Michael McKean is the improviser’s improviser, the rock star’s rock star and
the comedy actor’s comedy actor. He was David St Hubbins, the blond-maned
frontman of the spoof rock band Spinal Tap. He was Lenny Kosnowski in Laverne
and Shirley, one of the most popular American sitcoms of the late
1970s. He’s acted with his Tap bandmate Christopher Guest on all but one of
the improvised comedy films that have made Guest’s name as a director over
the past decade. He’s cropped up in scores of TV shows, including Saturday
Night Live, Alias and The X-Files. Somehow, though,
the roles remain more famous than the man who created them.
“I did The Pajama Game on Broadway this year,” says McKean.
“And people would come up to me after the show who assumed this was my
second big job, that I hadn’t done anything since Laverne and
Shirley. ‘Where ya been?’ ‘Well, I’ve been in about 150 movies. Just
not the ones you go and see. Or if you do go and see you don’t recognise
me’.”
Now McKean is about to make his first appearance on a British stage — apart
from a Spinal Tap gig at the Royal Albert Hall in 1992 — in Love
Song, a peculiar romantic comedy by the New York writer John
Kolvenbach. It’s the story of a lonely young man (Cillian Murphy), the thief
he falls in love with (Neve Campbell) and his seemingly more stable sister
and her provocative husband (Kristen Johnson and McKean). It’s a deceptive
story of finding and creating love: or, as McKean puts it, “it’s a very
funny play that’s also profound about how you sometimes have to colour
outside the lines if you are going to make yourself really happy”.
McKean loved the script’s twists and dialogue. There’s talk of taking the show
to New York next year. “But job one is to get it up on its feet here,” he
says with characteristic groundedness. “As Ralph Richardson said, ‘Acting is
merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing’. So we’ll
do that first, and the laughs will come later.”
He may have pulled off a disappearing act in the eyes of Middle America for 25
years, but McKean’s role in This is Spinal Tap means he will
for ever be an icon to the many bands and comedy fans who worship the film.
Perhaps it was the blond mop he wore as the alpha-male Londoner David St
Hubbins that makes it hard to reconcile him with the steady 59-year-old
sitting before me in slacks and tank-top. When I told some friends I was
coming to interview Michael McKean, they looked blank. When I said David St
Hubbins, their faces lit up. Is McKean happy that, 22 years later, many see
it as his defining moment? “Yeah,” he says. “Oh yeah. We’ve always been
proud of the movie. It came out pretty much as we wanted it.”
While Guest’s dumb guitarist Nigel Tufnel snaffled some of the best lines in
this improvised “rockumentary” and Harry Shearer’s bassist Derek Smalls got
the best facial hair, it was McKean’s fashion-disaster of a front man who
unselfishly motored the narrative. Like all good improvisers, he’d rather
lose a gag than lose credibility, something that always makes him excel in
Guest’s films, whether as a camp dog-lover in Best in Show, a
faded folk star in A Mighty Wind, or a touchy scriptwriter in the
upcoming For Your Consideration.
It could even be that his unselfishness makes McKean eminently employable
rather than a star turn. “Well, I can go as broad as anyone,” he says, “and
I have. But I think most of the film work I do is as close to real as I can
be. A lot of the time it’s the best way to sell a joke. If you take a joke
and whirl it around your head and hit someone in the face with it, it’s not
as funny as if you slip it under the door.”
So does it take confidence for a comic actor to emphasise character over
jokes? “I think so. It’s also trust in this company. I’ve known Chris Guest
for nearly 40 years. I’ve known Harry Shearer for 35 years. I work with the
same people over and over again because it’s like going home, except you’re
still speaking to everyone.”
McKean was raised in Long Island, New York. His father was a record-company
executive, who gave his son a love of music and a weather eye for bogusness:
“He was a big influence. He did not suffer bull**** gracefully.”
After studying acting at New York University — where he met Guest — and a
brief stint playing guitar with the fading psychedelic band the Left Banke,
he moved to Los Angeles, where he teamed up with Shearer and David Lander to
make the cult radio show Credibility Gap.
Then, in 1976, he and Lander were hired to write a script for the Happy
Days spin-off Laverne and Shirley. They were told they could
stick their Credibility Gap characters Lenny and Squiggy into the
show at some point. “Which we took to mean the first show! So we wrote
ourselves into the first show and every succeeding show; the show was a big
hit, suddenly I was paying the bills.”
Then came Spinal Tap. He was on a roll. Did he think that that he
might become a leading man?
“You know,” he says slowly, “I don’t really know how that’s done. Look at a
few careers. You can’t track them. If you walked up to Leslie Nielsen on the
set of Forbidden Planet and said, ‘You know what? If you wait 20
years you’re going to be a huge comedy star,’ he’d look at you as if you
were out of your mind. So I don’t worry about those things. It’s like George
Carlin said: ‘I don’t sweat the petty things . . . and I don’t pet the
sweaty things’.”
With more than 150 film and TV credits to his name, not to mention his recent
theatre roles, McKean has never lacked work. Guest asked him to collaborate
on Waiting for Guffman, the first of his series of improvised film
comedies, but McKean was too busy filming at the time, so Guest went on to
devise all his films with Eugene Levy.
But he and his second wife, the actress Annette O’Toole, have been slowly
writing a stage musical together over the past few years. And when O’Toole
finishes her stint as Superman’s mum on the TV show Smallville
next year — and the 2,200-mile round-trip commute from Los Angeles to
Vancouver that it entails — they hope finally to finish it.
McKean has a reputation for being easy to work with, but there’s one thing he
insists on: no moody nonsense from his co-stars. A trace, perhaps, of his
father. And certainly of his NYU drama teacher, the actress Olympia Dukakis.
“She was very plainspoken,” he says. “We’d talk about how hard it is creating
something believable on stage. But she also said: ‘Look, however hard it
gets, don’t ever lose sight of the fact that the reason you wanted to do
this was that it looks like fun.’ And it is fun. Because life’s too short to
sweat the petty things, it really is.”
Love Song starts previews at the New Ambassadors, WC2 (0870
0606627), on Saturday and opens on Dec 4
