Straight man to Larry David in the hugely successful TV show now he's set to star with a robot - but hey that's showbiz, Jeff Garlin tells John Patterson.
JEFF GARLIN, writer, director, comedian's comedian, demigod of American improv, accomplished standup comic, and blank-faced second-banana to Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, is recalling his lean years.
"I played the villain on Baywatch once, an evil disc jockey who tries taking over the beach, fights with David Hasselhoff and has a fantasy sequence with Pamela Anderson. I think it was the best acting I've ever done - even though when you watch it, it's obviously not good acting - but when David Hasselhoff is yelling at you, you try not laughing.
"And I didn't laugh, so I think it's pretty fantastic on my part."
Garlin is off colour today, a virus having laid him low, so we greet by bumping elbows awkwardly, instead of shaking hands.
As we clear a space to talk, he picks up a colour catalogue of some kind, squints at it and groans, "Oh no, that's just a big bowl of wrong!" (He says that a lot, I've learned. As in "Well, that's a great big bowl of thank-you-very-much," or "That's a big bowl of get my ass out of here!" - an interesting turn of phrase for a large man who bases a lot of his act around his own appetites and eating disorders.)
The object in question is the programme for some rightwing Christian Broadcasters' convention, evidently held in this same hotel recently.
"You want this?" he asks with eyebrows raised, perhaps satirically. He pushes it as far away from himself as he can, like a live hand-grenade, and we get started.
Garlin is the principal human element in Pixar's latest release, Wall-E, the story of a garbage-crushing droid left behind on Earth to clean up after humans blast off to escape the polluted planet.
After an extraordinarily vivid and effective opening half-hour sequence, containing not a single word of dialogue, Garlin shows up midway as the only significant human voice in the movie, playing the captain of a spaceship full of overweight and sedated human exiles in orbit awaiting Earth's big clean-up. And for a change, this time the fat guy gets to save mankind.
As one lonely voice in the recording studio, Garlin "had no idea while we were making it what it would end up being. I really didn't have a clue that I was as much of a hero as I am. That was a huge surprise to me. It's like doing a radio show.
"I'm doing it scene by scene in a vacuum, not paying attention - you're wrestling this guy and that guy, talking to this one, doing all this and all that - so I'm totally out of it."
I tell him I can't help noticing similarities between the trash-choked planet Pixar depicts in Wall-E and the future-world of Mike Judge's far angrier dystopian satire Idiocracy, which has its own garbage-mountains and landfill-lakes, albeit with plenty of humans, most of them moronic.
"There are similarities, but people aren't nearly as stupid in Wall-E as they are in Idiocracy. They're fat, sure, they're not in contact with one another, but you can see that when they wake up later in the movie they do become enlightened."
Adding Garlin's voice, with its everyman's turn of phrase and antiheroic bashfulness, is what humanises a movie mostly made by computers and largely bereft of humans (and which nonetheless is perhaps the best Pixar movie yet). Even when you can't see his bulky frame or his never-surprised face, Jeff Garlin is someone you're happy to root for.
Although Wall-E reminds us that Garlin is a fine actor and not merely an improv comic writ large, his history in the world of improvised comedy has put him in contact and on set with an entire generation of great comics. Name any American comedian who has made his or her mark in the past 25 years and Garlin is likely to know them, or be their friend, or to have directed their HBO standup special, or even to have discovered them in the first place.
He reels off a string of the household names and future legends with whom he first worked with at Chicago's famous Second City comedy ensemble, one of the major wellsprings of American comedy since the mid-50s.
"Who was there when I was there?" he asks himself. "Tim Meadows [ Saturday Night Live], Mike Myers, Bonnie Hunt [ Jerry Maguire, Cheaper by The Dozen, Chris Farley [ SNL, Belushi-like early flameout], Dan Castellaneta, Richard Kind [ Spin City]. Who am I missing? Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris [ Strangers With Candy], Steve Colbert [ The Daily Show]. That theatre just produces those kind of people en masse." The Second City connection underlines Garlin's Chicago background.
He was born and raised there, by parents who owned a plumbing-supply business, until the family upped sticks to Florida while he was in his teens. It happened halfway through the school year, which made him altogether too visible in this new environment for his own liking.
So it's not altogether surprising to learn that he later dropped out of the University of Miami and, propelled by the example of idols such as Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Shelley Berman, Jackie Gleason and Walter Matthau, made his way back to Chicago, whose metropolitan virtues he is happy to hymn.
"It's my favourite place on earth," he says. "It's more of a town, a big town, than a city. It's the capital of a bunch of sensible, mostly rural midwestern states, and everyone from those states goes to Chicago.
"It's like it's the exact right amount of big city for them. It's not provincial, the food's great, I love the women - my wife's from Chicago - and I love the Cubs, even though they've broken my heart a lot of times. It's not a big neuroses city, it's a genuine city; people encourage each other, not a lot of negativity."
And then of course, there's Curb Your Enthusiasm, which in TV terms these days is like the big, high-stakes, floating poker-game of comedy where all the comics du jour feel they must ante up at least once to be taken seriously.
Garlin, holding things together as star Larry David's nominal straight-man and combination Boswell/Lou Costello, is never far away from a comedy legend, and holds his own in the presence of such titans as Mel Brooks, Shelley Berman (the long-lost, missing-link 1960s comedy pioneer who plays David's dad), 50s-era ex-Second City member Paul Mazursky and against youngsters such as Ben Stiller, Seinfeld's Jason Alexander, Paul Reiser and David Schwimmer.
In this demanding environment - "totally highwire, no rehearsal, the cast members don't know what we're about to do, it's very loose, I love it!" - Garlin can draw on his years of improv, his ability, widely admired among his peers, to listen for his moment, to know when to hold back, and exactly when to leap in.
"To me, in a way," he says, "Curb's a very English show. We think of Fawlty Towers a lot - having a lead character not being inherently likable, that was one of the first shows to embrace that. Britain's the one place where it's been successful that hasn't surprised me at all."
Offscreen, Garlin's dependability and network of friends have given him a second career as a director of comedy specials, mainly for HBO, whose standup one-offs have helped along many a blossoming career.
Garlin directed specials for his friends Jon Stewart (Unleavened) and Denis Leary (Lock-n-Load), two comics whose style couldn't seem more outwardly opposed, and also directed This Filthy World, a marvellous record of shock-meister John Waters's one-man show.
Inevitably, Garlin was going to direct his own feature sooner or later. His small-budget labour of love, I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, appeared in 2006 after an 18-day shooting schedule spread out over two years (with two collapses in financing).
"It's a personal movie, a character study. It's funny but not like, you know, 'hilarious!' I'm pretty proud of it, it was difficult to make, but I'm not going to make any kind of money making that sort of movie. The only thing you get out of it is that you hope you made some good creative choices."It's certainly a step up from playing an evil DJ on Baywatch." - (Guardian service)
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Wall-E is on release