Stephen Collins
How did your appearance in Spamalot come about? Had you worked with director Mike Nichols before?
I'd known Mike for years and years, but I'd never worked with him. I got a call last fall asking if I'd be interested in auditioning for him. I jumped on a plane, had a storybook audition, and Mike said, then and there, "We want you to do this." Looking more closely at the schedule, I realized it was not a good time for me to leave home for an extended period, so I had to say no, which broke my heart. Mike said, "We'll come back to you again." Often people say that and they don't [follow through], but he did. This time, I was able to make it work with my family, and I'm having so much fun.
What's your take on King Arthur?
At the beginning, Mike said, "Arthur hasn't been king very long, but he loves it. It's an inspiring, hopeful time." I really went with that. It's a little bit like this Obama period, where people are hoping that something new and wonderful will come in and cleanse out the old. Also, even though we're in this silly show getting laughs for the most ridiculous of reasons, there has to be a thread of reality to it. When a play is as funny as this, it's easy for an actor to think, "Here comes my next big laugh." You have to be thinking simpler thoughts, like, "I'm talking to God! He's giving me a purpose in life, and I can get other people to rally around." Arthur is a lot of things, including kind of stupid at times, but he's also the king and he's actually going to find the Holy Grail.
It must be nice to do something flat-out funny after being so sincere for 11 years on 7th Heaven.
Had you ever done comedy this broad?
Who knew that one of your earliest Broadway credits was No Sex Please, We're British?
Your theatrical career got started almost 40 years ago with Shakespeare in the Park…
Does it seem like that much time has passed?
The second production [in 1989] is the one that sent Michelle Pfeiffer running back to L.A., never to set foot on a stage again.
When is the last time you were on a stage?
Your co-star in Tattingers! That show [a 1989 TV series about an upscale Manhattan restaurant] would probably be successful now.
Never mind the six degrees of Kevin Bacon—the range of the people you've worked with is almost freaky, from Blythe Danner and Christopher Walken and Diane Keaton to Ann-Margret…
You were the king of romantic TV movies and miniseries for a while. Did you enjoy that period of your career? Was it limiting in any way?
Were you a surrogate dad to those kids? You literally watched them all grow up.
Jessica Biel got some flack for leaving the show, but you recently acted in a short film she produced, so you must have stayed close to her.
You've released a couple of CDs and co-starred in the off-Broadway production of Putting It Together [in 1993]. Have you always maintained a singing career?
What was it like auditioning for Sondheim?
You played with a band during the 7th Heaven years and even recorded The Hits of Rick Nelson. What was that all about?
Will your daughter follow you two into the business?
Was turning 60 a big deal for you?
What has been your most memorable theatrical experience?
See Stephen Collins in Spamalot at the Shubert Theatre.
Yes, and I love working with him. Apparently, this is the first time they've put an Arthur and a Patsy in together, and it turned out to be a wonderful, unexpected bonus for all of us. Drew has a great attitude. There's no fuss, there's no ego, and he's got great instincts. It's a strange relationship, if you look at the script. They barely speak to each other, and yet they're always onstage together. There are a lot of what I would call Jack Benny takes, where somebody says something completely confusing or stupid and the only person I can react to is Drew, even though he's my slave. Sometimes you develop a real bond with someone onstage, and that's happened here.
It really is. What I like about the show is that it's insistently silly. Most people walk away from a joke after getting a laugh, but Monty Python keeps the joke going. The early scene [in Spamalot] is a perfect Monty Python set-up: Arthur arrives at the castle looking for men, gets engaged in the whole discussion about whether birds can carry coconuts, and the conversation goes on and on. Arthur and Patsy actually leave because the other two guys are so interested in what it would take for a swallow to carry a coconut. It doesn't sound particularly funny, but it is. Eric Idle understands what works in front of an audience.
Oh sure, in The Ritz [Collins played Detective Michael Brick in the original Broadway cast in 1975]. It's funny how careers happen, because my first movie, which I got after The Ritz, was All the President's Men [as Nixon aide Hugh Sloan]. And from there, I was off and running in "serious" things. I didn't steer or plan my career—I just sort of went from job to job, and even though 7th Heaven had a lot of comic elements to it, it's not the same thing. One is always having to prove that one can do comedy. In a way, that's all I've done onstage.
I usually leave No Sex Please, We're British off my resume because people go, "What the hell is that?!" But it was an old-fashioned British sex farce, kind of like Boeing-Boeing, a huge hit in London and in the three months we did it on the road. We came to Broadway, and it was playing like gangbusters—you could sit backstage and conduct the laughs. Then the critics came and, snobs that they were at that moment, said, "This is beneath us," and people stopped laughing. The night after the reviews, the laughs were one-tenth of what they had been. It was unbelievable. [The show closed after 16 performances in 1973.]
It was 39 years ago! God! [Laughs.]
Not even vaguely. It feels like 10 years ago, you know? The other funny thing is I've only done two plays in the park, and both were Twelfth Night.
She was quite good in it! That, too, was one of those things the critics didn't like but audiences had a blast at. There were a lot of movie stars in it—Greg Hines, Jeff Goldblum—and those curtain calls were like rock concerts. I actually got nice reviews [as Orsino], so it was a pleasant thing all around for me.
At Williamstown, eight summers ago, I think. I did a production of Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30 with Blythe Danner.
I loved that show. It was a classic example of bad timing. The show hit its stride just as the network lost interest in it.
I've always felt like I could give Kevin Bacon a pretty good run for his money [laughs]. Because I'm one degree away from a lot of people. Claudette Colbert and Ann-Margret alone put me in touch with a lot of people.
The hallmark of most of those roles was that I was the charming but unsympathetic character—the philandering husband, the dark side of J.F.K.—even this movie I did with Keri Russell, The Babysitter's Seduction, where I framed her for murder. I thought, "Well, that's that I'm going to do for the rest of my life." I'm a middle-aged white guy, and that's what happens to middle-aged white guys if you're not Harrison Ford: You play the corrupt senator or the philandering husband. And those parts are often fun. I thought, "Okay, I'm never going to get to play a good guy again." And then along comes 7th Heaven. Now, if I'm lucky, people will get to discover that I can play things other than a good guy. It's funny how that stuff works. Any attempt I've ever made to plan my career or how I will be perceived has not worked. I just go from job to job and try to work with good people.
Oh sure. I had friends who certainly never watched it. And, you know, why should they? I don't think anybody should watch something they don't want to watch. But I definitely found that people who didn't watch 7th Heaven had an image of the show that was wrong. They thought it was this somber, ultra-Christian, preachy, moralizing thing. While it had, god knows, many serious moments, there was a silliness to 7th Heaven, and a light touch that [creator] Brenda Hampton has in her writing. That's why it was successful. And Catherine Hicks [as Annie Camden] and I had a great chemistry.
I felt more like their older brother. When you put a bunch of actors in a room together, they tend to behave like siblings, regardless of their age. These guys all had good parents; Jessica Biel's parents are wonderful people. I definitely feel a pride of family in them, but I don't feel like their dad.
Well, she stayed with the show for six years and actually came back for parts of two more. She did that one photo shoot [a semi-nude spread in Gear magazine] that was pressing the envelope, but she was always wonderful on the set. She is someone for whom the sky's the limit if she gets the right role and her projects do well. I really think she can be the next big female star. There's nothing she can't do.
I let it go for a long time. I was lucky enough that James Naughton dropped out of Putting It Together when he got a pilot, and they called me in at the last minute to sing for Steve Sondheim. It was literally the day after I had sold my book [Eye Contact, the first of Collins' two novels], and I was 20 feet off the ground. For the first time in my life, I went into a singing audition and sang as well as I could sing. And the timing was perfect. They needed someone who could play opposite Julie Andrews. Julie is timeless-looking and I was able to age up a little bit, so we played wonderfully opposite each other.
It was otherworldly. I had been such a fan of his for so long, but I had given up hope that I would ever work with him. They wanted me to sing two songs from Company that I knew fairly well, "Have I Got a Girl for You" and "Sorry/Grateful," which was helpful because I didn't have any time to prepare. He was sitting about 20 feet away, and I sort of sang right past him, and I saw his face with this very relaxed smile. Then he took me in the next room where he had a piano and said, "I want to see if you can sing back some difficult intervals. Have you ever sung tight harmony?" I said, "Actually I was in the Zumbyes quartet at Amherst." I knew he went to Williams, and Amherst and Williams are arch-rivals. He said, "You were in the Zumbyes? That's good, because there's a lot of difficult harmony in this." So we sat down at the piano and he would play a three-note interval that was not at all harmonic and ask me to sing it back. I've always had a good ear for that stuff, so I was able to do it. And he said, "I think this is going to work."
It was just kind of a whim. We did an episode of 7th Heaven that focused on him. For a lot of years it wasn't cool or hip to like Rick Nelson, although many of us felt exonerated when Bob Dylan went on and on in his autobiography about how much he liked Rick Nelson. It was the 20th anniversary of his death, and I thought, "Let's go into the studio and record a bunch of his songs." We did it the old-fashioned way, by playing together at the same time in the same room. I always sing better when I'm playing the guitar. One thing I've done in the past few years, in addition to singing with a band, is that I sing when I exercise. That came in handy when this show came up.
She definitely did. She's been working a little more lately. She has a movie coming out with Dane Cook and Kate Hudson [My Best Friend's Girl] in which she plays Kate Hudson's mom, and she did a Noel Coward play recently in L.A. Sometimes it's not a conscious decision [to slow down], but she was such a strongly focused mom that with me working, she went through a period when she wasn't pursuing work as much. And if it involved travel, she would just say no.
I doubt it, but I have no idea. She seems most interested in writing. She's 18 and off to college [this fall]. It's a very sweet time for us.
I don't feel any different, but every time I see it on paper, it's very sobering [laughs]. I wish it were a typo, but it's not. You know, I had my daughter fairly late in life; most of the other parents in my world are much younger, so I keep forgetting how old I am. And working in a show like Spamalot where everybody is so young is great.
Boy, that's tough [long pause]. Till now, it was Putting It Together, but in many ways Spamalot eclipses that. I lost my dad a little over a month ago. He didn't have a lick of musical talent, but he loved musical theater. I told him on his deathbed that I was coming into Spamalot, and he lit up. He was thrilled to the core of his being. I've done a lot of things in my career, but I've never starred in a musical on Broadway until now, so it feels like a big, wonderful milestone. Suiting up for this show and doing it right every night takes everything I've got. It just feels like a gift.