Everybody Loves Raymond >> Articles >> 

Date::  February 2004
Author::  Fred Schruers, Photographs by Jeff Lipsky
Source::  Premiere Magazine
Credits:  Scans and transcript courtesy of D.

Everybody Loves Romano on TV, but will his regular-guy charms work in movies? Hey, even Tom Hanks was on a sitcom once. 

Ray Romano is running about 20 minutes late this morning. His assistant Christy says he's most likely dropping the kids off at school. Given that Romano has a 13-year-old daughter, twin 10-year-old boys, and a 5-year-old boy, that's entirely feasible. But when he arrives, he's wearing below-the-ankle white socks, the sort one might put on for a trip to the driving range with a favorite golf club. The socks help put his shorts-and-polo-shirt ensemble squarely in not-so-macho land, which is a zone Romano comfortably inhabits.

He greets his interviewer differently, apologizing for the wait, and sits behind his desk in a cramped corner of his unremarkable office in Burbank. Wherever his record-setting paycheck for Everybody Loves Raymond - about $1.8 million per episode - is going, it's not for designer furnishings. Romano gives the smile that always seems to border on a grimace and, discreetly spooning up breakfast cereal, awaits whatever comes next.

He's famous for self-deprecation, so just to test the waters, let's wonder aloud if he's got an optimistic feeling about this month's Welcome to Mooseport, in which he makes his film debut. He of course voiced the woolly mammoth in 2002's blockbuster Ice Age, and he's the best-paid, yet most down-to-earth, figure on network television. (Raymond is the fifth-most-watched show on television; last season, 105 million people saw it at least once). So, Hollywood, here we come, huh?

This is hubris grave enough to stop a man from lifting spoon to mouth. Romano's eyes widen a bit, as if to emphasize how deeply he's been misunderstood. "You know - " A beat. "I don't for one second assume that this movie is going to do well, that I'm going to do well, that I'm going to be received well. I swear I don't - I'm f***ing nervous about the whole thing, I swear to God."

Well, that's not how they kick off your typical Inside the Actors Studio segment. It's true that in Welcome to Mooseport he's playing a popular everyman, not too far removed from Raymond or from Romano himself: a hardware store owner who fights for the mayoralty of a small Maine town (and for his girlfriend) against an ex-President, played by no less than Gene Hackman. Yet he holds his own, according to director Donald Petrie (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days), who has directed Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and Michael Caine. "In this self-effacing way he'd be, 'Gee, I'm in this scene with Hackman. Is anybody going to look at me?' but Ray has got a real Jimmy Stewart quality about him."

Still, Romano, as he absorbs the compliment, has a penetrating eye for the bad news: "How was he about the film? Because he's very evasive with me - 'It's good, it's good . . .' and I think that that's his way, but that doesn't help the shit that I've got going on in my head."

It's very hard to say where Romano, 46, got such a sense of his potential for abject failure. His career to this point - once you get past the part where at 29 he was still living as a single guy in his parent's basement, a stand-up comic surviving as a sometime bank teller - has actually skipped from success to success. Though Romano scored well with a stand-up bit on The Tonight Show and had a fine following on the club circuit, his water-shed moment was a May 1995 appearance on the Letterman show. When his routine was followed by the hard-to-score summons chat with Dave, Romano dared to hope. "I just knew I had a good set, and this was at a time when all the comics were getting development deals, to try to develop a show. I remember having a discussion with my manager, saying, 'I've been doing it for 11 years, done all the shows, Carson and Leno and HBO's Young Comedians - I'm out there. Isn't anybody going to offer?"

A week later came the call from Letterman producer Rob Burnett. "He had my number at my house in Queens - 'In case you get other offers, just know that we're interested.'" Romano's studiously glum monotone leaves little doubt that then, as now, he was his own worst agent. "I said, 'Yeah, man. There's no other offers.'"

Both Letterman's Worldwide Pants and HBO Independent Productions, hip entities though they are, saw the potential in Romano's resolutely un-chic comic touchstones; stories of growing up Italian in Forest Hills, minor domestic failures and disappointments, sexual self-doubt, and detailed - one could say Seinfeldian - dissection of the petty annoyances of life, like coupons ("No man is going to look a speedy register girl right in her eye just to claim he's got 20 cents off the Cocoa Pebbles"). They paired him with writer Philip Rosenthal (Coach), who is three years younger than Romano and was raised up the Hudson in Rockland County. "I wrote the pilot based on Ray's actual life," says Rosenthal (now the series' show runner), "but I never met his family, so what I didn't know about his people I filled in with my family."

Everybody Loves Raymond debuted in September 1996 in a time slot that had been a graveyard for CBS for seven years running; it did poorly until the following March, when it was moved to Monday night, following Romano idol Bill Cosby's show. Thus began the run that currently finds Raymond the number-two sitcom, after Friends, and includes Emmy wins for the show and all five key cast members. (It also includes a rough patch before this season started, when some of the cast held out for a raise and were lured back with a cut in the syndication money, including a sliver of Romano's and Rosenthal's share.)

Rosenthal thinks his colleague and friend was wise "not to jump into movies the first or second year, when he was just starting to feel his oats as an actor. 'He never acted before this show, you know. Now, I kind of safeguarded it by not making him a gay astronaut from Cleveland. We kept him close to who he was. And he was adamant at the beginning about only doing things that Ray Romano actually did. He doesn't drink coffee, so he wouldn't drink coffee in the show. I had to say to him, 'You know, since it's TV, it could be anything we want in the cup.' And he said, 'Well, I guess at some point I have to start acting.'"

Twentieth Century Fox cochairman Tom Rothman, who shepherded Mooseport through a season in development hell that would have left most light comedies of its ilk in cinders, persisted with the film in large part because he saw " a reason for Ray's consistent popularity. He's that rare thing, an appealing, relatable comic genius. With comedy can come an aggressive edge, but he's more like Tom Hanks, with a gentle, self-effacing comedy. He's another rare thing in Hollywood - a genuinely humble man."

Taking questions after his Emmy win in 2002, Romano memorably compared Raymond with another nominee for Outstanding Comedy Series, Sex and the City: "Look at how different the shows are," he said. "There's no sex and no city in our show." The same might be said of Mooseport, which began its trek with rumors of Barry Levinson's getting attached and was projected at various times to have Owen Wilson or Adam Sandler in the role of local guy Handy Harrison, with Dustin Hoffman in serious talks to play the ex-President.

Hoffman's interest coincided with the hiring of director Rod Lurie (The Contender). "Me, Rod and Dustin met for breakfast," Romano recalls, "and if nothing else happened, that was enough for me - breakfast with Dustin Hoffman. Well, it was two hours with the director, and an hour with me and Dustin in the parking lot." The famously loquacious Hoffman held them spell bound as he postulated a plot that would carry messages about campaign finance reform, and he came with homework assignments: "He was talking about a lot of stuff," says Romano. "I was very intimidated . . . I'm so not political, and when he came into the restaurant he had books with him. And I said, 'Oh, no, there's going to be reading involved.'"

Lurie recalls seeing Hoffman become completely charmed by the comic. This tends to happen with Romano. After golfing with him several times at Pebble Beach, Clint Eastwood chose Romano to present his Lifetime Achievement Award at a Screen Actors Guild tribute. "It was the most surreal, greatest honor," says Romano. Then he adds the inevitable coda: "I'm not going to assume I'm his friend." Romano fails to mention that he and his Raymond costars won the SAG award that same night for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series. Kudos seem not to comfort him. "I know I'm a good stand-up. I'm trying to find out if I'm an actor. I'm not into all these techniques and methods, but when I read the script, I did relate it to somebody I know. I use that person. And what's funny is, Dustin Hoffman in the breakfast meeting, he went off on a little tangent about character, and it was great. He said at one point, with such intensity, 'Everybody thinks you become the character. Bullshit. The character becomes you.'"

Before jumping into Mooseport, Romano signed on for a low-risk excursion in the dark indie comedy Eulogy (due this spring), as part of a large ensemble (including Debra Winger, Hank Azaria, and Rip Torn) that brings together three generations of a family. With a glued-on mustache and twin sons in tow, he plays obnoxious Uncle Skip. "What I like is, of the two characters that I'm playing now on film, he was the biggest departure from Ray Barone. He is - if you believe it - probably more selfish and more immature and hornier. But he also has a vulnerability about him. What's odd is, he is the son who feels left out - what Brad Garrett is in our show, I'm playing it."

Since his stand-up days, and during Raymond tapings, Romano has worked on "adrenaline - an audience right in front of you. With the sitcom, I can try to be subtle, but at some point, I've got to project and I've got to hit it, hit this joke a little harder." Now, in his film work, he's becoming highly aware that "small plays pretty big. You can milk and underplay, and sometimes the actor and the director can't even see it until it's on the screen. I'm blown away sometimes by what Hank Azaria [in Eulogy]; I was right there, yet I didn't even see it."

Hoffman and Lurie would ultimately walk away from Mooseport, but Romano stayed on the hunt for the role, reassured by aspects of the character that he already felt cozy with. "He's kind of humble and earnest," he says. "I don't think he is that far from Ray Barone, except he's not as selfish and self-obsessed." Petrie eventually came on board to direct the script by Tom Schulman (What About Bob?), and ER's Maura Tierney was cast as the mayoral aspirants' romantic prize.

Finally, during Raymond's hiatus last summer, Romano traveled with his longtime buddy Jon Manfrellotti, who's a semi-regular on the show (and who plays a reporter in Mooseport), to the film's Toronto location - "the land of SARS" at the time, as Romano puts it. "And that's not good for me, because I'm a little paranoid to begin with. Jon's a hypochondriac, too. So we both had the hand cleanser in our pockets, and any time we shook hands we would do this [washing gesture], and we had the thermometer, you stick it in [gesturing to his ear]. They said the symptoms were 1001 or more. So every half hour we were doing this."

A Raymond episode that brought the cast to Italy had made Romano blas¨¦ toward major production fillips like "the craft service table and the assistants and all that stuff." He pauses, nodding, and tries the next line straight-faced: "The hookers, that was a nice touch."

But seriously - when he saw the aerial shot of the compound Hackman's ex-President character would live in, "I just thought, 'Holy God, they're really making a movie.'" And he was really playing opposite one of cinema's icons. "When we were throwing all the names around, Gene Hackman came up, and I just thought, he's perfect - you buy it no matter who he is, but especially the President. And with me laying off of him, the fear would be real."

The pivotal interaction between Romano and Hackman came early, when Romano was induced to deliver a toast at a dinner for the company after the first table reading. "I picked up my glass and said, 'I just want to say, this is my first major film.' And Gene Hackman goes, 'Holy shit.' It broke the ice, and then we hit it off."

Was there ever a moment where Romano felt he was living an actor's apprenticeship opposite Hackman? "Was there ever not the moment? You've got to understand that's a constant. It's a dichotomy. You have a part of you that thinks you are great, and the other part thinks you suck. And then one day during one scene where I had to explode and confront him - this is maybe the tenth day, and I come out of the hardware store and confront him in the street. And after about the third take, I was looking down just thinking about the scene, and I look up and he's standing right there; he had come across to shake my hand. He said, 'That was good, man, that was really good.' Yeah. I had to change clothes after that."

The formidable issue not just for Romano's career but for his life is what happens in January when Everybody Loves Raymond nears the end of its eighth season, with almost 200 episodes in the can. He and Rosenthal have said they will more than likely call it quits, which Rosenthal (who himself has an eye on feature films) reiterates this day: "We're planning on this being the last year. And we'll decide definitively in January. But at this moment, if we had to decide right now, we would say this is it."

The question draws one of Romano's ever available pained expressions. "Every decision I make, when this piece comes out I will think it's the wrong decision. You can write that - I made the wrong decision."

The Honeymooners has always been a touchstone for both men, and Romano recalls what Jackie Gleason said about ending the show after 39 episodes: "He always regretted that he should have done another year, or more episodes. I'm not comparing me to Jackie Gleason, but for what it takes to get the chemistry and the writing and the audience and to touch on a nerve - the odds of that, it's magic. And we may not ever get it again. But you don't want to force it when it isn't there. I am getting anxiety over it. I am in therapy once a week. You know, it took me 15 years to get 45 minutes of material. Whether it's [going back to perform stand-up], or another show or a movie, I want to do something. My wife thinks when the show's over that I'm going to be around a lot, and I don't want her getting that impression."

The reception Mooseport gets will not be the deciding factor, says Romano, who has also signed on to write a children's book. "I don't want [continuing the show] to be dependent on my film career. Because, first of all, I don't know if I have one, and I'm totally serious about that." What's certain is that Romano does not plan to be in the theater for the premiere - a policy he adopted from Hackman after a conversation late in the shoot. "I was still in awe of him, we were on a break, and it was just me and him standing there. I asked 'How often do you see your movies?' And he said, 'Never.' I said, 'Okay. So do you just like watch it one time, that's it?' He goes, 'No, I never watch them. I can't watch myself. I look at myself, and I'm like, 'Who would pay for this guy?' I'm like, 'I'm right there, man.'"

Romano for once gives an unadulterated smile, as if the future just became a bit less ominous. "And so, at the premiere," he says, "we'll go out to dinner."


This feature article appears in the February 2004 edition of Premiere Magazine, on sale now.

Special thanks to D. for the scans & transcript.

¡¡

l l l