from my wife for just about three years now. She’s still my best friend and I speak to her on a daily basis. My ex-wife is a veterinarian, a really good one. And we have all these animals between us. And they’re all getting old now. When she leaves town, I go to her house and all the animals stay there. When I leave town she gets my animals. All my parenting instincts have gone into just a couple of cats and dogs. I think I made the right decision not to have kids. I seem to be a bachelor, ’til the results are in now. I don’t mind it. I kind of like living up in the woods, with a couple dogs and cats. And I can go into the city occasionally. That’s my life. I live rather modestly, and that’s fine with me.
JACK HANDEY:
Lorne has always been very kind about saying there’s an open door there, and I think when the show got in trouble with the critics and the ratings about ’94, ’95, they thought to bring in some of the old guns. And so they brought me in, and I think they brought Robert Smigel back. Lorne and Jim Downey, I think, would encourage me or ask me to come back.
CHRIS KATTAN:
We do all love each other, and we all get along great, but there is a little generalization of casting people just in the sense of like, “Well, this character’s tall and skinny, get Jimmy.” Or, “He’s the dad or somebody, get Will.” And, you know, “He’s gay, get Chris.” I would be the guy who would dress up in drag or dance or something.
I know some people do think I’m gay. I’ve had people ask me if I’m bi more than gay. And I’m okay with it, and I like it, because I’m not gay, so actually, for women, it means I’m not threatening. It doesn’t bother me too much. I think there’s femininity, something feminine, in my characters that’s easy for me. The way I move my body and my rhythm — it comes out a little gayish.
The character of Mango was actually kind of based on an ex-girlfriend. There was a manipulation to her that was incredibly charming. You could nail it like, “Oh, don’t you see, you’re doing that thing again where it’s the whole ‘come here, go away’ kind of thing, and it’s charming and coy and really, really mean.” And the joke was that she was a bad dancer but for some ungodly reason, men just fell for her. It’s very much like the Blue Angel thing too. I don’t think I was conscious of it, but it’s very Blue Angel, you know. I mean, men aren’t turning into chickens, but yeah, there is that Blue Angel quality. It’s really a frightening movie, and in the end the poor guy, I remember him being a chicken.
Monica Lewinsky was going to be revealed as Mango’s wife on one show, but Cuba Gooding, who was the host, didn’t want to do that. On another show, Mango had a crush on Matt Damon, and then Ben Affleck pretended to be Matt Damon so he could get Mango for himself.
JAMES DOWNEY:
There has been a big trend lately where we do an impression of someone and sooner or later you know the real guy is going to do a surprise walk-on and startle the cast. And it’s always played as if it’s supposed to be threatening: “Oh my God, this is going to be awful, here’s the real Alex Trebek, he is going to be bullshit.” That kind of makes sense if it’s, you know, Mike Tyson, but why is it “dangerous” that the real Tony Danza shows up in our Who’s the Boss? parody?
At the very least it says that whatever we did, it didn’t offend them in any way. I guess it depends on if you really feel strongly that a certain person is so malicious and such a menace that it’s important that they really be taken seriously, and here we are with the kid gloves, and the proof that we’re not really laying a glove on them is that they’ll happily appear on the show.
A thing that actually kind of shocked and stunned me was when Monica Lewinsky was on the show. I guess I