Tony Shalhoub Goes Full Agent

Tony Shalhoub joins Rich to talk about American Classic, the MGM+ show whose season finale just dropped on Sunday. The entry point came from Leslie Urdang, an old Yale Drama School friend who produced the show. Shalhoub plays an agent, and the role gave him a chance to sit on the other side of the desk after a career of working with agents. The material pulled from the world of community theater, where people with day jobs use the stage as the thing that holds the town together. Shalhoub fell for it.

The Wisconsin sweatshirt he wears gives Rich his opening. Shalhoub is from Green Bay, one of ten siblings, and he grew up during the Lombardi years. He can name the roster. Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, Paul Hornung, Boyd Dowler, Henry Jordan. His older sister babysat for Lombardi's kids. In a town of 65,000 at the time, brushing elbows with the team was not remarkable. Shalhoub's father had season tickets. Eight of them passed to him and his siblings, spread across the Packers' sideline. Three sisters still live in Green Bay. Two of them walk to Lambeau on game days.

Shalhoub is on the Jordan Love train. He thinks this year hurt because of injuries and believes a surge is coming. On the Bears moving into the chat, he grimaces. Ben Johnson plays the provocateur role, and Shalhoub calls it sensitive. He thinks Chicago has real talent but predicts Green Bay takes the division back.

Rich pulls Shalhoub through his filmography. Men in Black required a full head cast and a 360-degree camera track for the scene where his head gets blown off and grows back. Galaxy Quest came from theater instincts and turned into lifelong friendships with Sigourney Weaver, Dean Parisot, Missi Pyle, Sam Rockwell, and the late Alan Rickman.

On Monk, Shalhoub says he was channeling a more exaggerated version of himself. The unlock came from Dean Parisot directing the pilot. During a scene around a simple desk lamp, Parisot asked if he felt like he needed to touch the lampshade. Shalhoub reached over with his index finger and adjusted it. The spirit of the character ran up his arm. The Emmys followed.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel stays the conversation's emotional anchor. Shalhoub credits the writers, the costumes, and the production design for pulling him back to his own childhood in the late 1950s. The final season landed for him because it did not just wrap the lead's story. It gave every secondary character a real ending, which Shalhoub says is almost never true in television. The scene where Abe accidentally watches his daughter perform in the Catskills is his favorite moment of the run. Watching Rachel Brosnahan make that subtle adjustment on stage required almost no acting from him. His jaw dropped, and so did Abe's.

Shalhoub closes by plugging We Thought They'd Never Leave, the book he co-authored with his daughter Josie about his family's fifty-year summer reunions in Wisconsin.