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He’s worked with Spielberg and appeared on Seinfeld . He’s directed Philip Seymour Hoffman and been directed by George Clooney and Wes Anderson. In his own words, he talks through his remarkable professional journey.
Bob Balaban, George Clooney, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, and Matt Damon from The Monuments Men.
Adam B. Vary for BuzzFeed / Phil Mccarten / Reuters
About 20 minutes into the first of three phone interviews with actor-producer-director Bob Balaban — I was in sunny Los Angeles, he was in wintry New York City — he stopped in the middle of an answer about acting as the head of NBC in several episodes of Seinfeld.
"Oh my god," he said. "Everybody's OK, but a giant block of ice just fell 20 feet from where I'm standing, outside the restaurant where I'm going to have lunch. Oh my god, right in front of the door where I would've been walking in. It destroyed the neon sign above the doorway to the restaurant, and it exactly crashed on where I would have entered the door. I could have been killed during our interview!"
For a character actor who has spent his nearly 50-year career playing quiet, circumspect men, Balaban's life is full of flashpoints of excitement. He's worked with everyone from Steven Spielberg to Lena Dunham and George Clooney to Robert Altman. He's appeared in two Woody Allen films — one before the Mia Farrow scandal broke in 1992, and one after — and his performances in two other Allen films ended up on the cutting room floor. He's appeared on memorable episodes of Friends and The West Wing, directed Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his first feature film roles, and was a regular fixture in Christopher Guest's quartet of sublime improvised comedies.
And this week, he'll appear in The Grand Budapest Hotel, his second film with director Wes Anderson.
"He's always his own self in all situations, and it's a delightful self, and very practical self," Balaban said of Anderson. "You think he might be eccentric, and he wears a suit all the time — that's considered eccentric. But he's not at all eccentric. He's practical. He knows how to get what he wants in a very pleasant way."
Balaban's ease with show business seems to come naturally — his uncle Barney Balaban ran Paramount Pictures for 30 years — but Balaban said that while growing up in Chicago, he was barely aware of his family's powerful position in Hollywood. "There was no show business at all practically speaking in my family," he said. "We didn't talk about what movie star was in town, and how well were the grosses of the last picture. Literally, I never heard anything about any of that at all. I was rather just buzzed to discover that my uncle ran a movie studio. I didn't really know. It was very downplayed. You know, Midwestern Jews keep a low profile."
Still, he must have picked up some kind of ambitious pluck: While still an undergrad at Colgate University in New York, Balaban essentially talked his way into getting an agent to submit him for the role of Linus in the off-Broadway debut of the musical You're a Good Man Charlie Brown — and he landed the part.
"I got jobs quickly," he said. "I was strangely aggressive for somebody who didn't really seem like they would be."
That aggression landed Balaban his first film role in what would become an iconic, Oscar-award winning, and highly controversial film — and Balaban's role had him at the center of the controversy. He graciously walked me through his memories and insights from that experience, as well as 22 other films and TV shows he's worked on over the course of his remarkable career. Here they are, in his own lightly edited words.
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Balaban and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Conventional showbiz wisdom says Balaban's first film role — for a film about a wide-eyed Texan (Jon Voight) who moves to New York City to become a male prostitute — would have derailed his entire career. But Balaban did not see it that way — and still doesn't.
I go down on Jon Voight. The character does. Was it shocking to be doing that? I was so naïve! It didn't occur to me. It was just acting. It was respectable. It wasn't a porn movie. Dustin Hoffman was in the movie, and John Schlesinger was a famous director. It did not occur to me for a second that this was anything shocking. But I guess it was shocking, and the movie got an X rating for my scene basically — and then the X rating mysteriously went away when it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. I know this is even more absurd — I was a little unaware of what I was auditioning for, and I thought perhaps it was a television movie. Now that's really strange. I guess I was just Pollyanna.
It had no effect on anything [in my career]. I mean, it wasn't like, Oh, you can only be up for gay roles now that you've done this. It was kind of a not very large part, and I wasn't the star of the movie. I suppose if I really wanted to be a movie star, or was able to be a movie star, this might have put a little ding in my movie stardom. But I was always just a character actor.
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