Not many people have managed to land the words Nazi and funny in the same sentence.
Charlie Chaplin did it in
The Great Dictator. Mel Brooks did it in
The Producers with the song and dance number "Springtime for Hitler."
And my guest today, the Emmy-nominated Larry Thomas, did it, too. He’s been an actor for 25 years and is a veteran of dozens of films, TV shows, and hundreds of theater performances. Larry recently finished shooting the film
Postal and was seen on “Arrested Development,” “Hot Properties," “Threshold,” “Scrubs,” and a Lexus commercial as a crazed pre-Bugsy visionary selling the idea of Vegas. Last year, Larry completed a 3- city, 140-show production of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple,” the female version, starring Barbara Eden.
Who the hell is Larry Thomas? No answers for you, not yet anyway. Be patient, my friends. You’re not going to want to miss this interview.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Larry, I’m sure a few people recognized your name but most probably won’t. Could you end the suspense and tell Mr. Media listeners and readers the role for which you’re most famous?
LARRY THOMAS: Well, I guess I could end it by saying, "No soup for you, Mr. Media!" I played the Soup Nazi on "Seinfeld."
ANDELMAN: I think people now know
exactly who you are.
THOMAS: It seems to be a phrase that most of the world knows. I actually have been told by many people who I’ve met that they use the phrase constantly in their lives, and they’ve never actually seen the episode. They’ve actually gotten it secondhand from somebody else, but they love the way it sounds, so they use it.
ANDELMAN: Isn’t that amazing? Now, do you remember getting the call to audition for that?
THOMAS: I remember it really, really well. It was at a time in my life when I was actually under the threat of being thrown out of my acting class if I didn’t get a job, a paying acting job. I had a certain amount of weeks to get it. I’d worked and worked and worked, done interviews, tried to meet people, dropped off photographs, what they call pounding the pavement.
One night I was actually having dinner with a guy that wanted me to work as a bail bondsman for his company because I was a bail bondsman, and I was trying to be more of an actor. I got paged, and I went to a pay phone, and my agent said, “There’s a call from ‘Seinfeld.’ They want to see you on this guest spot. The character’s called the ‘Soup Nazi,’ and I think they want you to work up a Middle Eastern accent. Other than that, there’s no scene available on paper or anything so you’ll just have to go in tomorrow morning and see what they have.” So it was kind of mysterious actually.
ANDELMAN: How do you prepare for something like that?
THOMAS: Well, you prepare for every audition differently anyway, but the way you prepare is based on what you see on paper mostly. You want to read the scene and go okay, this is a comedy, whatever. I need to think this way or wow, this is very serious, I need to do a little work on this. In order to get the Middle Eastern accent, the first thing I did was I went home and took the videotape for
Lawrence of Arabia, and I put it in, and I just worked up an impression of Omar Sharif. He has such a beautiful accent, and I thought, “They can’t fault me on that one.”
I was a big fan of “Seinfeld” since season three, and my episode was in season seven, so I had four years, at that point, of watching “Seinfeld.” I knew the characters. I knew how Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer would probably affect a guy called the Soup Nazi. It was so descriptive, the name, so I just worked on that. I was almost completely right on most of it except I thought Kramer would be like his worst nightmare, whereas instead, in the brilliant script by Spike Feresten, he actually had Kramer his only friend which I thought, in the end, was hilarious. So I just worked on it.
I called a friend of mine who’s a stand-up comedian, a guy named Tom Ayers, and I just was saying “Wow, I’ve got this audition for ‘Seinfeld’.” He said, “If they don’t have anything on paper tomorrow, what are you gonna do, what are you gonna say?” I just started ad-libbing things. I said, in dealing with George, I’d probably have some kind of a cart or something maybe on the street in New York, and George would probably come up, and he’d probably try to get something for nothing. I would probably say something to him like, “You, small fry, get to the end of my line or no soup!” And Tom said, “That’s great, man, that’s great, I love that no soup thing. It actually has a ring to it. If they do have something written, throw that in anyway.”
I didn’t need to because when I got there the next morning, three of the six total scenes waiting there for me, and no soup for you was the third line in. So we had actually both thought of the same line, although Spike didn’t so much dream it up as much as heard it because that’s what the real guy that he based the character on in New York,
Al Yeganeh, would say to people.
ANDELMAN: I’ll come back to Al in a moment. So obviously you got the job, you auditioned, you got the job. What do you recall about being on the set and playing the character? Was it all laid out? Was it like a Neil Simon moment where every word, everything was laid out, or did it happen a little more improvisationally?
THOMAS: Well, no. I stuck with whatever was written in the script, almost. I did ad-lib one word which has become a little bit famous actually, but it was almost accidental. But the script would change a little bit every day, anyway, because that’s how sitcoms work. No matter how funny you are around the table-read on the first day, and I’ve never understood this, but then again I’m not a sitcom writer or producer. The next day, it’s changed. And even the stuff you thought was really funny is different.
On “Seinfeld,” if you’ve watched any of those special features about Larry David, and Jerry, even though they didn’t write the original script, they did a lot of the rewrites to make it fit more and more into “Seinfeld” and to Jerry’s mind -- or mostly Larry’s mind -- because this is before he took a break. But I pretty well stuck to the script.
I was actually very nervous, to tell you the truth, because it wasn’t until after I went to the callback for the audition, which was yet another audition, that I found out that there weren’t just three scenes, there were
six. And when a guest character has six scenes, he’s pretty much the guest character of the episode, which I didn’t expect. And it was really interesting because in the callback, I walked in, and the first time I just read for a casting associate named Brian Myers, but when I went back, I went to read for Jerry and Larry David, and Andy Ackerman, and Spike, who wrote it, and some of the other writers were there like Peter Mehlman because they were now producers and so forth. And I think George Shapiro, who is Jerry’s manager and also one of the executive producers of the show, I think he was there. He was Andy Kaufman’s manager. Danny DeVito plays him in that movie
Man on the Moon.
ANDELMAN: Right.
THOMAS: So he was there. There were a lot of guys there, and I went in, and it was a little late, so I actually just barely cleared the top of the stairs when the casting director grabbed me, Marc Hirschfeld, and dragged me into the room and just handed me this stack of paper. We went through the first three scenes that I had already read, which had changed a little bit. But Jerry Seinfeld was laughing his head off so loudly that that’s all I could hear. I had to actually compete vocally to override his incessant laughter, which was great, but then when I got to the end of the third scene, I realized that I still had an equally thick stack of paper in my hand, which were the next three scenes which I had never seen.
Rather than say, “Oh I’m sorry, I haven’t seen these yet, may I take a moment and take a look at these,” I just felt like you’ve got Jerry Seinfeld cracking up! Another great thing that happened which you hope for in auditions for characters like that is I never spoke in my own voice. So at this moment, nobody in the room even knows I don’t speak like that, and I recalled advice from a great, great old actress who is deceased now, Sheree North. She told me “When you go into an audition and you’re playing a character, don’t ever let them know who you really are. Let them believe you are that character, because they don’t have the imagination to make the adjustment once you’ve come in and go, ‘Hi, how ya doin’,’ and then launch into the evil killer. So it was going so well, and I hadn’t said a word. Nobody knew that I didn’t really talk like this, so I just launched into the next three scenes absolutely stone-cold, picking the words up off the paper as I went. I just made that decision.
Anyway, cut back to the set. The part turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought it was, and I was nervous. There were some really good character actors in that week who had smaller parts than I did. Yul Vazquez, who played the gay armoire thief with the Cuban accent, and John Paragon, who played the other armoire thief, who was Paul Reubens’ writing partner for a really long time -- and he was in “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” and did specials with Paul Reubens on TV and stuff -- so I knew these guys, and I was going “Wow.” Not to mention all the Seinfeld people themselves. So I tried to stick really verbatim to the script, not make any mistakes, be Mister Perfect, except for one line that Spike had written where Elaine does the Al Pacino impression, and I answer her with, “No soup for you! Come back.” The way he had written it was, “Come back in one year!” but I’m just flying with this accent. I’d been told when I do accents that, one producer said, “You really play the accent, and it becomes a character of itself.” It’s music to me, doing different accents. So I’m flying through this accent, and somehow, “Come back in one year!” just didn’t fit. So I said, “Come back, one year!” and everybody on the set just fell and started laughing. It was the first rehearsal. I don’t know whether it was Andy Ackerman or Larry David or someone who said, “Keep that.” So it became part of the lexicon because half the time when I sign autographs and stuff, people ask me if I’ll write, “Come back, one year!” So it’s almost hard to write grammatically.
ANDELMAN: Your ears and your eyes see it differently, hear it differently.
THOMAS: That was my single ad-lib. Other than that, everything was exactly how Spike wrote it. And then Larry David had a couple of adjustments to my scenes after the audience left the night we shot it. The mind of Larry David, it never turned off. He was always adjusting.
CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING!© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.Labels: Al Yeganeh, Barbara Eden, Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Larry Thomas, Mel Brooks, Seinfeld, Soup Nazi, Spike Feresten
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