Stephen Tobolowsky became a “Hey, I know that guy!” character actor after playing the relentlessly cheerful insurance agent Ned Ryerson in the 1993 Bill Murray flick Groundhog Day. But Tobolowsky hasn’t always been a nice guy. In 1988, after 15 years of bit roles, he broke out in the Civil Rights drama Mississippi Burning, playing a hate-spewing Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Coincidentally, both movies had the same casting director, Howard Feuer. “That doesn’t happen very often, that you play a racist in one movie and later they bring you in to try out for Ned Ryerson,” Tobolowsky says with a laugh.
Tobolowsky was born and raised in Dallas and has acted for 50 years. After graduating from Kimball High School in 1969, he left his native Oak Cliff and made the arduous trek across the Trinity River to Southern Methodist University. There he studied drama, began a 15-year relationship with future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley, and earned his first paid acting gigs in local theaters. Now his credits include plum movie roles in Basic Instinct, Sneakers, Memento, Single White Female, The Insider, and the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday. He’s also been a series regular on Deadwood, Silicon Valley, The Goldbergs, the Netflix reboot of One Day at a Time, and the currently running NBC sitcom Lopez vs. Lopez.
Tobolowsky is a professional storyteller whose spellbinding monologues were recorded in the independent film Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party and the one-man stage play turned podcast The Tobolowsky Files. It’s impossible to have a short conversation with him. Any question or prompt might spark an epic Proustian riff that skips through time and space. Throughout, there’s a mellifluous Texas accent that you hear in every role. “That’s all about me not being able to do other accents!” Tobolowsky says. “I’m terrible at accents!”
Enjoying this article?TEXAS HIGHWAYS: What are your earliest memories of Oak Cliff?
Stephen Tobolowsky: It was woods and creeks and new housing developments. My friend Billy Hart created The Dangerous Animals Club. We had a little clubhouse, and we put a dead tarantula in there. We put in a live scorpion. Billy’s brother found a rattlesnake skull. We put that in there, too. The fitting end to The Dangerous Animals Club was when we knocked over the glass jar that had the scorpion in it and the scorpion got loose in the clubhouse.
TH: How long have you wanted to be an actor?
ST: I was an actor from the time I was 5. I played Hansel in Hansel and Gretel at the summer play festival in Kiest Park, and this girl Marcia played Gretel. I had to kiss Marcia’s cheek or forehead. Whenever my lips touched her, a shot of electricity ran through me. I won Second Best Pee-Wee Actor in the festival for my performance.
TH: You studied theater at SMU in the ’70s. Who was in the program with you?
ST: Beth Henley was there. Patricia Richardson. Powers Boothe was a new graduate student. Kathy Bates was a junior when I was a freshman, and she wasn’t cast in anything the whole time. They ended up doing a production just for her, Electra.
TH: You and Beth were together as a couple for a long time. You watched her write Crimes of the Heart, right?
ST: She took over our breakfast nook in Los Angeles and turned it into her office, and after a while she’s got this pile, four inches high, of typewritten paper. This is her new play. She’s called it Old Granddaddy’s Dying. I sit in our little living room with this huge pile of paper, and I start reading—and it was stratospheric. I said, “Beth, you are gonna be famous. I’m sorry, but that is the best play I’ve ever read. And you can’t call it Old Granddaddy’s Dying.”
TH: Is it true you suggested the title Crimes of the Heart?
ST: That was my only contribution to what was probably the best American play of the latter part of the 20th century, which won her a Pulitzer [in 1981], ended up on Broadway, and became a movie that was nominated for tons of awards.
TH: There’s an alternate universe where you’re a rock ‘n’ roller, isn’t there?
ST: When I was a freshman at Kimball, Bobby Foreman and Jim Rigby had this little group. They would perform Jim’s songs at parties, and Bobby asked me if I wanted to join and play the bass. I didn’t know how to play the bass, but because Bobby played every instrument, he showed me where to put my fingers.
TH: How did you cross paths with Stevie Ray Vaughan?
ST: Bobby said he had connections for us to do a recording of our stuff. He said, “Oh, and I asked a kid in our neighborhood, Jimmie Vaughan’s brother, Stevie, to play guitar for us.” Now, we all knew Jimmie. He was our age, and Stevie was 14. We said, “Bobby, why? Stevie’s a kid.” Bobby said, “Shut up, Stephen. This kid is really good, and he’s going to make us sound like we know what we’re doing.”
We started doing “Red, White and Blue,” and Stevie stopped us after 30 seconds and was like, “OK, I get it—this is, like, a crappy song. What if I do, like, a crappy lead, and then go into a good lead?” Bobby said, “Oh, well—that sounds good.” And so, on the recording, which is the first studio recording of Stevie Ray Vaughan—I have some of these records in my home, unopened, for anyone who’s willing to pay the price—we all stood around a microphone and sang in harmony. Then we all sat back, and Stevie did the crappy lead going into the good lead.
The engineer goes, “Son, that’s pretty good. You got another one in you?” So, Stevie stood up and did another lead. I see the mouth open on the engineer, like he just saw a flying saucer land in his backyard. Seeing Stevie play that day was the first time any of us had ever seen genius.
The next time I saw Stevie, I was in Memphis, Tennessee, shooting Great Balls of Fire with Jimmie, who was an actor in the movie. Jimmie and I used to drink and hoot and holler all night when we weren’t working. One time at six in the morning, Jimmie says, “Stevie’s in town.” So, we went over to this coffee place, and there was Stevie. It was there at that breakfast that Jimmie and Stevie talked about doing a double album, and Stevie got the invitation to go play with Eric Clapton up in Wisconsin. Jimmie always wanted to meet Eric Clapton and Stevie said, “Want to come with?” When we finished that movie, Jimmie and Stevie and Jimmie’s wife, Connie Crouch—all these people—they all go to see the Vaughan brothers play with Eric Clapton onstage. And they finish, and Stevie jumps on the helicopter, and Jimmie jumps on the helicopter, and Connie Crouch goes to get on the helicopter, and the pilot says, “Man, too much. There’s too much weight.” He says to Jimmie, “You can go on the helicopter.” Jimmie says, “Where my wife goes, I go.” So, Jimmie got off the helicopter. That helicopter did not make it 50 feet before it spun and then crashed and exploded.
TH: When did you start to be recognized in public?
ST: It probably had to be after Groundhog Day. That movie surprised all of us. We shot Groundhog Day, and then it got released, and it got good reviews, not great reviews. Then I got a call from our producer at the end of the first month of it being out, and he said, “Stephen, I think we’ve got a hit.” People started recognizing me [as Ned Ryerson] in grocery stores. “Oh, my God, you look just like that guy that’s in that movie with the glasses!”
TH: What shows have you been on that you felt had a creative vision?
ST: There are very few shows that are as good as One Day at a Time.
TH: The reboot, on Netflix?
ST: Yes. There aren’t too many shows that can make you laugh, make you think, make you cry, and have beautiful writing like that one did. That was a Norman Lear show. Silicon Valley was extraordinary, one of the greatest shows ever. That kind of quality comes from the top: Mike Judge, who as you know is from Texas, and all the other writers and producers on that show were brilliant.
Deadwood was an amazing mess, and I got to work with my old mate Powers Boothe on it. This is how crazy [creator] David Milch is: There’s a scene where Tim Olyphant’s character, the sheriff, is arresting me, and he’s taking me across town to put me in jail, and there’s a bull walking with us. The bull lifts up its tail and drops an entire load on my legs and my shoes, and Milch yells, “Cut, print it! That was fantastic!” Then David comes running up to me and says, “So you know, Stephen, we don’t wash the clothes on Deadwood. We keep the stains and everything consistent for continuity. So, you’ll be living with that bull s— for the rest of the season.”
TH: What’s a movie where you just didn’t know whether it was going to work or not, but it turned out to be great?
ST: Memento by Christopher Nolan. I get the screenplay and it’s 340 pages long, and I go, “Oh God, amateurs, amateurs.” I told Ann, my wife, “Baby, I gotta read this. I promised I would read this script, but it’s gonna be terrible. It’s longer than Gone With the Wind. But by the time I get to the end, I start screaming profanities upstairs, and I throw Memento across the room. Ann comes running up, and she goes, “Terrible?” And I go, “No—probably the greatest screenplay I’ve ever read.” I get a meeting with Chris, and I tell him, “I could play Sandy Jenkins.”
TH: You asked for that part? The character is barely in the movie!
ST: I think I had one word! Chris goes, “That isn’t really a very big part.” I said, “Well, the thing is this, you’re going to see a lot of people who come in and audition for this movie because the script is so great, but I am the only person you are going to see who’s actually had amnesia.” And I told him the story about having kidney surgery at Cedars-Sinai. They did an experimental anesthesia on me where you experience all the pain of surgery, but you forget about it afterward. Like any general anesthesia, it takes days to wear off, so there would be periods of time where I would find myself in the bathroom, standing at the toilet, and I did not know if I was about to pee or if I had peed, and Annie would yell to me, “You finished 10 minutes ago!”
TH: Do you consider yourself a lucky person?
ST: I was held hostage at gunpoint in a grocery store. The guy had a gun to my head for a few hours until I talked my way out of it. I went horseback riding in Iceland, riding around an active volcano, and the horse starts running wild, throws me onto a hardened lava flow, and I end up breaking my neck in five places. But yeah, somebody was watching out for me because I lived. The doctor tells me, “You had a fatal injury, but you survived because your neck is the opposite of the typical human being’s neck. Ordinary human beings have a curve in their cervical spine.” I don’t. When I hit my head, it broke five bones in my neck, but it didn’t snap my neck in two. I would say I’ve been very lucky.
